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   Vol. 13 No. 103  
Wednesday December 24, 2014

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The Arends

hristmas is quiet this year. Or relatively quiet, considering our rather spacious abode is usually stuffed to the rafters with family and Christmas visitors. I’ve grown quite accustomed to sharing a room with a sibling, but this year there are rooms to spare, and my sister and I have the pick of where we wish to rest our heads.
     I joked to my father that we are spilling over with X chromosomes this year—this Christmas is ladies’ Christmas, as my mother, sister, and I outrank my father three to one. The eldest brother (pictured below with his wife, Christina, and President Obama) is off in a northerly state that appreciates some measure of Christmas weather virtually year round—we hear that he, the wife, and their little red dog will quite literally be dashing through the snow in a one horse open sleigh. We miss them already, but my sister and I will be sure to eat all the extra Christmas President Obama, Christina & Geoffreymorning pancakes, and something tells me the blessing of technology may afford us a nice video chat before our respective fireplaces. Queens, NY, isn’t promising much snow this Christmas, so it will be nice to see some, even if it’s just on a screen two thousand miles away. The youngest brother is in another neighborhood of Queens, but work prevents him from staying for Christmas too long. We’ll see him Christmas eve night, and he will help us enjoy the extra pancakes on Christmas morning, but by Christmas night he will be gone again, and the gender imbalance will be restored. The little dog will be the only other man in the house, but he has been returned to us from the groomers with green bows in his ears and a jingling Christmas bell around his neck, and we’ve outfitted him in the cheeriest red pajamas, so I think perhaps the odds are in our favor that he can be counted amongst our ranks. Besides, he knows where his dog biscuits are buttered.
Chips     Our traditions continue. I’ve already sneaked a piece of German *Christmas sausage and *butterkuchen, and my sister and I enjoyed our first midnight slice of pizza last night. We deposited an army’s worth of decorative vintage Santas around the house—one so old and battered by attic storage that he leans drunkenly over his wooden cane and demands to be supported by a wall just to remain upright. A series of successively smaller Matryoshka Santas guard our mantle and still contain missives from my since-passed grandmother, and a tiny wooden nativity scene adorns our piano top, with the baby Jesus safely tucked behind a picture frame (he won’t make his appearance until Christmas Day).
     Our tree this year has the fullest skirt we’ve ever seen, and quickly swallowed each ornament it was fed like a hungry and dutiful holiday deity. We’ve done battle against the failing winter light with winking strands of Christmas lights, ritually plugged in once the sun sets.
     The month of December hasn’t been terribly cold, but it has been bleak and overcast. The sky is a white shroud against a weak winter sun and casts a draining fluorescence over everything, making the whole of New York feel like a poorly lit office. We light our fires and plug in our lights, surround ourselves with warm food, happy family, and good memories, sitting with the ghosts of Christmas past to brighten and enlighten Christmas present. Wherever you are, we hope you too can wrap yourselves in warm holiday memories, and if you can’t, our wish is that you will take comfort in sharing ours.
Flossie Arend



   “I’d like four-pair of bratwurst, and I’d like to smell ‘em.”

   I come from a long line of butchers. My father was a butcher, my grandfather was a butcher—my relationship with meat goes back several generations. My grandfather shot a 21-point buck with a bow and arrow in northern Michigan. We were a family who used the whole animal, too; we made venison jerky, and sent off the innards to make dog food. As a young boy I did all the slaughterhouse work—I killed and gutted cattle, and even spent an entire summer in the “gut room.” I placed the shrouds on the animals and watched the Rabbis kosher the meat, and saw nothing but guts all summer long. My father smoked up our kitchen cooking krainerwurst (in the time before smoke detectors) and it drove my mother crazy to have the smell of meat painting the walls.
   I can look at a piece of meat from a long distance away and tell you if it’s good, but smelling something is the most important—the nose knows best.
   I’ve been making what my children call “Christmas sausage” ever since they were very little. My own form of hackfleisch (pork tartar), I buy links of piquant bratwurst from the Forest Avenue Pork Store in Queens, slice them open, and pull the meat from inside. Forming small, round patties no bigger than a baby’s fist, I toss them in a heated pan and let them cook—the smell drives the dog and everyone else absolutely crazy. It’s the smell of Christmas.
   The Bavarian guys at the Forest Avenue Pork Store have been selling me sausages since the early 1970s. They know and understand bratwurst—it’s always perfectly spiced. Most German butchers now depend on processed meat and preservatives, but meat from Forest Avenue is low preservative and incredibly fresh, and comes with a very short shelf life. My father always used to say, “This is the best thing you’re going to taste all day. I don’t care what you eat today—you won’t like anything as much as you like this.” It’s something I repeat to my own children, and they always say, “I know.”
   “I’d like four-pair of bratwurst, and I’d like to smell ‘em.” I look at the sausages in the case, check out the color; I weigh them in my hands, take a deep whiff to check the smell. They smell like one of the nicer, warmer, fresher days in April—clean—like the natural spices present in a wild field, hints of white and black pepper, salt, and nutmeg, ginger, coriander, and mustard seed. Good, fresh sausage smells a bit like a good pigpen. I remember a New York restaurant whose slogan was, “The seafood you eat today slept last night in Chesapeake Bay,” and I like to think that the pork we eat today must have been on the hoof in some upstate farm fairly recently.
   Our other Christmas morning tradition involves another German treat, butterkuchen, or butter cake.    A simple cake, it’s topped with flakes of butter and then sprinkled with a bucket’s worth of sugar.    Not many bakers still make it, but I go to Vicky, the chief baker at the Oxford Bake Shop in Liberty Avenue, near JFK Airport in South Ozone Park. She still possesses an authentic German recipe. Vicky is about 4’8”, and when I enter the bakery she descends from the kitchen in a swirl of flour dust—you can’t shake hands with her without leaving fingerprint evidence, so I have to shake her forearm. She loves my eldest son Geoff, so if I tell her he wants a butterkuchen, she’ll make enough to feed a small army. I imagine she’s up at 2 or 3 in the morning baking in that kitchen. Everyone at Kennedy knows about her, and we’ve had well-equipped friends fly to Switzerland with boxes of croissants for the people at Swiss, but we’re skeptical whether any baked goods ever made it off the plane. She’s that good.
   From the time I was ten years old, I bought butterkuchen from a small bakery every Sunday after services at St. Luke’s Church in Forest Hills, New York. It was my Sunday morning ritual—after washing neighborhood casement windows all week, a task that afforded me sore and bloody knuckles, I earned about 5 or 6 dollars to do with what I wish. Back then a butterkuchen was a buck and a quarter; today, a butterkuchen would cost me a week’s worth of window washing earnings.
   When I first returned from Vietnam, I noticed that many of the bakeries carrying butterkuchen had disappeared, and I thought it was gone from Queens forever. Thanks to Vicky and the Oxford Bake Shop, our family never has to go without it.
   Many of our family traditions are surrounded by good food-—it only makes sense. If food nourishes the body, then family nourishes the soul. The holidays are naturally a warm belly, warm heart time of year. Here’s wishing your hearts and bellies are as warm as ours. We look forward to seeing you in the New Year.
Geoffrey

 


White Christmas & John Scott Trotter

     I remember when I learned John Scott Trotter wrote all of Bing Crosby’s arrangements, and his orchestra played on Crosby’s immortal album “White Christmas.”
John Scott Trotter (left), Ethel Merman, and Bing Crosby ready a radio show. John Scott arranged Bing’s rendition of Irving Berlin’s song “White Christmas,” which in 2014 is still the bestselling musical recording in history.


     
I had already known Scott as the man who played piano with a school band (for which he wrote many of the arrangements) that was formed at the University of North Carolina. In the 1930s they became famous almost overnight, playing aboard big, scheduled passenger ships crossing the Atlantic between New York and Southampton, well before the airlines took over during the mid 1950s.
     The band, called The Hal Kemp Orchestra, was aboard ship one summer and was invited to play for Prince George—he was throwing a big party as the future King of England (later becoming the Duke of Windsor after he renounced his throne “for the woman I love”) as he traveled from New York back across the Atlantic.
     At one point, the Prince, who fancied himself something of a musician (drums) joined the band—that simple gesture made headlines, and Hal Kemp became famous.
     Later John Scott wrote arrangements for many of the Kemp tunes. Some 700 were recorded, all at 78 rpm, before Hal’s untimely death in 1940, after which The Hal Kemp Orchestra was no more.
     But John Scott kept on working, and after he created the arrangement for “White Christmas” in 1942 (still number one single in recording sales), Bing wouldn’t work without him. Up until the mid-1950s, Bing rarely allowed anyone else to arrange his music, but John Scott must have convinced him otherwise.
     The string of hit songs the duo created has never been matched.
     During our early days at Air Cargo News, I had the great pleasure to create a 22-hour musical history of Hal Kemp & his Orchestra for Public Radio in New York City.
     John Scott’s early work for Kemp was full of wonderful musical discoveries brought to America for the first time, like the French song “Boom” and many others.
     John Scott invented the staccato triplets played by the horn section to create a unique sound for the Kemp band on many recordings, “Got a Date With An Angel” and others, and the sound became the band’s trademark—it even caused the great songwriter Johnny Mercer to remark with some admiration, describing Kemp’s signature as “the typewriter band.”
     John Scott’s arrangements influenced everybody from Kay Kyser to Glenn Miller, and of course the greatest crooner of them all, Bing Crosby, who said this about Trotter: “I'm not musically educated enough to really describe what he was in music terms. I just knew he was very good and he had marvelous taste.”
     Blessed Christmastide & all good wishes.
Geoffrey

 


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Vol 13. No. 100
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Wish We Said That
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Samsung Same Song
Molinelli Was Always Certain
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Vol 13. No. 101
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Mail For December 15, 2014

Publisher-Geoffrey Arend • Managing Editor-Flossie Arend • Associate Publisher/European Bureau Chief-Ted Braun
Film Editor-Ralph Arend • Special Assignments-Sabiha Arend, Emily Arend • Advertising Sales-Judy Miller

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