I was in New York City recently, looking for a few things for breakfast. The scone was an unusual shape - round, looking delectable, with small raisins in it. It had the roughened surface common to baked goods that contain an excessive amount of cream, a kind of velvet-like resistance here and there where your finger is making its way across the surface.
I imagined the passage of the melting butter I would put on the scones in the morning - the yellow pat metamorphosing into gold dripping into and through the small caves and declivities of soft bread, scone-bread with jam or honey, preserves or mulched fruit or, perhaps, just more butter.
"I'll take three," I said to the woman behind the counter.
"You want 'em in a bag?" she said with a Bronx accent and the New York sensibility that my ordering of three scones was maybe an insult.
"Yeah," I grumbled.
She smiled. "So what else do you want?"
I looked around. "Well, I'd like some jam."
"We only got one kind. If you go down there to the end of the counter, you'll find it."
"What kind is it?" I asked.
"It's jam!" she said.
"Yeah, but I mean, what flavor?"
"Flavor!" she grumbled, although there was still a smile on her lips. "Raspberry!"
I walked to the end of the counter and found it. A sixteen-ounce jar of raspberry jam with a label on it that read "Made especially for us by Anne Marie and Rene Darbelin, Les confitures de la creation, Passy, SAVOIE," At the bottom right of the label was a round stamp-like logo that identified the importer: Eli Zabar, New York City.
I have been a fan of the Zabar family dynasty since the very day I moved to New York from San Francisco in 1999. I'd never heard of them before that, and had just moved into my apartment on 57th Street, near the corner with 8th Avenue, in a building called The Sheffield.
Getting to the Zabar's Market on Broadway near 80th had been a bit of a march, even though I was just out wandering and exploring the neighborhood. It was worth it because of the very colorful transit up Broadway and because Zabar's — into which I had wandered by chance — was such an immediate astonishment.
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