Holiday Shopping

By Frank J. Gruber

There were moments last week when I thought that maybe history had come to an end in Santa Monica, or at least had begun to repeat itself in ways that if not necessarily tragic or farcical nonetheless didn't give me much to write about.

With no fodder for a "ripped from the headlines" type column I was getting desperate. Sure I can always find an obscure point about urban planning to write about but I know I can only abuse the patience of readers so much.

The week trundled on with pre-holiday anxiousness over Christmas cards, gifts, charitable donations, what nights to have who over for Hanukkah, etc. I bounced between bursts of enthusiasm and bouts of denial. Meanwhile I had a random thought that one of the problems about the holiday season is the clash of two clichés.

One cliché is that each year the commercialization of Christmas starts earlier and earlier, and the other is that each year around mid-December we're wondering how fast Christmas managed to sneak up on us.

I'm annoyed in November when everyone is supposed to be ho-ho-ho'ing already and then December comes around and I haven't yet decided whether to order Christmas cards from Amnesty International or Unicef.

This year Hanukkah fell in the mid-range of its lunar calendar possibilities -- the first night was Friday -- and at least that gave me a deadline. We always host several Hanukkah dinners, and we were having people over for the first night to eat brisket and latkes (potato pancakes).

As most non-Jews are aware these days -- certainly since latke parties became part of the kindergarten curriculum -- the tradition at Hanukkah is to cook in oil. In that way Hanukkah is like Mardi Gras, except the idea is not to use up the oil but to emphasize its miraculous abundance.

I can honestly report that I am known for the quality of my latkes, but I have no big secret. I follow an established tradition of latke making based on three principles: (1) shred, don't grate, the potatoes (and squeeze out as much water as possible, but that's a given); (2) use liberal quantities of onion and eggs (three onions and four eggs for every six potatoes); and (3) don't cook the latkes in advance -- eat them hot from the skillet.

The other Hanukkah dish we always make is fried chicken from a recipe in a cookbook called The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews, by Edda Servi Machlin. This recipe -- which calls for soaking chicken pieces in lemon juice before breading and frying in olive oil -- is so good that I'm surprised that no one has used it as the basis for a fast-food empire of Italian Jewish fried chicken restaurants.

Jonathan Gold would go nuts.

Given that I've already used the words "skillet" and "fried chicken" I may as well write about how I came to buy two frying pans at Busy Bee Hardware last week.

A little history. For years the heavy skillet inventory at our house consisted of a seasoned to pitch black but admittedly undersized (10-inch) cast iron frying pan I found in my grandmother's garage when I moved to L.A. 30 years ago, and a pair of bigger Le Creuset frying pans my wife's parents gave her when she finished grad school and started teaching in the 70's. Her parents had owned them for maybe 20 years before that.

I use the cast iron frying pan nearly every day, for everything from frying eggs to pan-broiling. It gets really hot and nothing sticks. My wife was partial to the Le Creuset pans, but at some point they lost their mojo. I can't explain how heavily enameled iron pans that weigh a ton can go bad, but no matter what you cook, you're left with a burned crust that takes days to soak off.

So for some time we have needed a new big skillet. We might have bought a new Le Creuset pan, but that stuff is so expensive now you need financing from the World Bank. Instead a few years ago my wife bought two of those anodized aluminum pans you see everywhere. We have been unimpressed. They're okay for, say, sautéing vegetables, but not satisfying if you want to brown a piece of meat or -- let's be specific -- fry latkes.

Last week when we were discussing our Hanukkah entertaining schedule my wife suddenly broke under the strain of our frying pan situation. Perhaps she was aggravated by the typical holiday anxieties (for my wife these revolve around when to find time to make spiced nuts), but in any case she blurted out that she thought we should buy a big cast iron frying pan.

It was an obvious solution to our problem and I am chagrinned I hadn't thought of it before.

My wife is a woman of action, and a few minutes later she was calling me to come upstairs where she has her computer. She had found a line of cast iron pans on Amazon and wanted to know what size I thought we should order.

Whoa, I thought -- buy a cast iron frying pan online? No no no. The nature of some products does not include delivery by UPS. The nature of some products -- those that are made of cast iron or spent uranium -- is to be bought at a hardware store.

Think of the shipping, I said.

But my wife pointed out that if we spent more than $25 we'd get free shipping.

Nonetheless I put my foot down. Actually, I had reason on my side -- if we used the free shipping surely Hanukkah would be over before the new skillet arrived.

So on Saturday there I was at Busy Bee on Santa Monica Boulevard. I've written before about grocery store urbanism and surely there is a hardware store version, too. Point being that I knew that I would find at Busy Bee a salesperson -- in this case his name was Rick -- even more obsessed about cast iron cookware than me.

I ended up buying two pans -- a 13-inch and a 15-inch. Now we are really set. (And I have something I can leave to my grandchildren.) I took the pans home and seasoned them according to the directions. Tonight -- a test run on latkes. Tomorrow, Jewish Italian fried chicken.

* * *

Former mayor Mike Feinstein emailed me last week in response to my play-by-play account (in last week's column) of the election of Santa Monica's new pair of serial mayors. Inspired by my account -- he said it reminded him of every other election for mayor he could remember -- Mr. Feinstein dug into his archive of videos of City Council meetings and assembled a highlight reel of the Council's past elections of mayors going back to 1996.

The technically savvy Mr. Feinstein uploaded the 40-minute video to YouTube, and those with a desire to see Santa Monica history precede itself can find it at this link.