On a mountainside in Shady, just outside Woodstock, in a house blessed with a spectacular vista of distant rolling peaks, I learned to make potato knishes and cheese blintzes. Food reporter and Queens restaurant critic Suzanne Parker taught three of us to roll dough, pour batter, and judge the doneness of Jewish delicacies as she demonstrated one of her “Cooking Classes with a View.”
“Anyone with basic cooking skills can follow a recipe,” said Parker, “but there are some things you have to be taught — how dough feels when it’s ready, how it looks when you’ve stretched it right. Whatever you’re making, you also have to know what a really good one tastes like. I build my classes around authenticity and a particular skill.”
When we arrived at her house, the onions had already been sliced, the peeled potatoes were sitting in a bowl, and the blintz filling was chilling in the refrigerator — so we didn’t waste time on processes we could easily do on our own. Parker turned a stove burner to medium-low and dumped the onions into a pan anointed with peanut oil. “Usually I use chicken fat,” she said to me, “but your husband is a vegetarian. Now we’ll cover it and let the onions sweat till they’re limp.” The low simmer, she explained, would draw out the moisture to intensify the flavor.
Parker’s knowledge of cooking did not come from her Jewish mother, who “wasn’t an adventurous cook because my father wasn’t an adventurous eater.” But living in Queens, where an estimated 138 languages are spoken, Parker has had opportunities to investigate the cuisines of many nations. When she worked as assistant director of Queens Council on the Arts, one of her duties was to support a folklorist who was documenting local customs. “She was kosher and a vegetarian, and she didn’t drive,” recalled Parker. “I would drive her to interviews, and people would offer us food that she couldn’t eat. So as not to offend them, I became the taster.”
As she experienced a variety of flavors and accumulated information about the foods of Queens, she had the idea to write a book, but her job kept her too busy. Then she was offered the job of director of the Council. She and her husband were already spending weekends at the house in Shady, which they had bought in 1974. (“We drove into Woodstock and saw a cop changing a tire for a hippie,” she said. “We decided this was a good place for us.”) The duties of director would require her presence in the city on some weekends, so she turned down the job in favor of more time in Woodstock.
After quitting the Council, Parker began to research and write Eating Like Queens: A Guide to Ethnic Dining in America’s Melting Pot, Queens, New York (Jones Books, 2005). In order to glean writing credentials that would attract a publisher, she began to write about food for Queens newspapers — a gig she continues to exercise. Her book surveys the borough, describing the markets, restaurants, and cuisines of many communities (such as Uzbekistan, the Philippines, Korea, Peru); the mixing of cultures (Thai bagel bakeries, Latino-oriented Chinese restaurants), and recipes for representative dishes (arepas, Jamaican jerk chicken, Vietnamese coffee, Indian rice pudding).
The knish recipe we followed in class is fairly simple, but the manipulation of dough requires particular attention. Parker added flour little by little to the ingredients in the food processor, encouraging us to prod the dough with our (washed) fingers at each step. Once the ball felt sticky but no longer actually stuck to our fingers, she rolled it in plastic wrap and left it on the counter, explaining, “The work in the food processor developed the gluten, and now it has to rest for about 40 minutes. If we try to roll it out now, it will want to snap back, and it will shrink. So it’ll take a nice nap, and we’ll do something else.”
We started mixing batter for the blintzes — “Not too much, or it’ll become rubbery. This is not dough. It’s okay to leave some lumps.” We took turns pouring the batter into small pans to cook until the edges dried out.
The onions, meanwhile, had shrunk to one-third of their original bulk. We raised the heat so they would begin to brown, under the watchful eye of an Arcimboldo head. Parker, who is also a locally exhibited artist, has made mosaics of the famous Italian paintings of men composed of fruits and vegetables, one head over each of her two stoves.
Parker, unlike her parents, is extremely adventurous in her exploration of food. For foodie cousins from Ohio, she organizes an annual Food Camp, which she described as “a day of relentless face stuffing where we visit ethnic markets, street vendors and restaurants. It always includes an activity that I call ‘I dare you to eat this.’ This year’s dare was a Filipino street food called balut, a duck embryo that has been allowed to develop for three weeks and then steamed. You crack the egg and then are supposed to swallow the contents in one gulp.”
Based on the delights of Food Camp, she now offers upstaters a day trip to Queens to tour Chinese, Korean, Indian, and Southeast Asian markets (minus the food dare). Participants will hunt down obscure ingredients, buy colorful spices, and enjoy a dim sum lunch. Parker also teaches classes on Chinese cuisine, pie-making, and how to put together an easy, elegant dinner party — as well as the Jewish dairy lesson, which can include latkes.
Once our potatoes were cooked, we mashed them with the onions and finely minced parsley. Then Parker divided the dough into four sections, showed how to roll one out to a rectangle, and gave each of us a chance to try. Her classes are limited to six people, so every participant gets a hands-on, intimate experience. The next step was to stretch each rectangle gently to a fine thinness, a process that looks nearly impossible to learn without demonstration.
Parker acquired her knish technique from cookbooks, trial and error, and pointers from the proprietor of Bubbie’s Best, who made knishes for local eatery Bistro to Go. “These are things you would learn at your mother’s knee,” Parker said. “I didn’t, but it’s in my genes.”
We wrapped the now paper-thin dough around logs of the potato mixture, split the logs in quarters, and gently smushed them into squat cylinders. While the knishes baked, we filled the blintzes with cheese and fried them in butter. Finally we sat down to eat our creations. Sheer pleasure!
For more information on “Cooking Classes with a View,” see https://www.cookskillsny.com/ or call Suzanne Parker at (917) 922-7606. A schedule will be built around the availability of prospective students, so feel free to express your wishes.
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