How to Survive Midsummer in New York
Tuesday, the greatest city in the world experienced one of its hottest days, and one of its coolest nights. By midday, temperatures in New York topped 100 degrees, the highest recorded in over a decade; by 11 PM, 33-year-old Zohran Mamdani was delivering his victory speech, having toppled Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic mayoral primary.
There were two very different modes of delirium coursing through the New York, reminiscent of the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City”:
Hot town, summer in the city
Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty
Been down, isn't it a pity
Doesn't seem to be a shadow in the city
All around, people looking half-dead,
Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match headBut at night it's a different world
It sure is. On Monday, Mamdani had braved similarly brutal temperatures to walk the length of Manhattan, galvanizing New Yorkers along the way. It was rolling block party, and one of the most inspiring moments in a campaign full of them—only topped by fellow candidate Brad Lander’s arrest by ICE thugs for courageously defending migrants. The bond that Mamdani and Lander formed over the course of the primary was truly heartening, and the response, especially from young voters, offers lessons for the Democratic Party moving forward.
Today, the heat wave continues, both in New York and around the country. And with no prospect of a paradigm-shifting political development on today’s schedule, we may need to turn to other, simpler solutions to survive. Like, cold soup.
Readers of this newsletter will know that, in addition to her authority regarding all things sandwich-related, Talia is a cold soup aficionado. A fanatic, even. So today we’re republishing a piece on cold soup and summer in the city from August, 2018, when Talia was writing for me at the Village Voice. Incidentally, her next column that month was on a newly-nominated Democratic congressional candidate and the radical women of New York politics: “It has been six weeks since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated Joe Crowley in the Democratic Primary for New York’s 14th Congressional District. Ever since, the nation’s thinkpiece writers have been working overtime, spilling untold barrels of ink in the pursuit of explicating, denigrating, or emblematizing her.” Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
Politicians like AOC, Mamdani, and Lander scare the hell out of the powers-that-be, but they offer the rest of us hope in an otherwise bleak midsummer. Cold soup offers humbler comforts, but on a day like today, it may be just what you need.
Stay cool, New York.
— David Swanson
How to Survive Midsummer in New York
In the summer in New York, everything is covered in airborne grit; it’s not anything so clean and fine as dust, and not quite ash, just ambient black specks pirouetting through the air in a kind of Brownian motion toward any uncovered surface. Every arm and thigh in the city is slick with sweat: When the air isn’t still and glassed-in like a hot bell jar, it’s buffeted by moist, swollen zephyrs. It takes a thunderstorm to wring all that humidity out of the air, let the crust of grime wash from buildings down to the street, where by noon it will dry out enough to flake to bits, and be cast forth on the wet hot wind.
Everyone with enough money deserts the city for weeks at a time. Select portions of Upper Manhattan look not dissimilar to an evangelical church after the Rapture: Behind the high windows is an enormous absence. Those left behind are free to envision orthodontically perfect grins and bronzed limbs sprawled out by the sea, while we gasp for air.
By August, it’s the proles and tourists that control the sidewalks. The entire psychiatric profession hits pause. The air gets thick as caramel; the sun a disc of violent light; the thunder starts long before the rain arrives, if it ever does. The bodega line grows to conga length, and everybody’s buying ice. It gets hard to eat.
There are days when it’s so hot outside—or the A/C is on the fritz or just dripping feebly—that the whole damp fabric of the heat hovers like a chloroformed rag around my face. On days like this, my throat feels pinched and arid. It begrudgingly accepts cold water and cold coffee and little else.
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Running on cigarettes and stimulants, I get shaky. My brain feeds on itself and excretes neuroses. Bad memories waft up in brackish gusts—loves lost and friendships ended, searing fumes of shame and regret. It’s too hot to become a madwoman in an attic—heat rises—but it’s also too hot to control my nerves and my anger, my fear of the future and rumination on the past.
All this is my betrayal of an essentially American doctrine of resilience. In this country, we are supposed to turn suffering into motivation; the will to work ought to stay intact no matter the time of year. The flow of capital never ceases, and neither should you. In New York, city of wealth and capitol of capital, the doctrine of work reigns in the congested streets from the north Bronx down to Brooklyn, condenses in the air and runs down our clenched jaws in salty drops. The pursuit of success—in work, in love, in investments—should never stop or sleep; neither should you, even if, in the heat, all you want to do is halt your bloom.
On days like this, I have precisely one solution to get out of this crucible of inner bile. It’s not medicine or moderate exercise or even HVAC repair. It’s not Superman’s icy Fortress of Solitude, or a ticket to the tropics. In fact it will cost less than ten dollars and only a few blocks’ worth of fortitude. It will require a blender, a few tomatoes, a piece of old bread, a little oil and vinegar and salt. It will require someone to feed, even if that someone is only hungry, baking, trembling little you.
There’s a quiet alchemy to cooking—a stillness of the mind brought on by rhythmic actions of the hands. There’s a congruity of mental and physical effort that’s rare in my life, so driven by a restless and self-cannibalizing mind, that I come to crave it. I enjoy cooking more than I enjoy eating; when drunk or anxious or sad, I cook too much, more than I can eat, and scramble to find hungry friends. Peeling garlic—slipping the pale cloves out one by one, prying the skins loose with my thumbnail—is a small act; peeling a head of garlic, mincing it, letting it foam aromatically in sizzling butter, is a little reclamation.
In the full and ghastly heat of summer, or in the grip of powerful emotion, it can be too much to ask of yourself to stand in front of a stove. Enter the cold soup—friend of the weary and the scorched. I have built a repertoire over the years—gazpacho foremost, but also other exemplars of the genre: Russian yogurt-and-radish soup, Hungarian sour-cherry soup, French vichyssoise topped with a fan of chives. Each asks so little of you and gives so much. There are few things on this Earth that can quench your thirst and fill your belly and soothe your restless heart at once.
In each crisis of mine in recent years, there was one friend who distinguished herself—who visited me in my mouse-infested first post-divorce apartment; who gathered my things and helped me move away from it; who slept in my bed when I couldn’t stop shaking, and watched marathons of sleazy true-crime shows with me. In Russian, one term for a perennial companion is a sobutilnik—“a friend who will share a bottle with you.” My own spin on this excellent word would be someone willing to make soup with you; to chop and blend and pour into the bowl. My best friend’s avid delight at the punch of garlic in the mix is better than rubies. There is little better than someone who understands that what you offer, when you offer a perfect soup, is all your love.
I first tasted salmorejo, a kind of Andalusian gazpacho, in Spain with my mother; I made it for the first time with the man who would become my husband. It differs from most gazpachos I have encountered in America in that it is thick and smooth, a soup, not a salsa in a glass. The key is a heel of stale bread, which, when combined with olive oil, binds the broth, thick and cool and pale. When my husband left me I waited a year and made it again. Now I have made it for my mother, for friends, and even for myself, the first to receive my ire, the last to receive my gifts.
In the dog days of summer, when the grass dries pasta-pale, wildfires fill the news, and the skies portend collapse, find yourself a soup companion, and make gazpacho. Make too much—ideally, enough to fill the biggest container you have. Like resilience, you have to make it yourself; like healing, it will look a little different each time. Like forgiving yourself, it will brace you, make you stand upright again, cease the tremor in your hands. With each cold sour spoonful I restore myself, dilute the bile in my mind and my heart, return. Vinegar and oil and bread, bell pepper, cucumber, tomato, whirred and poured into a jar and sealed for tomorrow, and eaten at midnight anyway. One trip to the grocery store is all it takes me to remember that—even wending my way circuitously in a world of straight lines—I am moving forward, that there is cool and comfort to be had in this ashen city I love.
Salmorejo
Serves 2 to 4
1 pound vine tomatoes (don’t use beefsteak tomatoes, please)
2 medium-size cucumbers
1 fresh green bell pepper
1 small red onion
2 cloves fresh garlic
1 chunk stale bread, ideally French or Italian
A few generous glugs of olive oil (about a cup)
Two generous pours (about 2 tablespoons) of red wine or sherry vinegar
Salt and pepper to taste
Soak the bread in water for five or ten minutes, then squeeze it out with your fist till it’s a soggy solid.
Chop up all the vegetables and the garlic. De-seed the cucumbers and tomatoes unless you like tomato seeds getting stuck in your teeth.
Put all of the above in your blender or food processor.
Add the liquid ingredients and spices.
Pulse until it turns a pale red, reminiscent of vodka sauce.
Chill till it feels cold to your finger.
Eat when it’s too hot to eat anything else.
