When I moved to New York City 16 years ago I am pretty sure that on some level I believed if I went far enough above 14th Street with money I did not have, I’d reenter some gauzy version of New York from the past, you know, stuffy restaurants with tufted leather banquettes, paintings in gilded frames, black and white tiled floors and stories about when Sinatra was a regular. Places where mutton chops, Lobster Newburg, Baked Alaska and things in champagne cream sauce never went off the menu. It’s not entirely clear to me why I thought I was moving to 1950 but needless to say, in the actual New York City I moved to, my first years were filled with the typical stuff, a walkup apartment in an illegal sublet, a terrible job, a lot of wine, virtually no hangovers (because: youth) and a lot of five-dumplings-for-a-dollar and $1.50 slices at 1 a.m. 
I still love those old-fashioned places, though, and I have yet to find peach melba on a menu. It’s too bad; I realize it sounds dreadful, like something an ancient aunt named Melba would eat or worse, something someone snuck melba toast into (fair enough, as they’re named after the same person), thinking we wouldn’t notice, but as it’s in fact a scoop of vanilla ice cream, a poached peach half and a cascade of tart raspberry sauce, it’s probably the most August dessert, ever. Escoffier created the dessert in 1892 for a dinner party to honor the opera singer Nellie Melba, who was performing in Covent Garden. Wikipedia says that an ice sculpture of a swan, which had been featured in the opera, carried peaches that rested on a bowl of vanilla ice cream topped with spun sugar but was later replaced with raspberry purée.
