The Upstairs Delicatessen by Dwight Garner

And a recipe for salmon quiche

I finished reading The Upstairs Delicatessen by Dwight Garner last night and went to bed with swirling thoughts of how I would write about the food I remember best from my life.

The inner back fold of the dust jacket told me Garner is a book critic for The New York Times and was previously the senior editor of The New York Times Book Review. Garner’s work has appeared in a number of other well-known publications over his career, and his recollections of the books he’s consumed is encyclopaedic. He’s also a big fan of food.

I had never heard of Garner but the subtitle hooked me immediately: On eating, reading, reading about eating, and eating while reading. And the cover is gorgeous.

I love food. I really, really love food. I love watching cooking shows, and watching food reels on instagram. I have a stack of cookbooks from which we plan the week’s meals; better yet, I love cooking those meals.

My love of food is something that’s been with me for longer than my appetite for books has. I have my mum to thank for that; born in the former Soviet Union, she grew up on a diet of pickled tomatoes, sour soups and hot salty pelmeni and passed that food heritage straight on to me. If it’s pickled, I will eat it.

There’s a photo of me of when I was about 3 years old that is probably the first documented instance of my love of food. Growing up in Queensland, we lived on the water and my parents always had a boat. We would go out most weekends and moor alongside friends, close to an island’s beach so we could swim or ferry ourselves in the dingy to shore. Sometimes, especially on a long weekend like Easter, everyone would bring food to share.

I think it must have been one of those long weekends on which my mum took the photo. I was so little, the pink hair tie on top of my head erupting with my bright blonde hair. I sat on the water-proofed upholstery of the wrap around bench with the table in front of me piled high with prawns, oysters, salads (potato and green), Moreton Bay bugs, fresh caught, killed and cooked crab - the lot. I was alone at the table and my captured expression would have wilted flowers: the adults needed to stop talking so I could start eating.

Garner, similarly, is obsessive about food and his book is a love letter. In the introduction, he tells us ‘I go to bed thinking about what’s for breakfast, and at breakfast I want to talk about what’s for dinner’. The book takes us through the day with breakfast, lunch, shopping, interlude: a swim, or a nap, then drinking and finally dinner. And for each of those pastimes he has mined a treasure trove of literary references to match, from books most of which I’d never heard (but have added to my list).

Whilst this isn’t an example from The Upstairs Delicatessen, there is a scene in Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle where the main character makes spaghetti bolognese, listening to classical music, that I always think about when I think about food writing. Murakami is a master of magical realism, but it’s the scenes in which he grounds us so firmly in the reality of a character meticulously boiling pasta and chopping tomatoes which I love most about his writing.

So you can imagine why it is I picked up Garner’s memoir, and I was not disappointed. There was something so delightfully wonderful about reading Garner’s literary homages to food. It reflected a man whose appetite for the beautiful things in life would make him a companion you would want to share your own dinner table.

I dog-eared the page where he references Lawrence Osborne’s book The Wet and the Dry about trying to get a drink in countries where it is illegal to do so. Garner notes Osborne’s sentiment at one stage ‘that, with its olive, his vodka martini tastes like “cold seawater at the bottom of an oyster”’. Absolute goosebumps. Oysters are the thing guaranteed to make my mouth water in anticipation, no matter how far from the sea I am.

Food is a language, and some may have a better grasp than others, but we couldn’t get by day to day without it.

It’s like that Anthony Bourdain quote, ‘You learn a lot about someone when you share a meal’. Sharing how we feel about food too can help us all learn that language, something which Garner beautifully packages in The Upstairs Delicatessen.

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In the spirit of sharing, I made a salmon quiche the other night that was completely made up from bits in the fridge and turned out far better than expected. It’s something I hope you’ll make too.

Salmon Quiche

Ingredients

• Puff pastry, enough to cover one of those big rectangular ceramic/glass casserole dishes (I buy a fancy frozen roll that’s made in Melbourne and sold by my local grocer because I tried it once and cannot go back the Pampas sheets, but use whatever you like!)

• 2 fillets of salmon, skin and bones removed (mine was out of the freezer, and so much easier to cut when not fully defrosted)

• 2 big and grated carrots

• 1 red onion sliced into crescents

• 1 1/2 cups frozen peas (this is a rough estimate - I just used the rest of what was in the bag so I can’t remember the quantity!)

• a tablespoon(?) of butter

• 6 eggs

• 1/3? (again, estimate here) cup of soy milk (but use whatever you’ve got, we just never have actual milk)

• half a skinny jar of capers (50g if you want to be precise about it? Really, I just flung these around on top of everything so go with your heart)

• fresh dill

Method

1. Defrost your pastry. If you’ve bought a fancy roll like mine, and it’s a little thick, roll it out with a pin so it’s not too thick - maybe 5mm). Defrost your salmon too, if it was in the freezer like mine. If it’s defrosted, skin it if necessary then dice into good bite size chunks.

2. Sauté on medium heat the carrots, peas and onions in butter until they all start to sweat and soften (about 5 mins, but every stove top is different). Add salt, just a small pinch, stir, and take off the heat. It’s probably about time you should also put the oven on to about 200 C (fan-forced).

3. Whisk the eggs and milk until fully combine and let rest.

4. Once you’ve put your pastry into the dish, stab it all over with a fork so that any trapped air between the pastry and dish can escape during cooking.

5. Then, spread your carrots, peas and onions across the bottom of the pastry in a fairly even manner. Next, scatter your diced salmon all over the bed of veggies. Coat all of that evenly with the egg mixture. (Your salmon pieces will stick out, don’t worry.)

6. Sprinkle the whole thing with capers and dill, then use a fork to gently dunk them down into the egg mixture so they’re coated with a bit of liquid to stop them from burning.

7. Put the whole thing into the oven, preferably on an oven shelf that looks like a sheet pan, rather than a rack, as the hot sheet pan will cook the bottom of the pastry and make it crispier. If I’ve learned anything from Bake Off, it’s that you never want a soggy bottom!!

8. Start checking to see if the filling is cooked at about 45 mins - I think I took mine out at 50 mins, but my oven is all over the place. Once your knife comes out clean from the centre, she’s done!

Bon appetit! I hope you share how it goes for you :)