The Brooklyn Cookbook

This past Christmas, I received as a gift The Brooklyn Cookbook. I cringed slightly, because although cooking and the anthropology of Brooklyn are two of my favorite hobbies, they don’t intersect. In the kitchen, I’m a lot more likely to reach for Julia Child and Marcella Hazan than artisanal mayonnaise.

It turned out I didn’t need to worry. This Brooklyn Cookbook was written by Lyn Stallworth and Rod Kennedy, Jr. and published by Knopf in 1991. Far from being the guide to new wave Brooklyn cuisine I expected, the book contains indigenous hand-me-down recipes from the households of Jewish, Italian, Polish, Scandinavian, African American, Caribbean and Latino communities of Brooklyn dating back to the turn of the last century (and beyond), interspersed with childhood anecdotes from the cooks. It also happens to have been released the year I moved to Brooklyn. So although it’s unlikely I’ll find myself preparing any dishes from its pages, The Brooklyn Cookbook did provide me with a unique rear-view mirror reminding me of how the cultural context of the borough was perceived twenty-some years ago, and a way to reflect upon how it’s being merchandised today.

Who was the audience for this book at its publication? Probably not the native Brooklynites who contributed the recipes for latkes, struffoli, or pigeon peas and rice, who would not have needed such a book to learn traditional ethnic cooking. More likely, the intended readers were people like Ms. Stallworth, whom liner notes identify as a having migrated from Manhattan to Park Slope in the late 1970s (at a time when the wave of brownstone Brooklyn gentrification was rising in that neighborhood). In her book, one reads about traditional foods from places like Coney Island, Brighton Beach, Bensonhurst, Flatbush, Midwood, Brownsville. Carroll Gardens gets a mention, but by and large, both the recipes and the stories of horse-drawn delivery vehicles and dates at soda bars are drawn from settings removed from brownstone Brooklyn. What their references to simpler, happier days in the borough and authentic community experience do provide is a rich backdrop of culture and cuisine that would have been comforting to brownstoners of the time, without in any way challenging their role in gentrifying Brooklyn.

A few of the businesses profiled in the book remain today (Totonno’s, Bamonte’s), but for the most part, The Brooklyn Cookbook is an homage to what had been lost by the time of its publication, and also what a new generation of arrivals to the borough hoped to rekindle in neighborhoods like Park Slope, Boerum Hill, Fort Greene and Prospect Heights, where brownstoners came in the 1960s, 70s and 80s to reclaim the “middle city” from decades of deterioration. Ms. Stallworth offers a sweet, if naïve, prescription for reconnecting with the past through attempting its recipes in one’s kitchen. If this seems quaint today, keep in mind there wasn’t much of a restaurant scene in Brooklyn in 1991.

There were also other reasons to stay home back then. What Brooklyn did have in 1991 was an extremely violent crack epidemic that was consuming neighborhoods like Crown Heights and East New York. (When I moved to Prospect Heights, the 77th Precinct led the city in homicides.) But the street culture of that time also provided the platform for rap and hip hop artists from Brooklyn to create a new art form that propelled many to commercial success in a way that established a lasting connection between the music and the borough. At the same time rap became increasingly mainstream, the 1990s later saw the adoption of data-driving policing in New York City which, together with an economic boom fueled by the Internet and Wall Street, finally reversed crime rates that had been steadily climbing for decades.

This turned out to be welcome news for people considering a move to Brooklyn, but as Ben Adler points out in “Brooklyn, the Remix” from last Sunday’s Times, the accelerating colonization of the borough’s brownstone neighborhoods has come at the expense of its hip hop culture. Mr. Adler provides a survey of sites with ties to rap culture and repertoire (Jay-Z’s old stash house, Mos Def’s former bookstore, the businesses of Albee Square mall) that have either been transformed by, or lost to, the current real estate market. They have become, as Mr. Alder writes, “places where rappers boasted about surviving shootouts and selling drugs, but where cupcakes and cocktails now reign.”

While we might argue about whether Brooklyn might not be better off without some of these places in their former incarnations, it’s also clear that the positioning of hip hop within the new Brooklyn brand is key to the brand’s resonance among new arrivals. Brooklyn’s transition from slow gentrification to capitulation to corporate development needs a counter message that emphasizes independence, creativity, non-conformtiy—an “attitude”—that distracts some of the very large numbers of people migrating to the borough today from realizing they might be part of a herd. The hip hop past of 80s and 90s Brooklyn is comforting to the new generation of immigrants in the same way that the ethnic neighborhood cultures of the 20s, 30s and 40s were to the earlier wave of brownstoners: an experience twice removed, but satisfying in its perceived authenticity. (Then, as now, local boosters jumped on the brand-wagon: in an illustration of how some things never change, then-Borough President Howard Golden contributed a glowing testimonial as the frontispiece to The Brooklyn Cookbook.)

But beyond similarities in purpose, the old and new Brooklyn brands are separated by more than decades and psychographics. One important difference is that the compression of time today between perceived past and present enables coordinated branding on the mass scale useful to marketers of luxury apartments, goods and entertainment. The group of authors writing popular history for a brownstoner audience decades ago were not even a cottage industry, but Jay-Z can help sell the Barclays Center—and by extension, a larger corporate vision for the redevelopment of Brooklyn—to a huge existing audience of fans who aren’t any more troubled by erasing the evidence of the rap star’s past than he may be himself.

Another difference is that the new Brooklyn brand targets not just new arrivals, but working class natives left behind by previous decades of traditional brownstone gentrification, now being co-opted with a message of inclusion and ownership. That message might have helped get Barclays Center approved, but is it honest or sustainable? Not according to Mr. Adler’s examples, which indicate continuing displacement of communities of color and the businesses that serve them.

It is inevitable that Brooklyn, with a rich context of cultural experience stretching to the 19th century, would be reimagined by successive waves of new residents. Both brownstoners and hipsters have taken comfort in counter-narratives that channel the past to validate the present, so we might wonder if the intent and result of the old and new Brooklyn brands is just a matter of degree. Ultimately, however, the new Brooklyn brand’s assimilation of hip hop in service of marketers whose economic models benefit by displacing the communities that gave birth to that culture seems to be a qualitative difference that does not augur well for the borough’s future. If everyone is either cashing in or moving out today, from what will future Brooklyn immigrants build myths of authenticity tomorrow?