Charity Robey

Zac Posen Q&A

Zac Posen at his parent's farm in Bucks Country, PA. Photo Credit: Vanina Sorrenti

 

Published in the Summer 2019 issue of Feed Me magazine.

 

Zac Posen grew up in a creative household in New York City, with a father who cooked every day. The 38-year-old designer dresses the best, from fashion royalty to more than 60,000 Delta employees reaching into overhead bins all over the world. His 2017 book, “Cooking With Zac,” extends his lifelong affinity for creating beauty to luscious ingredients. He spends as much time as he can shopping and cooking with friends on Long Island.

In “Cooking With Zac,” you draw connections between designing a new collection and cooking. How are they similar?

When I’m designing clothing, I drape fabric onto a form or human body and I start building expressively. Good material is the starting point, as good ingredients are the starting point for a dish. I let the ingredient or material sing and [take] the lead.

Your recipes seem solid and tested, and they include a lot of technique. How did you come by so many good practices?

I was told, ‘Don’t worry, in most cookbooks the recipes don’t test out.’ I said, ‘I can’t have that — it would be like making a piece of clothing with an armhole that’s closed.’ Food is like storytelling. When you cook with great chefs, you learn different parts of that story. I’m self-taught, but I’ve cooked with the greatest — Marcus [Samuelsson], Giada De Laurentiis, Martha [Stewart], Eric Ripert.

What do you wear when you cook?

When I’m doing cooking demos, I wear aprons. When I’m in my kitchen, I’m in my t-shirt, Brooks Brothers pajama bottoms and bare feet. If I do wear an apron, I like to do a fold so I can put a white cloth on the tie.

Some cooks meticulously measure, dice and peel ahead of time, and some throw carrots all over the kitchen. Where do you fall on that spectrum?

I’m a messy creator! If I have to time to prep, then I can be neat and organized.

Are there foods you’d rather get on Long Island than anywhere else?

Mother Nature is our greatest designer and creator, and produce is the greatest luxury item possible. I love the hunt for good ingredients. I make all the clothing I wear, but there are two things I shop for, jewelry and ingredients [for cooking]. Long Island has incredible small farms and produce. I love the Green Thumb [Water Mill]. I get my seafood — ideally, you get it on the dock [or at] The Seafood Shop [Wainscott].

Where do you go out to eat on Long Island?

I rarely go out, even though I know there is incredible food. I grill. It’s my time off. It’s important to me to have private, quiet time, not having to interact with the world.

How would you describe your approach to cooking and eating?

It’s generous, it’s eclectic, with a real respect for the ingredients. Family style with air. Rustic to refined ... enjoying the right balance of decadence to refined simplicity ... I don’t believe in suffering, in trying to not eat—I think it’s all in moderation.

The Delta Air Lines uniforms you designed made their debut last year. What did you do and how did you do it? And how does one of the uniforms hold up if a passenger spills a Bloody Mary all over a flight attendant?

Delta was a real once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It took over three years. I job-shadowed from entering JFK to landing on the plane, from ticketing to baggage to service. We worked with stain-resistant fibers woven into the fabric. That’s where the technology came onboard. It was great to bring this into the process.

A long East End history of clam-eating

Clam chowder made from Melva Sherman’s recipe.

 

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on September 5, 2019

On the East End of Long Island, people have been opening clams and eating them for a very long time, starting with native Americans who left piles of clamshells behind to attest to their enthusiasm. The Shelter Island Historical Society has a letter written in 1820 by Sylvester Dering describing the discovery of a large number of clam shells found while digging a well- 40 feet down, suggesting some very old archaeological evidence of clam consumption. 

The first published fish chowder recipe in America appeared in the Boston Evening Post- a recipe in verse:

First lay some Onions to keep the Pork from burning,

Because in Chouder there can be no turning:

Then lay some Pork in Slices very thin,

Thus you in Chouder always must begin.

Then season well with Pepper, Salt and Spice;

Parsley, Sweet-Marjoram, Savory and Thyme,

Then Biscuit next which must be soak’d some Time.

Thus your Foundation laid, you will be able

To raise a Chouder, high as Tower of Babel:

For by repeating o’re the Same again,

You may make Chouder for a thousand Men,

Last Bottle of Claret, with Water eno’ to smother ‘em

You’l have a Mess which some call Omnium gather ‘em.

Aside from the brilliance of a recipe in verse (easy to memorize, you’ll never forget to add the thyme) this preparation has a lot in common with another great chowder recipe, Melva’s 1st Place Chowder, which appeared in “The Shelter Island Historical Society Cookbook.” Melva Sherman came to Shelter Island in the 1920s to work as a schoolteacher, married local boy Herbert Sherman, worked as postmaster and went on to build a Shelter Island chowder dynasty.

Her dominance in the chowder realm was crowned when her soup won first prize at the Fire Department Country Fair, and inspired her grandson Matt to capture her method since she did not work from any recipe. He sat at the table with her after they got the chowder simmering and she dictated.

This act of culinary historic preservation on Matt’s part, and the subsequent publication of the recipe he recorded in the Historical Society Cookbook, is a textbook example of how most of the American recipes we still use and cherish today came to be preserved. A person who knew how to make something delicious, let somebody turn it into a recipe, which was often shared in a community cookbook. Community cookbooks are treasure troves for culinary historians trying to understand the food and culture of the past.

Melva’s technique called for grinding the ingredients, and was accomplished with a Hamilton Beach grinder and a cast iron pot, both of which are still in the Sherman family. Since I don’t have an antique grinder I decided to adapt the Sherman family’s recipe as faithfully as I could, and here is the result. Instead of a grinder, I chopped the ingredients coarsely, cooked them, and then used a blender to puree part of the soup to achieve the desired texture. I was used the same kind of cast iron pot. 

And I understand why this clam chowder was so prized.

Adapted from Melva Sherman’s 1st Place Chowder in “The Shelter Island Historical Society Cookbook,” 2013

¼ cup salt pork

1-pound chopped onion

1-pound potatoes, coarsely chopped

12 oz carrots, coarsely chopped

1 large (28oz) can tomatoes or fresh tomatoes blanched, skins removed and coarsely chopped.

4 cups water

Salt to taste

8 dozen cherrystone or littleneck clams steamed in 2 cups water, removed from shells- should yield about 4 cups of clams and a pint of juice.

Or 

Use 4 cups canned clams and a pint of bottled clam juice

Cook the salt pork in a cast iron pot at low heat until the pork gives up its fat. Add the onions and cook over medium heat until they are soft.  Add the carrots and potatoes, and one cup of the water, and continue cooking for 45 minutes until the vegetables are soft. Add the tomatoes, and another two cups of the water, bring to a simmer and cook 30 minutes. Add another cup of water as needed to make it thick, but soupy.

In the meantime, scrub and rinse the clams, put them in a pot with 2 cups of water and steam them, removing the clams as soon as they open. Reserve them in a bowl to cool, strain the clam broth into another bowl.  Chop the clam meats, and put them in the bowl of strained broth to stay moist. 

Taste the vegetables to see if they are soft, and add salt to taste. Puree the soup, using an immersion blender, or by transferring two cups of warm soup at a time to the blender and then pour the blended soup back into the pot, until you have a very thick but soupy consistency.

Add the clams and the clam broth to the pureed soup and let it simmer very low for five minutes without boiling, so the clams don’t get tough. Serve immediately.

Oysterponds Historical Society​ ​presents Ms. Robey and Jane Lear hosting Bay to Table: Clams in Oysterponds on Saturday, Sept. 14, from 2:45 to 4:45 p.m. at the Orient Yacht Club. Guests will enjoy a taste of chowder and look back on 10 years of clam-eating traditions and the chowders and clambakes enjoyed today. Admission: $25 for one person; $40 for two people.

A matter of proportion

COURTESY PHOTO

While trying to make sense of recent Town Board deliberations on the size of a proposed house, I turned to Russian literature for answers.

Published in 1886, Leo Tolstoy’s very short story, “How Much Land Does a Man Need” is a parable about the moral dangers of acquisition, and the costs and the limits of human greed. It does not end well for the guy who wants more property.

In Tolstoy’s story, a greedy man agrees to pay 1,000 rubles for as much land as he can walk around, starting at sunrise of a long, hot day and returning no later than sunset to his starting point. If he’s late, he loses the land and the money. Overcome with the desire to possess, the man ranges too far, exhausts himself trying to get back in time, and dies.

The man is destroyed by his own greed, but in Tolstoy’s story it’s the local leader (wearing a fox-fur hat) and his land-acquisition rules that set the man up for a fall. For our own local officials the question is: What to do when someone asks permission to build a house that is larger than the law allows? In the recent case, the Town Board approved an application to build a 9,619-square-foot house with nine bedrooms on Little Ram Island, in spite of the Town Code limit of the size of a home to 6,000 square feet.

It’s not the first time the town has wrestled with the question of whether or not to allow someone to build an extremely large house. In the fall of 2014, the question of whether to allow an 8,297-square foot house on Charlie’s Lane resulted in a public debate, the introduction of the term “proportionality” to local parlance, and approval.

A real estate study published in 2016 showed that the average newly constructed home in the U.S. has 2,430 square feet of living space, an increase of 74 percent over the average house built a hundred years ago. Since the average household has actually dropped from 4.5 members in 1910 to 2.5 in 2015, all those small families are rattling around in 200 percent more living space these days.

Whether you’re buying, building or renting, no one goes looking for something small, and the euphemisms in real estate ads suggest that size does matter. Anything described as “charming” or “cozy” means small and cramped, and possibly in need of work.

In her recently-published memoir, Michelle Obama said her childhood home in South Side Chicago was about 900-square-feet for her family of four. A real estate professional might well describe it as cozy, but as a place to raise children, it had good results.

Our current president’s New York City apartment is said to be about 30,000 square-feet, puny in comparison to his second home, Mar-a-Lago, which has 110,000 square-feet of living area and 126 rooms. This is not a home that will ever be described as charming.

The Town Board has considered proposals for even larger new homes, including 11,615-square-feet for a proposed home overlooking — and visible from — Crescent Beach.

I suppose it never hurts to ask, but if town code requires special permission to build a house larger than 6,000 square feet, why should the answer so often be yes?

Perhaps the Town Board should wear fox-fur hats at the next vote.

Friends since 1652: Shelter Island's place in Quaker history

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO
A sign on Route 114 marks the entrance to the Friends outdoor meeting place.

It was 38 minutes into the one-hour Quaker meeting before anyone said a word.

Gathered on the grounds of Sylvester Manor, seated on a jumble of rough-hewn logs fashioned into long benches in a wooded glade, there were six at the meeting, seven if you count the small white dog on Shelter Islander Jim Pugh’s lap.

They sat largely in silence, until Mr. Pugh gathered the group of Friends together in a circle of hands called the rise of meeting.

In a time when listening is out, venting is in, and most of your friends are people you never actually see, the Quaker approach to worship is distinct, even a bit strange. It must have seemed as strange to the 17th century Puritans of colonial New England, one reason why Shelter Island’s Quaker history, which goes back to the founding of Sylvester Manor in 1652, is relevant today.

The Quaker and Island connection

Quaker practices include plain speech, modesty, avoiding showy things such as flags and grave markers and an unwillingness to swear an oath. Activists for peace and social justice, Quakers have advocated for women’s rights and the abolition of slavery.

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO
The Shelter Island meeting takes place in a grove near the Quaker monument at Sylvester Manor, as it has since the 1970s.

The Religious Society of Friends, known as Quakers, was established by George Fox in England in the mid-17th century, around the same time that Nathaniel Sylvester and Grizzell Brinley married in England and crossed the Atlantic Ocean to become the first European residents of Shelter Island.

The Sylvesters brought with them Quaker practices and beliefs. When the passage of anti-Quaker laws in 1656 imposed punishments such as branding, ear-cropping, imprisonment and later banishment and death, Nathaniel and Grizzell Sylvester made the Island a refuge for persecuted Quakers.

The best known of these was the Quaker martyr Mary Dyer, who left her husband and six children in Boston in the early 1650s, moved to England where she became a Friend, and returned to Boston as a Quaker preacher in 1657 only to be arrested and banished on pain of death.

In spite of her banishment, Dyer went back to Boston, was sentenced to death, but was spared at the last moment in a bizarre public execution in which two fellow Quakers were hanged before her. She was made to stand on the gallows hooded, and then suddenly spared.

She made her way to Shelter Island where she spent the winter of 1659-60, a time the historian Mac Griswold describes in “The Manor,” her history of Sylvester Manor, as “the happiest, most dedicated, least fractured time of her life. Her actions embodied her faith; all the rest of life’s concerns had burned away.”

Ms. Dyer chose once again to return to Boston and her fate. She was publicly executed in June 1660.

Shelter from the storm

Nathaniel and Grizzell Sylvester also harbored Lawrence and Cassandra Sethwick, Quakers from Salem, after they were banished and two of their children ordered sold into slavery. The Sethwicks fled across Long Island Sound to Shelter Island.

Shattered physically and emotionally, they lived out their last days, both dying about a month after arriving. A copy of Lawrence Sethwick’s last will and testament, written on Shelter Island, and witnessed by Nathaniel Sylvester, is dated May 1659.

In 1661, King Charles II issued a royal order meant to stop the executions of Quakers in Massachusetts.

It was personally delivered to John Endicott, the governor of Massachusetts, by a London Quaker and ship captain named Ralph Goldsmith, who later settled in Southold.

Nathaniel Sylvester’s brother Giles, who was living in London, signed the petition listing the sufferings of American Friends, which prompted the royal order. Historians have posited a link between Grizzell Sylvester’s correspondence with her father Thomas Brinley who was in the court of King Charles, and the order to stop the executions of Quakers in Massachusetts.

As joyful as the Sylvesters must have been to see the end of Quaker executions, the arrival of the Quaker founder, George Fox on Shelter Island 10 years later was likely even more satisfying, as an indication of their prominent position.

COURTESY PHOTO
George Fox, a founder of the Quaker movement, who visited Sylvester Manor.

Mr. Fox had left England for a tour of America in 1671, and after two months in Rhode Island, finally visited the Island in August 1672. He wrote of preaching to hundreds of native Americans from the porch of the Manor House, and of trying to persuade slaveholders in America, such as Nathaniel Sylvester, to free the people he held in bondage. At the time, about 70 percent of American Quakers were slaveowners.

Nathaniel Sylvester died on June 13, 1680, aged 70. Grizzell, in settling the estate, followed Quaker practice by declining to swear, “being a person that cannot take an oath for conscience sake,” and instead testified to the inventory of her husband’s estate, which included 23 enslaved people.

Grizzell died on June 13, 1687 at 52. In keeping with Quaker practice, the Sylvesters’ graves bore no markers of any kind.

Noticed and remembered

For most of the 19th century and first half of the 20th, the 8th, 9th and 10th owners of Sylvester Manor were members of the Horsford family. They spent summers at the Manor, and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Eager to recognize the history of the Friends, and the Manor’s role as a refuge and haven, the Horsfords dedicated a monument on July 25, 1884 to their Sylvester forebears.

They made sure it would be noticed and remembered. A large crowd including most of Shelter Island, as well as friends and colleagues from Cambridge attended. A three-piece band and a choir performed.

The poet John Greenleaf Whittier, known for his dramatic poems about Quaker history, and a friend of Professor Eben Horsford, wrote a special ode for the event about The Friends’ ordeal and Island sanctuary, with the lines: “A peaceful deathbed and a quiet grave/Where ocean walled, and wiser than his age,/ the Lord of Shelter scorned the bigot’s rage.”

In 1952, Andy Fiske, the 13th owner of Sylvester Manor, and a direct Sylvester descendant, called on Henry Cadbury, who had recently accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the American Friends Service Committee, to conduct a Quaker meeting on Shelter Island. Cadbury not only came and conducted the meeting, but established a Shelter Island Friends meeting that is still active, albeit with occasional fits and starts.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Friends met at the Garr estate; during the 1960s, at Union Chapel in the Heights; and starting in 1970, outdoor meetings took place in the grove by the Quaker cemetery at Sylvester Manor.

And that is where six people sat last Sunday, with Friends past and present, in silent awe of all that was around them, and in search of all that is within.

Bliss Morehead, the woman in black who went green

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CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Bliss Morehead long ago stopped wearing a fur coat around the Island, but still wears black.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on April 12, 2018

Bliss Morehead was an advertising executive, a city-loving, urban creature with a BA in English from Barnard when her fiancé Mike Zisser coaxed her onto a ferry bound for Shelter Island in 1981. She remembers asking, “Why would I want to go live on an Island?”

This is what English majors call a rhetorical question.

They bought the third house they saw, got married, started spending weekends and have been living here full-time for two decades. Bliss’s son, Nicholas Morehead, married Paige Clark and also settled here. Nick works for the South Ferry.

“He does two things I never thought he would do,” Bliss said. “He drives a big boat and he uses a chainsaw.”

Bliss’s grandchildren Larkin and Cayman attend the Shelter Island School.

Somewhere along the line Bliss’s rhetorical question was answered, but it took a while for her to go native.

She laughs (and cringes) recalling how far she has come from the urbanite who first came here. Like the time she went for a walk on Congdon Road wearing a fur coat and fitted leather gloves. The next weekend a neighbor came by the house with a glove found on the road and told Mike it had to be his wife’s because, “I don’t know anyone else who would wear a glove like this.”

She was born Bliss Rehm, in Deal, New Jersey, educated at Asbury Park High School and after graduating from college with that English degree, she knew it might not lead to high-paying work.

“Barnard did what a college should do for you,” she said. “Not make you grow up. But make you.” By the time she graduated and began working as a copywriter, she was a New York sophisticate, dressed in black and sharing an Upper West Side apartment with multiple roommates.

She landed a job writing internal ad copy at Mademoiselle where she was exposed to the world of fashion journalism and then moved into advertising, working for Young & Rubicam where she met her first husband, Gould Morehead. From there she went to Beaumont-Bennett, where she met Mike Zisser, who became her second husband years later.

Beaumont-Bennett was a small agency but the work was interesting and often challenging. Bliss had to cater to the needs of difficult clients who were used to getting what they wanted. The worst, she said, were the real estate developers. “They were the lowest of the low humanity.”

As creative director, one of her responsibilities was naming buildings for real estate developers, including “The Soundings” in Battery Park City, and “CitySpire” on the Upper East Side. “The clients were my worst nightmare and it really put a strain on my professional relationship with Mike,” she said.

The late 1970s was a complicated time for Bliss. Her children, Joanna and Nicholas were little, her marriage was rocky and she was living in New Jersey commuting three days a week to Beaumont-Bennett in the city at a time when most professional women quit working when they had children.

Then Mike’s wife died suddenly, leaving him with three children, one still at home with him in Great Neck.

“I began writing letters to Mike trying to console him,” Bliss said. “The power of words can be helpful sometimes and we became close.”

Bliss left her husband and moved into the city with her children. “It really changed my life because I saw that I could live as a single parent in New York,” she said. Later, Mike moved to the city with his son and she and Mike began to spend more time together, marrying in 1982.

Once she and Mike sold Beaumont-Bennett, Bliss decided to pursue her interest in poetry, entering the Masters of Fine Arts program at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina and writing and publishing work in literary journals.

Once again, Shelter Island had its influence on her. “I wrote a poem called “Too Much Green” inspired by a friend from Santa Fe who lived here for a while but couldn’t paint because she said “there’s too much green on this Island.”

Bliss and Mike made the transition from weekenders to full-time Shelter Islanders after the events of 9/11 left her fearful. “I never thought I’d feel this way,”she said. “But who wants to be looking over their shoulder?”

Bliss has been active in promoting literacy on Shelter Island, volunteering with the 2Rs4Fun program that pairs local writers with local students to improve and promote the student’s writing.

She founded the Shelter Island Poetry Project, which will celebrate April (aka Poetry Month) with readings from the work of Frank O’Hara and the poets of the New York School at the Shelter Island Library on Friday, April 13 at 7 p.m.

Her belief in the importance of poetry as a means of communication is strong. “Poetry cannot be paraphrased. It is its own living thing,” Bliss said. “When you read it, the writer’s imagination will resonate in your brain. We are imprisoned in ourselves, but you can touch someone else with a poem.”

Bliss is facing her seventh decade with gratitude for the changes Shelter Island made in her life. “I used to be one of those people who thought getting fat was your fault, getting old was your fault, but once I began coming here I took the time to really know people, to see how they live,” she said. “There is a tremendously rich life out here.”

Lightning Round

What do you always have with you? A pen.

Favorite place on Shelter Island? If the peepers ever start, out back by the pond is my favorite spot.

Favorite place not on Shelter Island? The British Museum.

When was the last time you were elated?  When my granddaughter, Larkin Bliss Morehead, was born.

What exasperates you? The creeping incivility all around.

When was the last time you were afraid? When the World Trade Center came down. I was never without fear after that.

Favorite movie or book? I read all of Barbara Pym every summer.

Favorite food? Pasta.

Favorite person, living or dead, who is not a member of the family? The Obamas.

Carol Galligan- A writer's life

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Carol Galligan at home on Shelter Island, where she wrote her new book, “Collision Course: The Vatican, the Nuns of America and the Meaning of Obedience.”

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter in February, 2018

In the 1970s, Carol Galligan was a working, divorced mother of two teen-age kids. Once they made their way from Manhattan to Shelter Island on Friday nights she looked forward to a few moments of bliss.

“The kids would go off and do stuff and I would sit on the back lawn and look at the water and the city melted away,” she said. “It was a Manhattan antidote.”

A full-time resident of Shelter Island, Carol is a psychologist, playwright, journalist and author of the forthcoming “Collision Course: The Vatican, the Nuns of America and the Meaning of Obedience.” Her book is an account of the Vatican’s two-year standoff with a large leadership group of American nuns. Spoiler alert — the nuns prevailed.

Carol’s maiden name is Wolfe, born and raised on the West Side of Manhattan, where her family had lived since their 1847 arrival in the wake of the Irish potato famine.

Arthur Galligan, a friend of Carol’s older brother, began having dinner with the family when she was 13. When she turned 18, they married. “Boys at school were of no interest to me,” said Carol. “I was already engaged.”

She went to Barnard, got a doctorate at NYU and opened a practice in clinical psychology in 1963.

“I stumbled into being a psychologist and it captured me,” she said. “It was the religion I was looking for.”

Arthur was practicing law and became a founding partner of a prominent law firm. Their daughter, Jessica Galligan Goldsmith, is an attorney in New York. Their son, Zach Galligan, is an actor who played the role of Billy Peltzer in the movie “Gremlins” and lives in Atlanta.

Arthur Galligan’s work was demanding. He insisted his family spend weekends no farther than 45 minutes from Grand Central Station. When the marriage ended after 20 years, Carol said her summers were suddenly her own.

One day a friend called her from Shelter Island to say she was debating which of two pieces of land to buy. Carol impulsively told her friend, “Tell the broker I’ll take the other one.”

Frank Hallock, the broker, said he wouldn’t agree to sell land to someone who had not seen it. “I told my friend to put him on the phone,” Carol said. “I said, ‘Mr. Hallock, I know that land well, and I want it.’ I lied. I knew that if I made a mistake I would suck it up.”

After buying the land, Carol came out to see what she had done. Her deception was exposed when she had to ask Hallock to show her where it was.

“I thought it would be an adventure,” she said. “I was on my own for the first time in my life. I didn’t have to ask anyone if I could do it, so I did.”

She built a home for herself and her children in 1969 and after more than four decades of spending weekends and summers, she went full-time in 2004 when her daughter built her own house and invited Carol to live there.

It was about this time that Carol answered an ad seeking a proofreader for this newspaper and became a journalist, going from proofreader to garden columnist to feature writer.

She was well into her 50s when she completed a program in playwriting at Columbia University and began getting her plays and screenplays produced. In 1993, when her play “Out of Purgatory” was performed at the Cassius Carter Centre Stage of Balboa Park’s Old Globe Theatre, the critic for the Los Angeles Times wrote, “the surprise of ‘Out of Purgatory’ is the unobtrusive wit, truthfulness and tenderness of the writing.”

Carol has a new play under way and is holding first readings in her living room.

“Collision Course” tells the story of the Vatican’s struggle, starting in 2012, to control the activities of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), an organization that includes 80 percent of the nuns in America. Many American Catholics were outraged at the Vatican’s belief that the nuns had strayed from Catholic doctrine, and the decision to put them under the control of an archbishop whose permission was required for any action.

“I wrote the book because I have a thing about bullies, and I think the Vatican is the biggest bully on the face of the planet,” Carol said. “They have all the power. They answer to nobody.” Although raised Catholic, by the time she was 17 she’d often go to the local coffee shop instead of Mass. “I’ve always had a dim view of the Catholic church,” she said.

Carol got to know a number of nuns in the course of researching her book and was particularly inspired by their reaction at attempts to control their actions. “They never asked permission. They did what they needed to do,” she said. In the end, the nuns were cleared, and the Vatican backed down. Carol’s book describes how the nuns resisted and also attempts an explanation.

The book will soon be distributed by Amazon.

Active in the Democratic party, Carol is a keen observer of Island politics. “I like the intimacy of the political process here,” she said. “You could tell how it was going to go 10 days before the last election. You could feel it in the air.”

She’s also a member of the Executive Committee for Shelter Island’s collegiate league baseball team, the Bucks, and can be found sitting behind third base at every game. Anyone with a spare room should participate by housing a member of the team, she said. “I think the Bucks are one of the best things that ever happened on the Island,” she said.

The constraints of religion, marriage and societal expectations controlled the early part of her life, but when she came to Shelter Island she began to create a life on her own terms. “I love the city, but I’m a Shelter Islander now,” Carol said. “Just don’t interrupt me when I’m reading on the treadmill at Project FIT.”

Lightning Round

Favorite place on Shelter Island? A table outside at the Ram’s Head Inn during the first week of June.

Favorite place not on Shelter Island? In New York, when I went running, my route was along Central Park South, and at the end, I’d walk through the enormous lobby of the Plaza Hotel to cool off in the summer and warm up in the winter.

When was the last time you were elated? The play I am writing is doing it for me.

What exasperates you? The waste of people not being honored, not being heard.

What is the best day of the year on Shelter Island? The day after Thanksgiving. Everything wonderful is in front of you, the tree to be bought, the lights to be hung. The parties to give and to go to.

Favorite movie or book? “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.” It meant the world to me when I was 10.

Favorite person, living or dead, who is not a member of the family? My best friend, Elizabeth. She’s smarter than I am and she’s also something I am not — balanced, not impulsive.

Most respected elected official? Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Searching for Melania in Slovenia

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO On the street where she lived… in an apartment Melania shared with her sister, Ines.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on December 14, 2017

When I travel, I try to learn something. So when I visited Slovenia recently, I went with an urge to better understand a presidential spouse about whom I have questions.

Many questions.

Melania Trump, born and raised in Slovenia, is the second foreign-born first lady, after Louisa Adams, born in London in 1775. I wondered: Is there anything recognizably Slovenian about Melania? What do Slovenes think of her? And most of all, what did she see in Donald Trump?

Factual information about Melania before she met Trump is sparse. Born Melanija Knavs, she had a sister and two parents, went to high school and college in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and worked as a model before and after moving to America.

Reminiscent of Melania’s confinement within the walls of Trump Tower and the White House, Slovenia lies tightly wedged within the space between Italy and Croatia, with alpine mountains in the north and a karst (a region of soluble rocks such as limestone) and cave-riddled south that features about 30 miles of Adriatic Sea coastline. Slovenia was under communist rule when Melania lived there, so she’s used to life under a repressive regime.

The Slovenian language is full of unpronounceable clusters of consonants, which was only a problem for me when it came to eating. I solved it by ordering dishes with a nice balance of vowels and consonants, such as Kremna Rezina (multi-layer cream pastry also known as Lake Bled Cake) and potica, a rich, nut-stuffed cake.

The deliciousness of potica inspired Pope Francis to ask Melania if she feeds it to Donald Trump, nearly sparking an international incident when she heard him say pizza, not po-teetz-a. Owing to the consonant-clustering problem, I never did get to taste the cheese and walnut stuffed delicacy called struklji.

When Melania said in an interview that she speaks “a few languages,” many Americans, including me, figured she was exaggerating her linguistic prowess. But in Slovenia I discovered that everyone speaks four languages, usually Slovenian, Italian, English and French.

I asked every waiter, bus driver, farmer and gas station attendant I met, and could not find one person who spoke fewer than three. Mostly their English was better than mine (I had jet lag). So yeah, I believe that she speaks a few languages. A better question is how come most Americans don’t?

Wi-Fi has achieved the same penetration in Slovene society as drinking water. At first, I asked for the Wi-Fi password in every café, until a bartender in a remote mountain village laughed at me. “Of course we have free Wi-Fi,” he said. “Everyone has free Wi-Fi. What do you think this is, North Korea?”

His English was very good.

Slovenia has an excellent highway system, talented drivers and an almost complete absence of speed limit signage. Slovenians don’t need signs, because the standard limits are common knowledge. Like Melania, I was aware of constant surveillance by cameras, albeit the traffic-enforcing kind. I am sorry to report that foreign visitors often receive speeding tickets by mail from Slovenian authorities weeks after returning home.

My constant companion during this trip was “Slovenology,” by the American writer Noah Charney. It’s a peculiar and delightful guidebook whose subject is as much the Slovene people as it is the country’s landmarks and scenery.

People even stopped me on the street to say how great it was — it’s available in Slovenian and English — and how Charney really “gets” Slovenians.

Charney identifies a fundamental Slovene characteristic, which is expressed in the common aphorism, “If you look at the stars, you’ll step in dung.” I think this tendency to avoid being a showoff is at the root of one of my questions about Melania: What do Slovenes think of her?

Aside from a few hoping to sell something related to her fame, they don’t think much.

When she was 23, Melania made a television commercial in Slovenia in which she played the president of the United States. Dressed in a tan raincoat with flowing brown hair, she waved from her limousine, issued orders, took important phone calls and, in the final scene, signed off on immigration papers.

Seeing her performance, it’s impossible not to think she had dreams of living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. She looked presidential. I think when she met Donald Trump five years later, she already had the training and the desire, and saw in him the money and connections to put them on a path to the presidency before other people saw that possibility.

What did the daughter of Slovenia see in the dotard of real estate? I think she saw the White House. And as an immigrant, she may have a better appreciation of the possibilities of the United States than her husband.

I certainly hope so.

Saving Sylvester Manor, and social justice. Did baking powder do all that?

COURTESY SYLVESTER MANOR EDUCATIONAL FARM Professor Eben B. Horsford, ca. 1890.

Published on September 7, 2017 in the Shelter Island Reporter

When food historian Linda Civitello, author of “Cuisine and Culture: A History of Food and People,” tells the story of baking powder, as she did at a recent Friday Night Dialogue at the library, she starts by describing the state of bread baking in this country before baking powder existed. An America unrecognizable to this reporter; a place without chocolate chip cookies and cupcakes.

Another way to look at the effect of baking powder is to imagine America if Eben Horsford, lord of Sylvester Manor in the 19th century, hadn’t developed it, Shelter Island would look very different too. Instead of acres of woods, farmland, gardens, barns and a Manor House up a lane from the IGA, there would likely be two hundred 5,000 square-foot homes on one-acre lots.

Most of what we think of as real American cooking owes its existence to baking powder, Ms. Civitello said recently in an interview. She cited the baking powder biscuit as one of America’s finest contributions to culinary history. “Cornbread, graham crackers, blueberry pancakes, these are ours,” she said. “We invented them, they came from American women in their kitchens.”

In the early chapters of her book, Ms. Civitello notes that in the time before chemical leaveners, the first step in creating bread was to make yeast. That’s why early cookbooks, including Catherine Beecher’s “Domestic Receipt Book,” published in 1858, had pages of recipes for making yeast for bread. These instructions were helpful in New England, where literacy rates among women were close to 100 percent, but less so in the American South, where universal schooling for girls was only mandated after the Civil War and many women, especially enslaved ones, did not read.

Liberation comes to the kitchen

In an effort to better understand what was involved in making bread in the 1850s, Ms. Civitello described her attempt to mix a dough similar to one that a woman in the kitchen at Sylvester Manor might have made. It involved 8 quarts of flour, salt, 2 quarts of water and a pint of homemade yeast. It made pounds and pounds of dough, and kneading and mixing it required a physical effort she could barely summon, and hoped never to have to repeat.

The first widely-used chemical leavener was bicarbonate of soda, which when mixed with an acid, briefly produces gas bubbles. A 19th century baker could add vinegar, or cream of tartar, derived from grapes, or another acid to the dough to get a rise. But bitter tastes, and uneven rising were common problems.

This was the sad state of American bread making when Mr. Horsford was appointed Rumford Professor of Chemistry at Harvard, and a year later married Mary Gardiner, whose family owned Sylvester Manor. Mr. Horsford “married up,” and his pursuit of Mary Gardiner motivated his academic and business aspirations.

His 1861 treatise, “The Theory and Art of Bread Making,” described how awful the other methods of bread making with chemical leaveners were. “He had tasted bread made with cream of tartar,” Ms. Civitello said, “And he was seeking a remedy.”

She described the debate that raged in American universities between the theoretical and the practical. Harvard, where Mr. Horsford was a professor, came down on the side of the theoretical. “But Horsford had trained at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as a civil engineer, and his approach to teaching Harvard students was to take them on factory tours,” Ms. Civitello said. Once he figured out how to make money from his reformulation of baking powder, Horsford quit Harvard.

Advertisement for Eben Horsford’s Acid Phosphate, a key ingredient in the formulation of Rumford baking powder.

Doing well by doing good

With his partner, George Wilson, he formed the Rumford company specifically to make baking and medicinal products. Their goals were to do good, while also doing well for themselves.

It’s not an overstatement that if Mr. Horsford had not made so much money from his Rumford brand of baking powder, Sylvester Manor might have passed out of the family a century ago. Profits from the sale of Rumford baking powder produced the wherewithal for the family to hold onto it, and make a gift of it to the public in 2012.

Ms. Civitello said that Horsford was also notable because of policies he instituted at the Rumford company for women employees. With five daughters from two beloved wives — the Gardiner sisters, Mary and Phoebe — Mr. Horsford understood that supporting women in their work, whether at home or in his factory, helped the business and improved society. (Of course, his own family had servants to make their daily bread.)

If baking powder hadn’t fomented a revolution in American baking, the stakes for companies such as Royal and Rumford would not have been so high. American women voted for baking powder with their dollars. Ms. Civitello documents the profound change by examining period cookbooks, in which recipes for baking powder breads and cakes soon outnumbered recipes using yeast.

The marketing war between rival baking powder manufacturers is the core of another book by Ms. Civiletto, “The Baking Powder Wars,” chronicling one of the ugliest business scandals in American history, but one Mr. Horsford did not get to see. “He died before the down and dirty part took place,” Ms. Civitello said.

Unintended consequences?
He was however, a target of attack by other baking powder companies, especially the Royal company that denigrated calcium phosphate, a component of Horsford’s baking powder derived from animal bones, as “bone dust.”

The invention of baking powder also had unintended negative consequences on American’s health and nutrition, which Ms. Civitello speaks to this in her book. Not only did baking powder lead to an explosion of packaged cookies, cakes and crackers of questionable nutritional value in the 20th century, but it made possible the rise of fry bread among native Americans who switched almost overnight from traditional corn-based breads to fried baking powder and wheat flour fritters.

In the past few weeks, a national dialogue has broken out about the good and the evil done by historical figures. Did Mr. Horsford do more good than bad? Ms. Civitello’s fascinating book sets the stage for the debate. But before you vilify chemical leaveners as poisonous junk food enablers, think of the Ritz Cracker you held aloft last week for eclipse-viewing. It would have no tiny pin-holes without baking powder.

Would #sheetcaking be a thing in a world without baking powder? No, not so much as a gleam in Tina Fey’s eye.

Island Profile; Christine Finn, ready to lead Shelter Island School

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Christine Finn at The Islander this week.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on September 7, 2017

Christine Finn, a teacher and education administrator, has a sure-fire way to get the flavor of the local culture when she travels overseas. Go to McDonald’s.

“In Paris, the McDonald’s had very nice macarons.”

The differences between a McDonald’s in Moscow versus Mattituck were also revealing.

“In Russia, they had a dysfunctional system, ordering at one window, and picking up the order at another window,” she recalled.

Since there is no McDonald’s on Shelter Island, her first taste of the place was accompanying a friend who was running the 10K. That was 10 years ago, and since then she’s been thinking about making a place for herself in this community.

When Christine got the call letting her know that she’d be the next superintendent of the Shelter Island School, she was over the moon.

Christine was born and raised on Long Island. Her dad worked for Grumman, and she went to high school in Islip, college at C.W. Post and has a D.Ed. from St. John’s University. Her sister is an auditor for Stony Brook University. Her brother and her parents now live out of state, but her family is close and supportive.

Christine started college thinking she’d be an English major, but a summer job at a nursery school changed her life. “I fell into teaching. It was very happy accident,” she said. “I just loved that you could do something and the kids would respond, especially when they were so little, so happy to see you, and
so joyful.”

After changing her major to elementary education, Christine graduated and began to teach first grade in Brentwood at a school with huge classes, no teaching aides and plenty of obstacles for students to overcome. Many of her students had parents who worked long hours and had no time to read to them; some of her students didn’t speak English at home.

“You want to change the world?” she said. “Well, I was doing something that had a significant impact.”

She spent 10 years teaching 1st and 4th grades. “I taught a lot of kids how to read,” she said, “and I was really proud of that.”

Christine’s experience in the classroom convinced her that great teachers are not always born knowing how to be effective. Experience showed her how to help other teachers improve. “I don’t think I was a natural, but I became very good at it. I was fortunate, the women I worked with showed me the tricks,” she said. “When I see a teacher struggling, I know it can be fixed, that I can help them.

“Most teachers have a certain outlook on life. The glass isn’t half full, the glass is refillable.”

Christine made the shift from the classroom to administration when the principal of her school encouraged her, saying, “You have that little sparkle.” For the next decade, she worked in the Patchogue-Medford district, starting in low-level positions, then assistant principal and principal, and then three years in the district office. From there, she was tapped by the Herricks School District in New Hyde Park, to become assistant superintendent for curriculum.

When she learned Shelter Island was looking for a superintendent, she told her boss she was going to toss her hat into the ring, one of more than 50 applicants seeking to lead the school. It was a brave move. “I was very comfortable in Herricks,” Christine said. “Here I’m in charge, but with a lot of people supporting. My old boss used to say, ‘It’s not the superintendent, it’s the superintendency. It’s everybody who sits at the table with you.’”

Christine was married, but divorced by the time her son and daughter were three and 18 months old. “I raised them on my own, but not really,” she said. “I had a lot of help from my family and his family.”

Christine’s children, Thomas, 27, and Colleen, 25 will be moving with her and their three-month old chocolate Lab, Phoebe Fiona to a dog-friendly development near Wading River in a couple of weeks. “She’s my daughter’s dog but she loves my son best,” Christine said.

She couldn’t help but gush a little about her kids, “Thomas is on the autism spectrum, and he’s very self-sufficient,” she said. “He drives, he works, he likes connecting with people. I’m very proud of him. My daughter Colleen is an old soul — bright, beautiful.”
Colleen is attending Suffolk County Community College.

Christine’s boyfriend, who she met via Match.com, is a writer and lives in Massachusetts.

An avowed night owl, Christine confesses that she has sent the occasional late-night email. “Don’t panic because I emailed you at two in the morning,” she’ll say. “It’s just because I had an epiphany.”

She mentally organizes her working life in decades. Her first 10 years as a teacher, her second 10 years as a middle-level administrator, ending her career with 10 years as a superintendent for Shelter Island.

“I don’t see this job as practice. This is the place I want to be, and I hope the teachers all feel that way, too,” Christine said. “There are many wonderful things we have here, and I’ll learn about more. I’ll have an opinion, and I’ll share it, and I won’t do it all by myself.”

Annette Hinkle, telling the stories that matter

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Annette Hinkle outside the Reporter’s office last week.

In the Shelter Island Reporter, you won’t often find stories about the staff, even though they are some of the most interesting people you’ll ever meet.

But Community News Editor Annette Hinkle’s story is too good not to be told.

Annette’s life was interesting before she came to the Reporter in 2016 after 20 years at the Sag Harbor Express, and it’s only gotten better. Just six months after a December fire destroyed the Sag Harbor Cinema, Annette has written a history of the beloved theater — “Sag Harbor: 100 Years of Film in the Village,” a 128-page book full of historical photographs, theater history and memories, with an introduction by Jay McInerney. And she did it in six weeks.

“I used to take improv classes at Second City,” Annette said. “It helped me think on my feet.”
Annette had a rough upbringing in the Rust Belt city of Dayton, Ohio, the last of five children, and so much younger than her siblings that by the time she was 11, they had all moved out of the house. “I went from being in a big family to an only child,” she said.

Her father sold restaurant equipment. Annette remembers going with him to call on customers, in commercial kitchens permeated with the mingled smells of bleach and grease, a sensory assault that haunted her later when as a teenager, she worked at a Wendy’s.

“The worst job I ever had,” Annette recalls. “I didn’t have much in the way of confidence, and there’s something about fast food — people think they can be evil.”

The polyester uniform and striped apron didn’t help her confidence either.

In high school in a Dayton suburb, she felt alienated from classmates she considered small-minded and ignorant. “My older sister had moved to New York and married a man who was African-American. Meanwhile, kids were coming to my school dressed as K.K.K. members. I knew I would leave there as soon as I could.”

Her father’s chronic health problems, including mental breakdowns, made it hard for him to make a living. While hospitalized with heart problems, he died on the last day of Annette’s senior year of high school.

When Annette graduated from high school, no one in her family had gone to college. But two weeks before he died, her father told her he wanted her to get a college degree. “It was out of the blue,” Annette said.

With her father’s dying wish in mind, and the Social Security benefit he left her in hand, she enrolled at Ohio University. In the early 1980s, the university had a strong presence of international students, and Annette made friends with people from Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates and Germany. “It was a real eye-opener,” she said.

She decided to study audio engineering and landed an internship with the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour in the fall of 1984. For three months, she lived in Manhattan in the apartment of a friend of a friend, working in a small, exciting newsroom in the middle of a fascinating election year that resulted in a second term for Ronald Reagan. She got to escort Henry Kissinger to the green room.

After graduation, she moved to Chicago where her typing skills got her a job typing commercial scripts at the Leo Burnett ad agency. After two years she transferred to Leo Burnett’s New York office and moved to Hoboken — close to Manhattan, which was her goal.

In New York, she worked in client-sponsored programming and commercial production for Leo Burnett, and soon met a graduate  of New York University’s film school named Adam Flax, who provided equipment for film shoots. They bought an apartment in Hoboken, then moved to the East End in 1995, when Annette began working at the Sag Harbor Express. In 1997, they bought a house in East Hampton and got married. Their daughter Sophie was born in 2001.

When Annette came to the Shelter Island Reporter last year, she said it reminded her of the Sag Harbor of 20 years ago, with a small-town vibe that has disappeared elsewhere.

The conflagration that consumed the Sag Harbor Cinema was the kind of shock that forces people to examine their values, and very quickly Sag Harbor’s arts community formed in solidarity, determined to bring the theater back in a way that made sense for the future.

The Sag Harbor Partnership had the idea to rebuild it as a nonprofit cinema arts center, with classrooms, café and cinema, and they’ve set about to raise the $13 million needed to achieve that vision.

It was in the context of that effort that publisher Pauline Neuwirth approached Annette to write a book about the Cinema for her firm, East End Press. “I was the ideal person to do this because I’d been at the Express so long I was able to tap into some of the historical details,” Annette said. “It takes time to foster contacts especially if you’re talking about a local story going back.”

After some research, she started writing the first week in April and by early May was done. The book grew beyond the story of a single theater, into a history of film in Sag Harbor, told through the handful of cinemas that operated there. The first copies of the coffee-table book came off the press in late June, in time for the July 16 benefit that will raise the money needed to purchase the theater.

“An insanely fast project,” said the exhausted, but happy author.

This won’t be Annette’s last book. She is already planning a history of Sag Harbor’s venerable American Hotel and is almost finished writing a book of Sag Harbor’s “true ghost stories.”
And someday she plans to collaborate with her husband, Adam, a dedicated fisherman, to write a book about fishing and small-town America, which sounds a little like Shelter Island.

Lightning Round

Favorite place on Shelter Island?  Sylvester Manor, it feels like I’m reincarnated there.

Favorite place not on Shelter Island?  Maui. You’ve got to love a place where you see rainbows every day.

Last time you were elated?  Pauline sent me pictures of the book on press and I felt like I was giving birth again.

What exasperates you?  People who put on their left turn signal and then turn right.

Favorite movie or book?  Brazil

Favorite food?  Lebanese stuffed grape leaves with lamb.

Favorite person, living or dead, who is not a member of the family?  Spalding Gray. He always had his eyes open. He was inspirational in my wanting to tell stories.

Most respected elected official?   Elizabeth Warren.