Editor’s note: Northampton resident Robin Goldstein, a travel and food writer, launches his bimonthly column that will highlight popular restaurant dishes, chefs, and movers and shakers in the industry throughout the area.
Day starts with morning. Life starts with childhood. So my first-ever food column for the Gazette, after 27 years of writing about food for other publications, begins with the morning meal of breakfast and the most deliciously nostalgic breakfasts of my childhood growing up in Northampton. Here goes.
There aren’t many places left in America like the Bluebonnet. Even as Northampton’s King Street turned into an extended strip mall of retail banks and car dealerships, the Bluebonnet Diner dug in its heels and endured as a priceless relic of another age in America.
Another priceless American relic is eggs Benedict, which is becoming hard to find in its traditional form. Many of today’s pretentious nouvelle chefs will desecrate eggs Benedict with smoked salmon, pork belly, or slices of sourdough. The Bluebonnet’s kitchen, instead, shows deep respect for the original recipe with an old-fashioned English muffin, Canadian bacon, correctly poached eggs (neither runny nor mealy), and hollandaise sauce that’s got the ideal balance of richness, subtle acid from lemon, and a hint of pepper.
In great cooking, the individual ingredients lose their individuality and unify into something greater. These are the timeless eggs Benedict of your dreams.
Probably the most underappreciated feature of the Bluebonnet Diner is the semi-secret cocktail bar in the back-room banquet hall that quietly turns out the best bloody marys in western Massachusetts — just spicy enough, with plenty of vodka kick to give that wonderful tingle down your spine as you swallow.
And above it all, a toy train that runs along tracks just below the ceiling of the main dining room, complete with a whistle that kids (especially my 7-year-old nephew Azai) love to toot as they exit the vestibule to the outside world, sadly signaling their departure from this sensuous slice of Americana.
If influence is measured in impact on our everyday lives, then the most influential Northamptonite in history — edging out some stiff competition in the Rev. Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) and President Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) — was probably the Rev. Sylvester Graham (1794–1851), who rests in peace beneath a gaudy obelisk in Bridge Street Cemetery. Sylvester Graham was America’s first health-food guru and inventor of packaged whole-wheat bread.
Today, Rev. Graham is best remembered for Graham Crackers, whose original version bore little resemblance to today’s Nabisco treats that are the backbone of s’mores. According to the Rev. Graham’s wacky theory of human nutrition, delicious and flavorful foods were the root cause of all sinful lust. So the original Graham Crackers were a medical remedy, precisely engineered to be so bland that they could even quench the fiery loins of sinners all over New England.
Rev. Graham’s stately old red-brick home still stands on Pleasant Street, where it houses the bright, airy dining room and adjacent café of Northampton’s iconic Sylvester’s Restaurant. But if the reverend were to rise from the dead and taste the food that’s now being prepared in his name, he would be appalled by its sinful deliciousness.
Especially lusty are the blueberry pancakes, which are made with a yeasty batter that’s rich with Hadley’s Mapleline Farm milk and drowned in sultry local maple syrup from Snowshoe Farm in Worthington. I’ve been devouring these pancakes since my own adolescence, when they would routinely prove Rev. Graham’s theories of sin to be completely correct.
My father introduced me to corned beef hash — and to the legendary Miss Florence Diner, an old yellow train-car gem whose iconic 1950s sign defines the landscape of downtown Florence. Take your visiting out-of-towners here, and they’ll generally fall in love at first sight — not just with the outside but the inside too, with its gleaming Formica tables with individual mini jukeboxes where my teeny-bopper babysitters in the early ’80s would let me flip through the cards and play Lionel Richie songs.
When you’re a kid growing up, you tend to think the food you eat is what people eat everywhere else too. Then you grow up, move around the world, and realize that most people in the world have never met the pleasures of some of your favorite foods. You realize that you’re from somewhere.
Massachusetts, with our Irish heritage, is corned beef heaven. Sept. 27 is National Corned Beef Hash Day. Corned beef is the best kind of peasant food — salty, satisfying and cheap — and hash, where the corned beef is chopped and sautéed with itty-bitty home-fry pieces and moistened with slightly runny egg yolk on top, is the finest realization of this humble deli meat’s potential.
Luckily, there’s still good corned-beef hash all over the Pioneer Valley (Bluebonnet and Sylvester’s serve it, too). The dish has proudly avoided extinction and, at least so far, avoided the sorry fate of liver and onions, the Eastern omelette, or Salisbury steak.
The Miss Florence Diner always makes its hash from scratch and serves the dish as it should be, with poached eggs and generously buttered white toast. Here America’s noble train-car-diner tradition still lives in the flesh, with cream pies in a glass case and a brusque “what’ll it be, hon?” from your server, and the menu of daily specials in white plastic letters on black magnets, high above the counter. It is a temple to tradition, a place where time stands still and folk food still lives.
Robin Goldstein is the author of “The Menu: Restaurant Guide to Northampton, Amherst, and the Five-College Area.” He serves remotely on the agricultural economics faculty of the University of California, Davis. He can be reached at rgoldstein@ucdavis.edu.