Though Wells enjoyed the ones from Yonah Schimmel’s more than the street cart knishes, he said he never craved them enough to make the store into a regular stop when he lived on the Lower East Side. But what if, I asked him, you had discovered a knish like the one at Russ & Daughters earlier in life? Or had took the subway to Knish Knosh in Queens, Ms. Stahl’s, or had even met the famed Ruby, whose specter haunts the internet and inspired a devoted Facebook group? Would you be singing a different song?
But I think there’s a reason that so many of these tall tales have been rooted in a single place and point in time. When it comes to food origin stories, we crave the details. We want our favorite foods to have been invented by a specific person at a specific moment. If we can work in a little tension and drama, like hot tea that won’t sell or ice cream that’s melting all over, then all the better. And the more we dig into these tales, the more we can see why the St. Louis World’s Fair was such a ripe venue for these dramatic origin stories.
