Issue Date: March 23, 2003

Delicious memories

Family stories are one New York restaurateur's favorite ingredient.

by Michele Hatty

Chef and cookbook author Rebecca Charles says preserving family recipes is important because "it's so rare you find something that's still the same as when you were a kid"

When Rebecca Charles was growing up, her one respite from the hot New York summers was her family's annual trip north to Kennebunkport, Maine. Although Jewish, they weren't intimidated by vacationing in a place so WASP-y that, for many years, only one hotel would take Jewish guests. They made the tony town their own and have spent more than 70 years summering there -- and cooking up a storm. It's that sort of chutzpah that drove Charles, 49, to become chef-owner of the Pearl Oyster Bar, a 25-seat Manhattan restaurant where people stand in hour-long lines for a taste of her signature lobster roll. Intrigued by her past -- especially her suffragette-turned-opera singer grandmother Pearle -- Charles delved into her family history. The result is the deliciously entertaining "Lobster Rolls & Blueberry Pie" (ReganBooks, $26.95), a cookbook-memoir co-written with Deborah DiClementi. Charles spoke with us between the lunch and dinner rushes:

Your book reads like a novel with recipes.
We'd been talking about writing a restaurant cookbook. I didn't buy [cookbooks] anymore. They were boring -- just recipes and pictures, and that was it.

Then you opened a trunk from your grandmother's attic and found a wealth of correspondence about your family's visits to Maine.
We found hundreds of letters. [What I learned from the contents] was a surprise -- it was all new to me.

Surely you'd heard stories as a kid ...
I was a teenager when my mom first told me Jews weren't permitted to stay in most hotels up there. I remember thinking, "Wow." When she told me that, it was the late '60s, and it was a little foreign to me that [we] wouldn't be permitted to stay certain places.

You also found out lobster wasn't always considered a luxury food.
[In the early 1800s], it was in the servants' contracts that they not be served lobster more than a few times a week. Can you imagine? [New Englanders] just used it as bait!

Tell us an easy, cheap seafood dish.
Seafood is really hard to make cheap. Mussels would be the cheapest and easiest. You could feed four people a huge bowl of mussels for under $10.

How does your heritage make its way into your kitchen?
Every time I roast a chicken, I think about my grandmother. I think of her when I roast goose. I think about the way my grandmother cooked: She passed this all down to my mother, and I watched them cook a lot of the same things for years. Whenever I make those things, I think about them.

Why are family recipes so important?
It's so rare you find something that's still the same as when you were a kid. Every once in a while I have a craving for a candy bar, so I buy one that was a favorite when I was child. And I'll notice it tastes completely different, or it's smaller, or both. It's just not the same product anymore. When I discover something that's the same, it's a time to rejoice!