Saltie Memories
I moved to New York City a year after my college friends did: the last to find gainful employment, just as I was the last to lose my virginity. I was the first to snort cocaine, though. I blame Saltie: A Cookbook.
I purchased it alongside my lunch order the very first time I stepped into Caroline Fidanza’s era-defining sandwich shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Saltie closed in 2017, spurring dozens of odes to its spry focaccia sandwiches—a rarity back then, though they are everywhere now. Saltie had a nautical theme that was so random it could have only come from the heart and the nerve to sell a lettuce sandwich for $12. (The Romaine Dinghy, worth every penny.) I wish more sandwiches would opt for this level of minimalism, but that’s unlikely in the age of TikTok.
Saltie was special. Special enough to make me my first New York friend, an Australian girl who worked at Aesop. We met at a cool literary party, the first of not that many. I’d felt extremely out of place until her Saltie tote bag led us into a conversation about a shared love of those sandwiches. She gave me a sweet discount on Resurrection hand soap and an even sweeter discount on cocaine (free). The drug did nothing for me, but the thrill of being asked buttressed my confidence, which had taken a real hit in the previous year, most of which I’d spent commuting to unsuccessful job interviews and perusing photos of my college friends having a blast in “the city.”
I only ever made two things from the Saltie cookbook: homemade yogurt (a dud) and soft-scrambled eggs, more of a technique than a recipe. It instructs you to crack eggs into a buttered pan. Just as they veer into sunny side-up territory, you have to take the pan off heat and agitate the yolks until they look like scrambled eggs. Add sea salt, and that’s it. This is still how I cook eggs, with the addition of black pepper (in the widest grinder setting).
I once quintupled this recipe to make for a friend’s family as a thank-you for inviting me to spend a week with them in France. I made the eggs in my friend’s mom’s pitch-black carbon steel pan, rendered nonstick after decades of use. They loved it, and I scribbled down the recipe in a notepad as requested. I also made these eggs at an AirBnB for my first boyfriend during a staycation, a concept he thought was stupid, but I’d bullied him into it because it was my birthday.
I put the eggs in focaccia from a fancy bakery, on clouds of ricotta, just like the iconic Ship’s Biscuit sandwich. He complained that the eggs were too runny, and we broke up not long after.
Saltie: A Cookbook has a way of making any recipe in its pages seem as la-di-da simple as those soft-scambled eggs, even when it involves fermentation or removing pin bones from fish. They are the kind of recipes you’d make while whistling, if you can whistle. The cookbook is very white. It says things like “served to HRH the Queen on her Coronation day” like it’s cool that the monarchy still exists. It has a recipe for squash lassi that would enrage my ancestors. All this, plus the fact I barely ever cooked from it, is what led me to shed the cookbook at some point over the course of several house moves.
Last week, I managed to get my hands on a copy—no easy feat, since the book is out of print and I no longer live in the USA. It was like being reunited with an old friend, all gripes forgotten. The cookbook is a portal to 2013 Brooklyn, when I was younger and stupider and full of illusions I knew would eventually get crushed (maybe not that hard, though). Before I put collagen powder in my coffee, before #MeToo, before Momofuku splintered into countless Milk Bars, one of which sits next door to what used to be Saltie. When I crack open the cookbook and see the “Scuttlebut” or “Chocolate Nudge Cookies,” I am taken straight back to that sun-lit counter, where I’d gaze out the window in one of two modes: pleased, or irritated at myself for not being happy enough with what I had.
Nowadays, this cookbook is more than enough. It’s not nostalgia I feel, but gratitude. That I got to experience such a singular place in its heyday, and that I get to do it again now.
Nikkitha Bakshani is an Indian-American writer based in London. She is the author of the dark comic novel Ghost Chilli, as well as an astrologer and tarot reader. Her work has appeared in various publications in and out of food media. She writes a newsletter about culture, food, and spirituality called The Fool Story.
