Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll find out about a dinner with an updated menu from the last meal on the Titanic. We’ll also find out about a member of the Central Park Five who is running for the City Council.
After the Titanic hit an iceberg, the hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee” was played.
Tonight, an invitation-only crowd will be served a cocktail by that name.
The crowd will dine on an updated version of the first-class passengers’ last meal, an extravagant dinner that began with soup — consommé and cream of barley — and ended with peaches in chartreuse jelly, éclairs and French ice cream. In between, waiters brought out dishes including salmon, duckling and squab.
“We made the portions smaller,” said the cookbook author and food-television personality Gail Simmons, who modernized the menu that will be served tonight at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, N.J. Simmons also trimmed the menu to seven courses, from the 10 that were served on the ship that night in April 1912.
Her changes made sense to Paul Hoffman, the director of the center. “Those were not light courses,” he said. “Very buttery, very creamy.” He said that Simmons’s reinterpretation would include healthier ingredients — more vegetables and vegetable purées — “so we’re not rushing you to the cardiologist right after the meal.”
And with the shorter menu, the dinner won’t go on as long. “God knows how long that meal lasted, probably four or five hours,” Hoffman said. “I think they retired just shortly before they hit the iceberg.”
Hoffman scheduled the dinner to celebrate “Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition,” which opened 10 days ago with more than 100 of the 5,500 artifacts brought to the surface by RMS Titanic Inc., the company that has the salvage rights to the sunken ship. On display are Champagne bottles, chandeliers and the Titanic’s logometer, which tracked the distance traveled each day. It still shows the reading from the night the supposedly unsinkable ship went down.
“I think a lot of us are romantically invested in the Titanic as the greatest legend of the sea,” said Simmons, who is collaborating with Aramark Sports & Entertainment, which has the food concession at the science center. “The Titanic was a great feat of engineering and imagination, and they were celebrating their wealth and class.”
So the original menu “tells us about who they were and the idea of luxury” in 1912, she said.
The waiters served passengers from silver platters. By some accounts, the main galley, which prepared the meals for first- and second-class passengers, had a bakery, a butcher shop and storage space for wine, beer and oysters. There were also storage bins for coal to heat the ovens. And the staff, like so much else about the Titanic, was epic. More than 100 cooks worked in the galleys, along with a dozen pastry chefs and five butchers.
For many passengers, dining was about fashion as much as about food. “Jewels flashed from the gowns of the women,” one survivor, May Futrelle, recalled. “How fondly they wore their latest Parisian gowns.” The evening “was the first time that most of them had the opportunity to display their newly acquired finery,” she told a newspaper two weeks after the disaster.
Hoffman said that it was up to Simmons to work out the ingredients for tonight’s meal. “We had heard somewhere that the menu existed because it was in the pockets of a few of the survivors — they took the menus with them” when they left the dining room, he said. “But the recipes didn’t exist. Historians have not been able to find them.”
Simmons said she wanted to appeal to 21st-century palates. “They don’t need to hire me if they want to recreate it exactly as if was, and do we all want to eat it exactly as it was?” she said. “Tastes change, evolve, and things are served a certain way at a certain time because that was the style of cooking.”
And the “Nearer, My God, to Thee” drink? It is a modern take on the peaches in chartreuse jelly from 1912. Marisa Capasso, Aramark’s general manager at the science center, who devised it, described it as a sweet concoction with green chartreuse, peach schnapps, maraschino liqueur and fresh lime juice.
Weather
Today, expect a sunny sky and a high near 53. In the evening, there will be a chance of rain, and the low will be near 42.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Friday (Losar).
The latest Metro news
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A state budget in the Trump era: Gov. Philip Murphy of New Jersey proposed a $58 billion budget that would leave spending roughly flat as the state braces for potential reductions in federal funding, including for Medicaid. Murphy wants to set aside $1 million to pay as many as 10 additional lawyers who will focus on challenging Trump administration policies.
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Cuomo lays the groundwork for a mayoral run: Three years after resigning as governor amid a sexual harassment scandal, Andrew Cuomo is making final preparations to run for mayor of New York City.
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Trying to persuade Trump privately: Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York met with President Trump at the White House last week and made her case for congestion pricing, which the president wants to kill.
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Winning the housing lottery: When Miguelina Minier heard that 49 units of affordable housing were being built above her local library, she applied. She was selected out of 60,000 applicants.
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Remembering Al Trautwig: A familiar face on New York Rangers and Knicks broadcasts on MSG Networks and at 16 Olympics, most recently on NBC, Al Trautwig died at 68.
A second Central Park Five member is running for City Council
Raymond Santana was one of the Central Park Five, the Black and Latino teenagers who were wrongly blamed for the rape of a white female jogger in Central Park in 1989.
Now he wants to replicate the success of Yusef Salaam, another member of the group, who won a seat on the City Council two years ago. Santana, 50, announced his candidacy in a City Council district that covers East Harlem and the Bronx.
Santana’s platform is built on his story and what he called the “deterioration” of neighborhoods like his. He said they have been ravaged by rats, drugs and skyrocketing rents.
“You look around and see the normal stuff isn’t working,” Santana, a motivational speaker and activist, told my colleague Nicholas Fandos. “That’s why we need someone who’s outside the system, who can come with a different lens.”
Santana is likely to face a difficult race. A handful of other Democrats have already filed paperwork to run in the June primary, which will almost certainly determine who fills the open seat. Among them are Elsie Encarnacion, the chief of staff for the district’s outgoing council member, Diana Ayala. Encarnacion has already amassed roughly $160,000 in campaign funds and has the full support of Ayala. Another candidate, Wilfredo López, a nonprofit lawyer with ties to the City Council, is expected to have the backing of a well-funded super PAC.
METROPOLITAN diary
Fare Competition
Dear Diary:
In 1979, my girlfriend at the time (now my wife of 40 years) moved to New York City to pursue her goal of becoming an actress. She enrolled at HB Studio, and I drove a yellow taxi overnight.
In the wee hours of one Sunday night, I was driving back into Manhattan from Kennedy Airport on a mostly deserted Queens Boulevard when I spotted a fare far down the street holding up her arm.
In my rearview mirror, I noticed another yellow taxi accelerating behind me. Clearly, the driver wanted the fare, too.
I sped up, and the other cab did, too. We raced toward the fare side by side, with my taxi in the right lane. The other cab couldn’t pass, and I soon pulled over triumphantly.
The fare turned out to be a friendly woman.
“You would think I was going to Ithaca,” she said as she got in.
— Billy McLean
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Our story on Monday about The Amsterdam News misstated the ownership of the newspaper’s building. The ownership is being transferred to the nonprofit Amsterdam News Educational Foundation, but it is the newspaper, not the foundation, that currently owns the building.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Hannah Fidelman and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post They’ll Dine Like the Passengers on the Titanic appeared first on New York Times.
