Summers when Henry Glucroft was growing up were spent in a studio apartment in Knokke, a town on Belgium’s coast. “You can bike into the Netherlands,” says Henry, who owns Henry’s Wine & Spirits in Brooklyn. His parents, who split their time between a town outside of Paris and New York City, would ship Henry and his brother to their grandparents for the summer. The one-room apartment was two blocks from the beach and the boys would play mini-golf, ride bicycles, and go to the movies. “We couldn’t be happier spending our summers like that,” Henry adds. “I’m just grateful for how much love they gave us.”

In the middle of the day, the family would gather at a round table in the apartment for a lunch of fried thin filets of sole and a simple salad of mixed greens with tomatoes, cucumbers, and olives, dressed with a heavy dousing of lemon. His grandmother Coca would also prepare mamaliga, a cornmeal porridge that’s a staple of Romanian cooking, and guvetch, a vegetable stew. “That seemed like the menu of the day, which somehow was the menu of everyday,” says Henry. 

“That seemed like the menu of the day, which somehow was the menu of everyday”

The recipes came with Coca and Henry’s grandfather Carol when they fled the Iron Curtain. “My grandparents were trying to leave Romania from the late 1950s. It took them 12 years,” and countless visits to government offices to get the necessary paperwork, he says. Carol documented the family journey in a comic strip. In one frame, security guards outside of a government building even comment: “you’re here a lot.”

The family planned to relocate to Brazil or France, where relatives had settled. But the “realities of needing to put food on the table and providing a shelter,” prevented that, Henry adds. As they traveled from Bucharest to Vienna and finally to Brussels, they relied on a network of friends of friends and family for favors. “I think that’s where Judaism played a big part… all the Jews in Europe [could] relate to the challenges other Jews are facing. I think there was a lot of mutual help in those days — to help people escape and help people get set up in new places.”

Henry’s grandfather Carol drew a comic about the family’s journey from behind the Iron Curtain.

In Brussels, where his grandparents lived most of the year, they would go out for lavish dinners when Henry’s family visited. “They loved to take us out to the best possible food… often way beyond their means,” says Henry.  Family meals rarely included Balkan recipes; many were replaced with a Soviet palate of blini and tarama, but the mamaliga and guvetch, which Henry calls ratatouille today, stuck with him. When he moved to Brooklyn as a young adult, mamaglia was an affordable way to round out many of his meals and a sweet reminder of the summer meals with his grandparents. 

He no longer makes it during the summer as his grandparents did, but he’s reconsidering that — as well as the complete summer lunch. “I’m revisualizing the table I sat at,” he says. And, “I’m tempted to try to recreate the meal in its entirety.”