From the Archive: Mel Brooks

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Mel Brooks makes the world laugh. Watch the Producers Blazing saddles Young Frankenstein, Listen to the two thousand year old Man, or read his autobiography All About Me, and you are guaranteed to find yourself laughing out loud until it hurts. But for me, having known Mel for twenty five years, funny is not the first word I would use to describe this amazing man. Hungry, hungry, fiercely proud. Do you think that's your adjective? You get hungry with you. I

Spill it all over the table.

I'm trying to take this seriously today. It is home. We are together, lucky me. We're going to talk about wine and family and friends and be prepared to laugh because mel Brooks is funny. So that was a serious introduction.

I want to tell you what do you want to tell me that before we stopped talking, Before I forget, I would like to do my imitation of a cat, because not a lot of people know that I do it. I make your best cats sound in the world.

Ready, I just want just gonna be I just need one second to really get myself into this.

Okay, here's working the sound of a cat. That is that is a perfect sound. It's hard to do, hard to do. I do it in young Frankenstein. I think it's it's a dart throwing contest and one of the dots hits a cat and you hear you know, did you.

Do the sound? I get there every night? Can you do it again?

Wow?

That's good? So what's a technique?

Technique is to is to squash some air between your cheek and the front of your mouth.

As we're talking about cats and fish, maybe fish, you know cats like to eat fish. We could actually read the recipe.

Oh yeah, my favorite of all the all of all the things in the book. There's a good picture of it too in your cookbook River Cafe, London.

Thirty because that was done for our thirty.

Three threeh thirty years. Wow.

Do you remember you came to the party?

I did. Oh?

You and Richard sat there the whole night in the oh yeah, in the restaurant, and everybody just came to your table. Everyone. Everybody wanted to see.

It wasn't as important as the food on my plate. A lot of food, paid attention to all. He eats, Ali eats are supreme. Let me read the rest of Okay, there dover soul with Marjora. I don't know what marjoram is, but I love it. Okay, whatever it is, whatever it is, one bunch of fresh margarine leaves, one whole dover soul, weighing twelve to fourteen ounces three fifty to four hundred grams, scaled and cleaned. Of course, of course I'm not going to eat it with the scales on, never and with

Okay, well, we get armored lemons from Amalfi, so they're pretty good too.

Okay, here we go. Pre eat the oven to four hundred and fifty degrees fahrenheit. That's pretty hot. That's pretty hard. Brush a large flat baking sheet with extra virgin olive oil. Scatter half the mordrum leaves over the sheet along with some sea salt and black pepper. Place the fish on top, season with sea salt and black pepper. Then scatter the remaining mordorum drizzle drizzle generously with olive oil. Okay, that

Ah.

If cooked, the flesh should come away from the bone. Okay. Squeeze the lemon, either from a malfy or from mel Brooks's lemon tree, over the fish, and serve with any juices from the pans that are left. I like that.

Let's begin at the beginning earliest food memories. What do you remember from you know, your early days. Did your mother cook?

Yeah, my mother, okay, it was It was a standard Williamsburg, Brooklyn Jewish tenement food. So breakfast in the winter was always a hot cereal, cream of wheat or ralston which was the kind of Baridge brown porridge, and then in the summer cornflake strice krispies or wheaties.

What year would that have been? How old would you?

I would that would be thirty five. I'd be around nine. That's when I went my uncle Joe, shortest jew on earth. Short he was about four to four when when a taxi, a big checker taxi cab rolled down the streets of Brooklyn, and there was no driver. That was Joe. There was no driver. It was so short it get just about peer over the you know. Anyway, Joe took me because his friend al was the doorman of the Alvin Theater on fifty second Street, and running at that same theater

No MIC's she was just she was in anything. Anything goes did say the mother, Yeah, yeah, the woman. It's on a ship, isn't it.

And it's on the ship. Very good, yea. And Victim Moore was the gangster, the gang Yeah. Yeah. It was so good. At the end, I nearly clapped my hands over. I just couldn't stop clapping and screaming and shouting. And then I got back an Uncle Joe's camp. I said to him, Uncle John, I'm not going in the garment center. Everybody at three sixty five South third Street, between on Hooper and Use three sixty five South third Street, everybody

To food, what do you take you out to eat? I always went to the theater as a kid, and then there was the meal afterwards, lunch before it was a day out.

We had some favorites that Uncle Joe would take us to, where one was called Gallagher Steakhouse. They had like half a cow in the window. I always had these half cows in the window, you know, the raw meat hanging gallaghers. Yeah, and the and the steak was incredible. And sometimes you go to Jack Dempsey's restaurant.

And what was that?

And that was great, but you know it was it was all meat, it was. There never any fish in a restaurant. Yeah, and I never liked fish. I don't think I ever liked fish until I was seventy or eighty and I went to the.

River Cafe, and so really you never ate fish.

I hardly ever ate fish as But.

It's interesting to me that you you describe a kind of modest home life in terms of food, but you went out to restaurants.

So a lot of Jewish restaurants were called dairy restaurants, and they serve stuff like blinches with sour cream and old dairy. You never mixed meat and dairy with something some religious nonsense.

Did your grandmother cook for you?

My grandmother cook?

What did she cooks? Which grandmother? Your mother's my mother's mother. I never knew my you never knew your father's.

No, No, my father's grandmother. I did know. She did say to her meals best over meals in Bensonhurst where they lived in a big one family hand.

Did they come with their first generation?

I know they were. They were European?

Yeah, and so do you think your grandparents brought their food with them? The food they.

Cooked the same stuff. Mostly it was chicken, chicken and chicken soup.

And uh briscuit.

Yeah, they made brisket. Absolutely, they made brisket and brown potatoes.

Do you know my grandparents came They were They came from Hungary and Russia. And my father remembers my grandmother having in the Lower East Side a carp swimming in the bathtub that they would make a filter fish out of. So do you imagine having they would bring it a live fish.

Live fish?

We would get a live fish.

My brother Bernie and I were usually one week. We loved and we called them arty, and we fed them bread crumbs and we chased them around the bathtub. And then it was unspeakable. I can't even describe it. Irving, my old oldest brothers Irving and Lenny held us back. We were screaming, don't kill him, and my mother would say, we gotta eat, we gotta eat supper, and she she'd kill audience, serve him, it was and we would cry, and but we ate him.

And then would you get another carp and kill that?

We got another car.

It's so interesting that they had live fish swimming in the back in the back, yeah they didn't.

It's amazing that you had to say.

Yeah, my brother Michael, who you know, just wrote, I have found that something my father had written about his memories of food and just living in the Lower east Side. But you weren't in the Lower east Side.

Were the Lower east Side? An extension of the Lower east Side was Williamsburg.

That was probably one step up, was it.

Well, it was one step up if you put it next to a section of Brooklyn called Bronzeville, East New York. And that was really where they had coal stoves. They didn't even have gas. Know, we had electricity and we had guess so we were one step of Browns built equal to the lower east side. And let me tell you that my mother used to make every once in a while on a Sunday night, she would make spaghetti. She would buy a box of Muller's noodles.

They were flat, flat noodles.

And she cooked them until they were dead.

They'd be really soft.

Oh, they were really soft. And then she'd put them in a baking pan and she would empty a bottle of Heinz ketchup over them. This is spaghetti. And then she'd bake it for thirty or forty minutes until the pan was dead, till everything was dead. And then she cut them into squares and served it to us and said spaghetti. And I was from eight years old to about thirteen or fourteen. That was spaghetti and it was okay.

Yeah, it was really okay.

Then I had joined a club called Baltzer Bugs. We made model airplanes. I think we enjoyed smelling the glue. Where do we like backing the planes? But we may so. One of the Baltzer Bugs was Bernie Steinberger, was Flappy Rothman, and there was Tony Galliani Italian an Italian, and Tony said, I'm going home. It was Sunday and I said, He said, I'm going home to have spaghetti. I said, we have spaghetti on Sunday too. He said, well try, you know, come on and have bar spaghetti. So I went home.

Did you cry?

I wept? I wept, and I said, Tony, this is this is spaghetti. This is spaghetti. I was about fourteen, and I just wept and I went When I came home, I said, Mom, you're not making spaghetti. I don't know what tide of stuff is that cardpoint? But it's not spaghetti.

You're starting to tell me about your her mother's food. What was her mother's food when you went to your grandmother's.

Well, we went to the state. It was, I know, they made little dishes before to celebrate the Jews freedom from slavery in Egypt, and had something with apples and stuff that was supposed to mimic the mortar that the Jews carried up to make sure these big stones stayed together. And then some salt for the heart, for the suffering, for the tears, and it was a lot of those little things. And then she served this thing called the filter fish with red horse rice has they called it

So you love food from food?

I tasted food. My mother wasn't making food. She was she was making something at bathroom food.

So do you think your mother was not?

And the first time I had Chinese food? Where was that Inburg? We never went to it. My mother said, we're gonna go to a Chinese restaurant, all right. And each meal, the whole meal menu twenty five cents, and the Chinese restaurant and the Chinese restaurant, and you got you got egg that's right. First. Then you got chowmine, oh, cholmine. And then you got a yellow ball with little pieces of ice in it, round ball that was the ice cream dessert. And and then some portun cookies with with

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One of the most delicious things was very simple. We lived at five five stories up in this tenement and I was I wasn't going to come up. They will get that I was not going to come up for lunch. I was not why because there was five stories and I didn't want to leave the game, right, So we took a break in the game and we all had lunch.

I was going to say five stories up as.

One time I missed it and splat blast, you heard the sound, and the bag was crammed with wet So I very carefully peeled that what used to be the bag away from the sandwich, and I began eating the sandwich, and I once again cried. It was so great. It was the closest thing to pizza.

When did you have your first pizza?

Oh? I had my first pizza when I was I was sixteen or seventeen.

So as a teenager, you lived at home, and then when did you leave you When you left home, did you cook for yourself?

Well? I didn't leave home home, Okay, I was sent to Virginia Military Institute the Army. There's a guy that came to my high school and we were going to graduate. We were seventeen. We're going to be eighteen and graduated from Eastern District High School. Our claim to fame was a red hour back was a great, incredible basketball coach and world famous and he was on the team and

I just couldn't understand.

I couldn't understand later.

It's kind of like plent It's kind of like, you know, what was it like the food in the military. Was that awakening?

Yeah? Can I can be very honest with you and say some words.

That's yeah, this is a podcast. We can do it.

Okay, it's a podcast, we can do it. I remember the only thing the army had a I went into the mess hall at four Dicks, and I was shocked by what I saw on a on a great big griddle, maybe maybe twelve feet by twelve and it was just enormous. I saw a thousand eggs, sunny side up, and you'd pick. You'd say, give me two, give me three, give me four,

We're homesick.

I was homesick.

Could be so homesick? How old were you.

Oh, well I was. I was nearly old enough to be in the regular army, so I was seventeen and eighty. Yeah.

To take you out of Brooklyn, to take you out of your hair, yeah, put you in a place.

It was a strange place. But anyway, we're all together and we we you know, we alearned to each other.

Yeah. Did you take anything away from that experience?

Yeah? I did. They were They were unusually nice to us, these cadets, these Southern cadets they had, and they taught us never to lie. Honor is the best thing. You know.

That stayed with you, and.

Stay that stayed with me. Hardly, I hardly ever lie. Except in show business. You're forced to liar.

Say something, to tell somebody their work is good. To do that good. Always tell something.

You look so great today, you know that.

I said. A friend of mine once interviewed Isaiah Berlin, you know, the philosopher said, he said, when you admire somebody's work, you just say I loved your work. And they said, no, no, no, that's for the work you didn't think so much of. If you really loved their work, you I died, you know, I was on the floor. You know how do you how do you give I love? Your work is for the people whose work you didn't like, you know, that's what you say. That's fine. Yeah, But then what happened after.

The and anyway? I went into the real army and there I saw a thousand eggs sunny side fourth That was Fourth Dicks, New Jersey. What you would have been, I'll tell you exactly. June forty four, I was transferred from v M I to four Dicks. I was in the regular army. And then there was a thing that was on the table. It was a big round bowl with stuff in it, and it was not at the table. It was like where where the cooks were, you know, And they had big spoons and they could slop it.

Know, did they send you abroad? Did you go?

Yeah, eventually, But let me tell you, at breakfast and old meals in the army, there was no short cutting. You You got into a lot of trouble. If someone said passed about or past the jam or past the whatever, you passed it. If you stopped and took some of it and put it on your plate, that was short cutting. And you had to leave the table in the middle of your meal. That said your your.

Throat, So you pass and then you waved.

You passed it and waited, you waited. And then when we were on bivouac. Bivouac means when you're you're on a campsite. You pitched tents and you sleep on the ground, and then you go through a mess line with this stuff to eat with. It's all aluminum. And then there were indentations for food in it. Yeah, and then they always did the same thing. It was beef stew. They put the beef stew in the deepest dish, in the dray. Then yes, for the let's say the mashed potatoes. You figured, well,

On the meat, and then mashed potatoes on the.

Meat on the meat, and the at the top it off, or slice beaches on top of the mashed potato. And there were places in each plate for sections where everybody you can eat like a person. But they invariably put beef stew, then meshed potatoes and then and I don't know, so.

You always cared about how food tasted.

Yeah, And there was one big another, very big revelation about food. Jeane Wilder, I could cry. Take him, He's so sweet, sweetest invited Anne and I to dinner at his house and in the village, at his house apartment in the village. I forgot what we ate, but he served wine. Up until then the only wine I had ever really never cared for wine. I don't say it tastes a little sour. Oh, up until then, mana Chevitzai carmel is a sweet Jewish wine. And I tasted this wine.

Was it a French wine?

It was a French wine, Santa's steph, you know, And I said, what is this? He said, it's wine. I said, so this is wine? And he got me hooked. And from that day I think I was twenty something whatever for twenty six I don't know to that day to this. If I have wine, it's always a good wine. It's either a good Italian wine or a good French one, or a good and a half of Valley wine. But he taught me that wine wine could actually taste, really taste good, you know.

And so how did you make the kind of voyage from tasting wine to having one of the great sellers. And well, up.

Until Blazing Saddles, I was hanging on the show business with the skin of my teeth, not making any money. The first movie I made was The Producers, good movie. I won the Academy Award for the screenplay, but just about broke even. And then the next one was The Twelve Chairs, which was a foreign movie kind of you know, maybe it was a good, very one of my best movies, but alas, it didn't make a penny. So I was thinking of going back to television, where I was doing

And.

I was okay, blazing saddles did it? And that?

How did you educate yourself in wine? Did somebody help you or did you?

Well? Once once I tasted those wines and I looked, I looked up. You know, I got a book. I got a few books. Can you find a book? Take a look, look up on the on the shelf there, look up on the shelf. See if you find a wine book. Yeah. So I've always got books find finding out well.

You know, if somebody said they want to learn about wine, would you say.

Read, I would say read. I would say read. I would say read. Yeah, yeah, what book? That Bordeaux?

So then you just learned. And you visited, and you.

And I visited, you know, and I went cheval Blanc invited me the owner of the chateau, and I spent the weekend.

Do you still go down Do you have your wine cellar downstairs? Do you go downstairs?

I don't drink much wine now because of my belly. I can't drink a lot of wine.

But you can drink some.

I can drink some, Yeah, I can, I can. I can drink some.

What do you feel about Italian line?

I love Italian mine.

Yeah, I love a barollo.

And you know, the wines can be soft and wonderful, they can be rough and beautiful. You know a lot of wat.

It's changed now. You know, there's a new generation of Italian winemakers whose father's werem was farmers. You know, everybody had a vineyard and chianti or whatever. And then this new generation of taking it seriously. And I actually even came to California to learn more about wine.

All right, Yeah, so.

We talked about food in the army. But what I'd like to talk to you about food and filmmaking so or television. When you were working in film and the studios, what would food be like? There would there be a canteen where you ate? What would they call the commissary?

What would they commissary?

Commissary?

What was that mesole? Yeah, in the movie studios it's a commissary.

And what happened? What was that like?

Well? Some some had a fox was very good, really, I mean fox you could get an omelet, you know, are the other studios didn't know what an omelet was, you know.

So tell me about a lunch. Would you stop for lunch and would you all meet other actors from other films. Everybody would just meet. There was that a way of kind of meeting people. Who did you when you had the commisary?

Yeah, well mostly the folks that I met, you know, the stuff that you know Allan lad Jr. Who ran Fox often liked to eat at my table. Yeah. And the guy who just passed away lest this literarlier this year with Richard Donner. Yes, I loved so much. He was so mischievous. And uh Jay Canter, who at one time as an agent for MCA handled Marlon Brando, Grace, Kelly, I mean, and they all liked him because he was soft and sweet than he was. So Jay used to eat with.

Us, and he was on the movie set was and he had You wouldn't.

Invite people to come to the Commissary, they'd come to the Fox and eat with us.

Your good friend Alan Up whenever he was in town, told me to ask you a story about Carry Grant. Yes, what's the story about Carry Crah.

It's a good story.

Okay.

I was not yet a filmmaker, but I was writing a movie for a guy called Marvin Schwartz on the universe a lot. So I'm writing this movie and I look across the way and I see Grand Art g r a n Art, and I say to Marvin Schwartz, Marvin, what the hell is Grand Grandhart? Who works there? He says, that's Carry Grant. That's carry Grant. That's about twenty feet away. It's thirty feet away.

But here was this smell.

This was I can tell you exactly fifty nine. Yeah, I think fifty nine.

So you're watching.

I'm watching to see carry gran I'm watching, and sure enough a Rolls Royce comes. A guy gets out of chauffeur. He opens the back door, bounding two steps at a time up up the stairs to Grandharts in a gray it has got to be Good's, dark gray with talk stripes, double breasted carry Grant. It was him. I said, holy shit, carry Grant. I can't believe it. So one day soon after that, I'm walking down about twelve thirty two, the commissary at Universal. I hear a little click clack behind me,

Did you see him ever again?

Oh?

All the time one of the carry Grant stories.

You know, I used it in my stand up stuff and I made it funny, but actually, if I told the truth, it was really very touching because he was really a good act dirt, and he had made some very beautiful, you know, intelligent soft films about love and people and and and they have none of it. I kept saying, why don't that was such a great picture? What did they make? You said, because the money was in in the light comedies.

So I think that you know life through food and through your family and to your grandparents and coming here to do this home and memories.

Food at the River Cafe still there is literally some of the best. And and I've eaten in some really great restaurants, you know, and I've had duck at the Tour Doje and you know, yeah, my finest omelets with Madame Romainne de Leon. Never split an omelet. She said, if you split a little run, she said, you can split a steak, but never split it on lit.

When I came here, I told Danny, remember Danny the chef, And I said, I was coming to see you. And he said, you know, I once made a risotto for mel and he came up to the past and he said, Danny, you made that RESULTO. You should be proud of yourself. And it was so something, so meaningful because you didn't say I'm proud of you, and you said you should be proud of yourself. So I'd like to end this by saying, mel Brooks, you should be proud of you.

We have when I have a really outstanding meal, like like your spaghetti have you made for my son Max? We we just came in upon your and Max was hungry and you said I'll make him and you may have made him some spaghetti, and I take it was the most delicious spaghetti in the world. When food is really good, it serves the soul. It serves the soul. And I'm not talking about dover soul. But when food is really good, it serves more than just the belly and the hunger, and it serves the soul. And you