I'm getting ready to head back to Budapest after two months in New York, and I can't say I'm looking forward to the late winter produce that will usually be available in the local markets. February in Hungary means a diet of potatoes, pork, and cabbage. I am going to miss a lot of things, but probably none more than shellfish. Winter is the best time of year for shellfish, especially if you roam around New York's Chinatown fish markets where the crabs and clams move fast and are fresh and cheap. 
I'll be making one more gluttonous trip to Chinatown before I leave though... I need more Shangahi soup dumplings. These are steamed dumplings filled with pork or crab in broth... but with the the broth inside the dumpling. 
You nibble the dumpling skin, slurp up the hot broth trapped inside, and then go to work on the dumpling. I usually order some of these and then move on - I can hit two or three Chinatown eateries in a row on a good day, trying different things out. Wandering around Chinatown on an empty stomache is a poor man's five star vacation trip. I need some more vietnamese pho molecules inside me, and maybe some sticky rice jong packets... 
Of course, I usually pick something up to take home to cook up... octopus, for example. Stinks like an old shoe when you cook it at home, but for these prices, let it stink! Octopus mean New Year's for me, after last years excessive cephalopod feast on the island of Dvernik in Croatia. Bigger octopus are best grilled. 
If you are visiting New York, a bit of advice: New York is located near some of the world's best clam beds. Clams from Long Island, New Jersey, and New England in the winter are possibly the single closest thing to a fresh taste that screams local New York! and isn't shaped like a pizza. Order them in a restaurant and you can get set back a big piece of change. Buy them at a fish market, take them home, and enjoy. While traveling abroad - as in outside of landlocked Hungary - I often find some kind of clamlike shellfish at the local market and take them back to my hotel for a late night feast. The hotel management might not like it, but it's not as bad as trashing your room, and tastes better. 
All I need to prepare them is a knife and a towel to protect my hand as I hold the clam and ... slice it open. I prefer the larger cherrystone sized clams to the more delicate littleneck clams. I like to see them squiggle a little as I cut the aductor muscles... the fact that the clam is alive is a sure sign of freshness. Americans are generally thought of as squeamish eaters, which hold true until you get to clams. Clams are the only food that Americans eat while it is still alive. You don't get much more unkosher and un-Buddhist than that. 
Clams on the halfshell, like oysters, have to be alive when eaten. Sure, it sets you back a few karmic reincarnations, but heck... it tastes good. I was introduced to clams by my father when I was about thirteen years old. It was something of a rite of passage for non-religious New York Jews. Eating Italian pork sausages or Chinese food wasn't really considered unkosher enough to shock anyone. Taking your son out for clams on City Island in the Bronx was the best way to insure that nobody in your family was going to return to the hasidism that took so many generations to get out of in the first place. The ability to eat clams on the halfshell were a gift from my Pop to me. And he still gobbles them down, oblivious to the karmic implications...
One final bit of local flavor I will dearly miss: Popeye's Fried Chicken. Popeye's is a commercial fast food fried chicken chain that is - as the say in the deeply racist but happily euphemistic vocabulary of American merchandising - an "Urban Franchise." Meaning it is marketed to Black people in Black neighborhoods. The same goes for Church's Fried Chicken - also good. White folks, supposedly, eat Kentucky Fried Chicken. In America, social segregation applies to fried chicken as well as people. Needless to say, Popeye's is better, cheaper, less greasy, crsipier, and offers sides like jalapeno peppers, Louisiana dirty rice, red beans and rice, and great biscuits. Sometimes, sitting in a cafe in Budapest, I can suddenly smell the aroma of Popeye's drifting out of nowhere. But, heck... I've got gigs in NY next October... I'll be back for seconds!All I need to prepare them is a knife and a towel to protect my hand as I hold the clam and ... slice it open. I prefer the larger cherrystone sized clams to the more delicate littleneck clams. I like to see them squiggle a little as I cut the aductor muscles... the fact that the clam is alive is a sure sign of freshness. Americans are generally thought of as squeamish eaters, which hold true until you get to clams. Clams are the only food that Americans eat while it is still alive. You don't get much more unkosher and un-Buddhist than that. Clams on the halfshell, like oysters, have to be alive when eaten. Sure, it sets you back a few karmic reincarnations, but heck... it tastes good. I was introduced to clams by my father when I was about thirteen years old. It was something of a rite of passage for non-religious New York Jews. Eating Italian pork sausages or Chinese food wasn't really considered unkosher enough to shock anyone. Taking your son out for clams on City Island in the Bronx was the best way to insure that nobody in your family was going to return to the hasidism that took so many generations to get out of in the first place. The ability to eat clams on the halfshell were a gift from my Pop to me. And he still gobbles them down, oblivious to the karmic implications...
A lot of my initial interest in the state of the Yiddish language is related to work I did as a linguist working with Native American languages and African languages spoken in the New World. One got accustomed to language communities that had very few speakers, or were teetering on the brink of linguistic morbidity. The general attitude towards Yiddish in Eastern Europe was that it was a dead language. Well, Yiddish ain't dead by a long shot. To paraphrase Frank Zappa... Yiddish isn't dead. It just smells bad. Or as I.B Singer said, Yiddish is taking a very long time to die. Take Yiddish theater... although the Yiddish theater has seen better days, the revived National Yiddish Theatre - the original 
You can still catch a bus in Yiddish in Brooklyn...
Or buy a subway pass in Yiddish...
Or just learn to behave properly. This signboard was found upstairs at the headquarters of the Arbeiter Ring, the Workman's Circle building which houses the weekely Forward newspaper, which comes out in both 
Now, if you want to learn how to move in Yiddish, well.... you would be well advised to check out the Tants Hoys. The word means "dance house" and the idea is that yiddish dance should be taught in a lively atmosphere to live music in order to make a sense of community. Not just "right foot, left foot, one - two-three" to some recorded music. Last night it was dancing at the Manhatten Jewish Community Center with dancing led by Dr. Zev Feldman, who has been at the forefront of research into early Klezmer music since the 1970s. 
Zev focused on Moldavian Jewish dancing, since those traditions have survived best into the recent era. Zev has basically reconstructed an aesthetic of Yiddish dancing based on his extensive contact with elderly yiddish speakers and his own family traditions. One interesting point was that while much of south/central Moldavian Jewish dancing is lively and fast, the northern style of dancing (as around Edinets, where Zev's family comes from) tends to be stately and slower, with a lot of grand arm posturing in place of fancy footwork. The band was perfect for the occaision, consisting of musicians who learned extensively with the late Bessarabian klezmer clarinetist 
Here we see clarinetists Michael Winograd and 
Next to Pete is Jacob Shulman-Ment, the great vays hope of klezmer fidl. I met Jake in Budapest where he spent a year learning the Hungarian language and violin styles, and now he is - bazd meg! - my favorite person to speak Hungarian with in New York. Kiboszottan jol beszel a nyelvet! (Continuing apologies for lack of diacritic marks...) Jake has been playing with 
Jake traveled around Romania last summer and made visits to many of the Maramures fiddlers with whom I did research, for example, Nicolae Covaci, who still plays quite a bit of Jewish music he learned from local Jewish musicians before World War Two. Jake is the kind of musician who doesn't just learn tunes... he learns the moves as well. 
The fourth Tantshoyz of the season will be on Tuesday, March 13 7:00PM - 9:30PM at the JCC ( 334 Amsterdam Ave. at 76th St.) with dance instruction by Michael Alpert! For more info about the event email Pete R. at klezbanjo AT yahoo.com. 
And to top it all off, mayn shvester un shvoger had a good time at the tantshoys as well!
I did a set of Moldavian Jewish klezmer tunes dancing early in the evening with Pete Rushevsky, Jacob Shulman-Ment, Christian Dawid, and Raoul Rothenblatt, with dances led by Dr. Zev Feldman. Of course, I couldn't take picture of that - I was playing sekund fiddle - so I will try again tonight when I go to the Yiddish "tants hoys" at the Manhatten JCC. Armenians were playing for dancing in the basement. New York - and Newark, New Jersey - has always had a vibrant middle eastern music scene centered around the Armenian community. Oud, clarinet, and some duduk music for Anatolian style dancing.
Since I will be on the road back to Budapest next weekend, the festival was a good day to meet up with lots of friends from lots of music scenes. Harris Wolfson, Sarah Alden, and Lev "Ljova" Zhurbin (who just returned from a six month exile in Budapest with Inna Barmash of Romashka) did a hot set of Transylvanian style fusionoid music as "World on a String."
The hardcore Transylvanian style music was played by E
Raoul Rothenblatt plays bass with Eletfa. Raoul used to be one of the regulars in Budapest's old Tilos az A bar scene back in the days when he was paying his dues at the Ferenc Liszt Music academy. Jozsef Gartai - we know him as Heki - plays the kontra, the three stringed viola I mentioned in the last post. I knew Heki from the wild Budapest "dance house" days back when I first moved to Hungary. As soon as he could, he moved to the US. Essentially we traded places. Below, you can see the classic position for holding the kontra viola - verticle, played by a heavy, hand-carved bow. the three strings are tuned GdA, forming tightly harmonized chords, which is facilitated by a flat brige for the strings.
It was great meeting up with Eletfa since I had been stuck with a bagful of Hungarian candy bars from my local CBA shop that nobody else wanted. Everybody got Sport Szelet and Balaton Bars - deep Budapest nostalgia flavors - and even the infamous candies called "Negro" were accepted totally without irony. Alas, no such event is complete without the indelible imprint of Grand Master Godfried... appearing here with cajun band The Bosco Stompers. How a band like this can limit themselves to a twenty minute set is beyond comprehension. Honking great accordion and fiddle, it simply made the dance floor explode.
Chinatown is filled with cheap lunch parlors, especially ones serving noodle/wonton soups and roast meats. While there is a full menu, you can order your BBQ goodies by the pound - spare ribs at $6.40 a pound is about as good a deal as it gets.
If you have a craving for duck, why pay more in some fancy mid-town bistro? Here's what five bucks will provide:
Claude and Mina went for the spare ribs and shrimp fried rice. Romanians like meat, accompanied by meat, with a light meat dessert. I stuck to my old favorite chinese noodle soup - a huge bowl with roast duck, roast pork, and shrimp dumplings.
If you haven't had enough, you can pick up some char siu bao - roast pork steamed buns - on the way out. Our entire meal for three came out to $21. Translated into Forints, Euro, or Lei that counts as a damn good deal. 
I actually started my day early up on 181st Street in the Dominican section of Washington Heights. I needed some late breakfast, so I stopped at a Mexican taco stand on the sidewalk near Broadway.
I had no idea what I was getting into, so I just walked up and ordered a chorizo taco. The guy working inside answered me in Spanish, so I switched to my bad Romanian-influenced dialect of Castillian and asked him where he was from... "Din donde estas?" Apparently he understood me, and he was from Cuernavaca, Mexico.
I'm from Hungary, I answered, and we can't get tacos in Budapest. "You don't have tacos in Hungary?" He was sincerely surprised. "What do you eat? No tacos?" "We eat mostly stews with potatoes (asados con patates.)" "Oye, amigo" he answered, "you people need tacos." Absolutely. Two whopping hefty tortillas wrapped around hot, spicy chorizo sausage with some killer green hot sauce and sour cream. Two dollars. I may have to get me a taco cart and set it up someplace on the Nagykorut. "No Tacos? Ridiculous!"
Tommy's style (generally known as "Round Peak" style) became the New York City default mode for fiddling. Tommy Jarrell's father, Ben Jarrell, had been the fiddler in the obscure but 
Tommy Jarrell 's style of fiddle - full of off-kilter synchopated bowing and open tunings - was the meat and 'taters of the 70's New York fiddle scene, since Tommy was a living link to an archaic music tradition that was already, by the 1970s, fast disappearing. One day Jarrell made an offhand comment to banjo player Henry Sapoznik about all the Jews playing Appalachian folk fiddle - "Hank, ain't your people got any music of their own?" Sapoznik - whose organizational skills are as amazing as his old time banjo chops - set about answering that question and the beast we know as the New York Klezmer Revival was set in motion. (Henry's book, 
Tommy Jarrell makes an appearance in 
The party was organized by fiddler/guitarist 
Jeebus!... where in the world would anybody allow you to play three-fiddle Moldavian dance tunes in their apartment at 2 in the frigging morning? And get away with it? My hat is off to Thomas, Mozell, and Guy and their friends for hosting a fantastic party. My tip off to the party was the eminence gris-gris of the New York ethnic music scene, Bob Godfried. Bob is a one-man nerve center for all music happening in the NY folk and ethnic music scenes, a walking encyclopedia of music trivia, history, instrument repair tips, and exhaustive bits of Bronxiana. If there is a Chaldean bar that features oud music in Yonkers, or a Ghanaian Highlife band playing a bar in Queens, Bob knows about it. Need an Azerbaijani accordion tuned? He's your man. Wondering where to find rare Bosnian Sevdah music CDs in the Bronx? Up his alley. Coming in from Lousiana with your Cajun Band short a member? Call Bob G. Without him I would be a babe lost in the woods of the NY music scene.
In the photo above we see Mr. Godfried playing a vintage Strad-o-Lin, which were cheap mandolins mass produced before the 1960s that almost all of us NY musicians owned at one time or other. When you are jamming in a room full of valuable vintage Gibson guitars, Vega banjos, and other fine old instruments it takes cojones the size of bowling balls to whip out a despised little Strad-o-lin, but these little plywood babies really scream in a decidedly impolite manner above the din of the banjos and fiddles. Long Live Big Cojones and little Strad-o-Lins!
Cruising around midtown Manhatten, I accidentally found myself in front of Zabar's. Zabar's is one of the oldest established New York gourmet food markets, especially known for its bakery and coffee departments. Still going strong, and not really expensive at all, Zabar's manages to buck the trends and offers a glimpse into the food cravings of several generations of New Yorkers.
Whitefish, for example. No Sunday breakfast is complete without smoked whitefish. Whitefish are, essentially, big minnows, chubs and other fish that most Americans would never, ever think of eating fresh. In Europe these would be considered trophy sport fish.
New Yorkers tend to identify salami with Italian varieties. This is Hungarian Brand Salami, made in New Jersey. Close to a Pick or Hertz salami, but not quite - saltier, and without the sticky pork fat aftertaste that makes a salami "sing" for me. Regardless of what they tell us in Budapest, I haven't seen any Hungarian imported salamis yet. In fact, I haven't seen any imported products from Hungary apart from a jar of Univer garlic paste in a warehouse in New Jersey. Pick up a copy of any business newspaper in Hungary and they would have you believe that the world is climbing over each other for more Hungarian salamis. Well, it just ain't so.
Rugelach are small pastries filled with fruit, nuts, or chocolate, made from a dough that incorporates cream cheese into the batter. They are originally a Polish Jewish obsession, but now they have become a universal identity pastry of New York.
The best rugelach are probably found in Boro Park, in Brooklyn, or possibly in Jersey - everybody has a tradition-based variation on the rugelach theme, and none of them even hint of "healthy" or "light." Rugelach are a meal in itself - especially the nut filled versions.
Hot sauces. Oh Lords of Capiscum, I love hot sauces. So do my friends in Transylvania. I often bring dozens of bottles of hot sauce to Romania when I return for a visit. You want to make a seventy year old rural Musician Gypsy fiddler very happy? Give him real Mexican hot sauce. Soon these little babies will be tucked into my luggage to burn the hungry palates of Kolozsvar.
The Angry Doughnuts are an institution in Cluj, also known in Hungarian as Kolozsvar, which is the central city of Transylvania and has always been my second home in Yurp. Gogoaşa are not really doughnuts at all in a strictly European sense, they are freshly fried dough filled with jam or chocolate or vanilla cream and served hot on the streets. They are devastatingly good. Below is an example the effect these doughnuts have on EU citizens. 
Several of the EU member states, such as Britain, have set restrictions on the entry of Romanian and Bulgarian citizens into their work forces. It isn't any surprise. The EU is not about fair sharing of labor. The EU is about Germany, Ireland and France getting extremely rich. The two-tier system that came in place when Hungary, Poland, and the other east European and Baltic nations joined the EU is full of holes, though. Any Romanian can still travel to the EU... they just have to be a bit cagey about how they find work once they get there. And believe me, they will find work. Yes, Europe, they are coming.
The BBC posted a 