When it comes to Thanksgiving, the show must go on

For my mother, Thanksgiving was the Big Event  -- the Academy Awards, the World Series and the Super Bowl all rolled into one. Each year, she took on a second job as she created a menu and prepared a behemoth of a meal that included appetizers, a main course starring two mammoth turkeys, and more than a dozen made-from-scratch cakes.  It was not unusual for 50 guests to spread out between the dining room and living room, where we would set-up banquet length tables and chairs borrowed from the local firehouse.

The next Thanksgiving, my mother always dreamed, the weather would be chilly and she could serve spiced apple cider or mulled wine next to a crackling fire. This was in deep southeast Georgia, 50 or so miles from the Florida line, so the wish was probably completely unrealistic, but we all loved to imagine the scene anyway. In reality, by the time the meal was over most years, we had stripped off our autumnal sweaters and were perspiring in our shirtsleeves.

My mother also loved to peruse her women’s magazines, looking for the one dish or table decoration that would make the next holiday the best ever. She and her first cousin Sylvia even tried making glazed fruit one year. That resulted in a lot of laughter and funny stories for future years even if the centerpiece wasn’t a total success.

Planning for the next year always began Thanksgiving night as Mama scrutinized the refrigerator, noting which items were almost gone and which had produced large containers of leftovers. Baking usually started in the summer, a slower time for her real job at the clothing store she and my father owned. She would make layers for the dozen or more cakes she would serve at Thanksgiving and put them, meticulously wrapped and labeled, in the outside freezer.

By Labor Day, preparations were in full gear. With my mother’s master list, Potty, our much-more-than-housekeeper, started creating the side dishes. Those also went into the freezer – casseroles of squash or asparagus or mushrooms or peas, or whatever Southern Living magazine had featured in the past year. On fall afternoons, when I got home from school, I would watch Potty cook and frequently assist her. My favorites were dishes like the sweet-and-sour meatball appetizer because my efforts were rewarded with a taste before the dish was banished to the freezer. (Even now, when I make dinner, I often hear Potty’s sweet voice in my head, reminding me to check one dish or to add pepper to another).

On most Sundays during the year, we would travel an hour northwest to visit my maternal grandparents and other relatives. In November, however, Mama stayed home every Sunday to work on her special dishes, usually more of the cakes she baked with scientific precision. Every cup or teaspoon had to be packed and leveled off. There was no pinch of this or dash of that in her kitchen. I often helped her, even when I was a teenager, because I loved to cook and enjoyed being around her when she was having so much fun.

As mid-November approached, the kitchen was a madhouse. As soon as I was out of school for the Thanksgiving vacation, I had a list of jobs. Some, like tossing coconut on the sides of the iced layer cake, began before I could see over the counter. Others, like stuffing and baking gigantic mushrooms, didn’t come into play until I brought the recipe home from college. Even as an adult, I arranged my vacation schedule so I could spent Thanksgiving week at my parents’ house as long as they hosted the big meal.

As a result, I usually was around for the final stretch. That was when my mother made gelatin molds (remember, we’re primarily talking about the 1950s into the 1980s) and Potty made chopped liver. Both efforts took the planning of a mini-Olympic game.

Every mold had its own shape, ingredients and gelatin flavor, and there usually were at least four. The fruit had to perfectly fit the indentions in the Della Robbia mold, for example, and I often found myself elbow deep in a large can of pears  looking for just the right ones. My favorite was the star-shaped mold with cranberries and celery. Something about the tartness and crunch melded perfectly with the sweet gelatin.  The morning of Thanksgiving always featured heart stopping drama as each gelatin mixture was unmolded; most came out beautifully and were shimmering works of art. And, if they didn’t, my sister Susan was called in to design the plate. With her artistic flair, well-placed lettuce could hide anything.

The chopped liver, which went through an old-fashioned food grinder, was a different set of challenges. It began with chicken livers, which always created controversy among the aunts and great-aunts who tended to be proponents of beef or calves liver. Then, there was a large pot of hard-boiled eggs, onions, celery and a good dollop of bright yellow chicken fat. The aroma was pungent and long lasting; even the cooking turkeys didn’t totally obliterate it. Potty would feed the ingredients through the grinder and they would come out in unappetizing round ribbons. Like magic, though, once mixed together, they transformed into a delicious spread that you couldn’t stop eating. On Thanksgiving morning, Susan had to repeatedly smooth the chopped liver and redecorate because someone had sneaked a taste before it was put out for serving.

The varieties of stuffing, called “dressing” in the South, were made the night before also. We always had a sage-scented toasted white bread dressing pulled from a magazine in the 1950s. The second type of dressing changed over the years as did the overall Thanksgiving menus, although some dishes were perennials. That was both to satisfy my mother’s desire to try something new and to meet the current proclivities of the guests.

Many of her new efforts were successes and became part of the regular rotation of dishes, but there were a few missteps. One year, she found a recipe that called for apple jack brandy. My father and I were dispatched to Savannah, 60 miles away, to locate a bottle. We finally found one in a liquor store in a very sketchy neighborhood; a few disheveled patrons gazed wistfully at the bottle as the clerk put it into the brown paper sack. (We had not known that apple jack, made since the days of Colonial America, was a very inexpensive liquor popular with winos.) We dashed to the car, locked the doors and never looked back.  As it turned out, my mother misread the recipe and put too much brandy in the apple dish; a few of the guests got a bit tipsy and she never made the dish again. I’m sure the partially-used bottle of apple jack was still in the liquor cabinet when my sister Linda and her husband Saul packed my parents to move to South Carolina in 1996.

 For some years, pickled shrimp, purchased off a shrimp boat on the Georgia coast 30 miles away, and oyster dressing were served. Later, when several families in my generation began keeping kosher, the shellfish was removed from the menu and my mother kept special cookware to prepare kosher turkeys and the fixings. She and Potty always were a bit indignant about the kosher turkeys because they were too small and had too many pinfeathers to be removed.

The tradition was that one turkey was roasted overnight and kept warm while the other was put into the oven predawn Thanksgiving morning to be ready for the early afternoon meal. A third turkey would then be roasted for Potty and her family to have for their Thanksgiving, celebrated that evening. Beef roast also was on the menu to accommodate relatives who had childhood trauma from raising chickens and did not eat poultry.

I usually accompanied my mother to the grocery store for her final of dozens of trips in preparation for the holiday. That was partly because she had to pick up the massive turkeys, chosen because they were large enough to roast overnight without drying out.  The butcher, who ordered the gargantuan birds for my mother each fall, kept them in his walk-in cooler until she need them. We each had a cart, and I helped her load the three birds in one. That left room for little else, so we began filling up the second with last-minute items like crackers and salad fixings.

Chopping up and dressing the salad eventually became my job also. I now own the giant wooden bowl that was rubbed with garlic cloves before adding iceberg lettuce, green peppers, cucumbers and tomatoes and then dressing it all with a mixture of Wesson oil, lemon juice, oregano, salt and pepper. The ingredients were very simple but, again through some Thanksgiving magic, it ended up being an addictive salad that you could not stop eating.

The secret to my mother’s roast turkey was a generous amount of pickling spice encased in a fabric bag and slipped into the bird’s cavity. You can imagine the tantalizing fragrance about 3 a.m. The salivating made it hard to sleep, even though you knew the next day was going to be a busy one.

Not long after my mother arose in darkness to take out the first turkey and put in the second one, the rest of the family sleepwalked into the kitchen. It is a little known fact that steaming hot turkey picked from the carcass makes an excellent breakfast.

Then, the division of labor began. My father rounded up the male relatives, including his sons-in-law Larry and Saul, to go get the tables and chairs from the fire station. Susan did the decorations and Linda usually was in charge of table setting with me as her able, if not particularly willing, assistant. The shiny wooden dining room table was spread with a tablecloth embroidered by our Bubbie and set with Mama’s good Wedgewood china and the silverware Sylvia had painstakingly polished. The farther you got from the head of that table, the more hodge podge the settings became. Somewhere in the living room, we switched to our mother’s second best china, which had pink and brown swirls, and, by the foot of the lengthy table, where I often sat with the younger relations, you might sometimes see the everyday melamine.

During the last minute preparations, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade would be playing on the television in the living room. All work would stop as each Broadway number was announced, and everyone would gather briefly to watch the singing and dancing on the streets of New York before rushing back to their tasks.

Our father and his helpers would drag the wooden bar from the den to a more centrally located position, and we would set up a card table nearby for the appetizers. That table usually featured my mother’s silver fish forks, which she gave to me as part of the set. I kashered the silver many years ago with a pot of boiling water and a fiery hot stone, and now use those same forks for gefilte fish at Rosh Hashana.

Just about the time we finished setting up, everything was warming,  and the drama of the gelatin molds had ended, cars would start pulling into the driveway. My mother would appear at the door between the kitchen and the dining room, her face flushed from the heat of the ovens, and shout excitedly, “They’re here. They’re here.” It was show time on Ty Ty Street.

Every year, it was quite a production with new cameo appearances. Different cousins -- no one really cared if they were first, second or third -- would show up from year to year. A visit from one of our Philadelphia relatives could make the entire event.

 If someone in the extended family had become engaged, the future in-laws were brought along to be evaluated. Sometimes my sisters or I invited friends. One year, I brought the son of a prominent liberal U.S. senator, to the great shock of my extremely conservative uncle.

Even though the dining room was banquet-sized and the adjoining living room was twice that size, the entire area was filled with guests, clinking their drinks and stabbing cocktail franks and meatballs. It was a mob scene until everyone finally took their places at the long table. While I usually served the salad, my mother, sisters, Potty and Potty’s sister-in-law Jeannette began to bring in the turkey, roast beef and side dishes. If, in fact, a table could groan, this one did.

The rooms became strangely quiet during everyone’s first helping. All you could hear was chewing and an occasional “Please pass me…” Then, when the roar of conversation returned, my family started pushing seconds, trying to keep the leftovers to a manageable amount.

As soon as the main meal was finished, we cleared away the farthest tables so the uncles could access the easy chairs and watch the football games.  The children went out to play in the yard. Everyone else either sipped coffee or found a corner of a sofa in which to sleep off the tryptophan. Eventually, as the afternoon shadows slipped in, someone would suggest having a slice of one of the cakes that lined the buffet – coconut, chocolate, German chocolate and spice layer cakes, a myriad of pound cakes and cheese cakes as well as the always beloved nut cake. Then the dessert course would begin and continue well after dark as friends from around town would drop by after their own Thanksgiving meals to feast on one of my mother’s cakes.

By 8:30 p.m., all the guests had cleared out and only family was left. We would excavate the turkey from the back of the fridge and assemble turkey sandwiches slathered with mayonnaise. That would be accompanied by leftover cold food – salads, gelatin molds etc. My mother would do the postmortem of that year’s event and begin talking about the next year. We went to bed not long after dinner because the next day, now called Black Friday, was one of the busiest days of the year at the clothing store.

My mother’s Thanksgiving tradition ended by the 1990s. The Parkinson’s Disease that eventually killed my father had progressed by then, and my mother had her own health problems.  In 1991, when I announced my engagement to my husband Marc, hosting Thanksgiving was already too much for my parents and I held the event at my house in Atlanta. After that, Marc and I went most years to South Carolina where my parents had moved. My mother died in 2002, five years after my father.

 Since then, a series of events, both happy and sad, have made Thanksgiving a bit erratic and, a few times in recent years, I didn’t even see my sisters on Thanksgiving Day. We’re hoping to fix that. The meal will be at Linda’s house next week, and I’m hoping everyone will come to my house in 2011 to celebrate the 20^th anniversary of my engagement to Marc (and the last time I hosted the Thanksgiving meal). Maybe that could be the beginning of a rotation involving my two sisters and me.

This year, while we’ll sorely miss the midmorning call from Potty asking us how our cooking is going – she died this past summer – we’re excited that some familiar faces will be joining us at the Thanksgiving table.  Several first cousins are planning to join us in South Carolina this year, including some of the Philadelphia contingent who will be on their way to Disney World. Linda will have to pull out the folding tables and chairs to accommodate everyone.

 My sisters and I are all contributing dishes to the meal, and we’ll be making some of the old favorites, including the special salad, chopped liver, sage dressing and asparagus-mushroom casserole. The meal also will include some more recent specialties such as my corned bread/kosher sausage dressing, Marc’s molded cranberry sauce, Susan’s warm spiced fruit, Linda’s sweet-and-sour meatballs  and just about anything brought by my niece Faith, who is a very creative cook.

Marc and I plan to get to Linda’s house early to help set up and get everything ready. We want to be there for that moment when the cars drive up and someone shouts, “They’re here.” After all, the show must go on.

Those Are Some Spicy Meatballs

Growing up a few blocks from U.S. 301 in the 1950s and 1960s, Snowbird season, referring to the Northerners heading south for the winter, was a season just like summer, fall and spring. (Winter hardly exists that far south in Georgia.) Not to sound too much like a bad Andy Griffith Show imitation, but part of the fun of Snowbird season was the cars – Thunderbirds and big-finned Cadillacs and pastel convertibles. My favorite part, though, was really good Italian food.

That statement obviously requires some explanation. When my father, although somewhat formal and a bit of an introvert like me, made friends, he made them for life. So when he married my mother and moved South after World War II, he kept up with his Army buddies, mostly New Yorkers of Italian descent. Whenever they headed to Florida, they always stopped for a visit. After a meal or two of fried chicken and other Southern delicacies provided by my family, the wives often offered to cook up some Italian specialties. The very best were the meatballs prepared by the Brunis, an older couple whom we called Uncle Charlie and Aunt Rose.

It was all great entertainment for a little girl. There was the trip to the local Winn Dixie in search of key ingredients, or reasonable replacements if we couldn’t find them. Then, back home to chop the peppers and onions into miniscule bits. When everything came together, the aroma of the sauce was so mesmerizing, I didn’t want to leave the kitchen and would read at the dinette table until time for supper. Then, we all sat down to eat and listen to Daddy and Uncle Charlie (or one of the other visitors) tell Army stories.

Of course, we weren’t exactly in the desert the rest of the year, when it came to authentic Italian food. Many of my family’s friends were Catholics, always Italian if they weren’t Irish in south Georgia, and we also enjoyed sumptuous meals from cooks like Mrs. Pucciano

While these friends certainly avoided pork products when they were cooking for my family, I’m equally sure the mixture of ingredients wasn’t exactly kosher either. So even if it is possible to make a completely passable Sunday gravy (as some Italian Americans refer to a homemade tomato sauce), it always has been difficult to duplicate the flavor of those tender, moist and delectable meatballs.

A few days ago, more than four decades after those memorable Snowbird meals, I finally found a way to get close to the correct flavor. The recipe doesn’t exactly fit into the category of “clean food,” a term which refers to a small number of fresh ingredients not sanitation. But, it’s great for an occasional treat and can easily slip into a Weight Watchers diet.

The recipe uses one of my favorite secret ingredients: Toastettes Gourmet Round Croutons (Parmesan Cheese & Garlic Flavor). As counterintuitive as it may seem, the croutons are kosher pareve, nondairy, and can be used to impart a cheese flavor without rendering a meat dish nonkosher.

The recipe below is for the meatballs only. Use any sauce you want. I often doctor up Trader Joe’s organic marinara, which is low in both calories and sodium.

Mix one pound of ground veal with 100 finely crushed Toastettes (four servings on the package box.) Add a teaspoon of garlic, a half teaspoon of red pepper and a beaten egg. Mix together well and divide into 10 large or 15 small meatballs. (If you want more of a sausage taste, also add a half teaspoon of fennel seeds.)

Brown the meatballs in a just enough olive oil to keep them from sticking. When they are brown on all sides, steam the meatballs in the marinara sauce until cooked through.

I serve the meatballs and sauce on Dreamfields brand pasta, which is high in fiber and much tastier than most of the whole wheat pasta products.

Honestly, while these meatballs are very good, they are missing some key ingredients from the specialties of my youth. And I’m not talking about real parmesan cheese.

The homemade Italian food we ate in south Georgia always tasted of friendship and my father’s special visitors from far away. It should come as no surprise that, whenever I eat Italian food now, I always think of my Dad.

When I was a senior in college and had been accepted at Columbia University for journalism school, my father offered to fly with me to New York City as I looked at housing options. It was April of 1976, and New York City was bogged down in a devastating fiscal crisis. The city was probably at its dirtiest and scariest and, frankly, I was glad to have my father with me as I explored the fringes of Spanish Harlem.

In some ways, the visit was disappointing. I learned from university officials that I would not be able to work while attending the graduate program in journalism. I did not want to ask my parents for money to support me, even though my father offered to pay, excited about the prospect of my attending Columbia. As the youngest child, my parents were already in their 50s and I knew they needed to start saving for their own retirement. I was proud that scholarships had paid most of my tuition during my last two years in college. That issue became a deal breaker with Columbia, and I ended up going to the University of Michigan for graduate school.

Of course, we didn’t know any of that then. So, that night, after visiting the university, Daddy took me to Mamma Leone’s at West 48th Street off Eighth Avenue to celebrate. (The restaurant ultimately became a notorious tourist trap and moved to the theater district. I don’t know if it still exists now.) My father and I had a great time. We had a meal from soup to nuts, or, in this case, from minestrone to spumoni. Like most 21-year-olds, I could eat my weight in food, and we left nothing for the doggy bags.

The next day, we went to a Times Square movie theater to see All The President’s Men, which had just opened. For some reason, we had been unable to get tickets to a Broadway show. We then rode the subway to Battery Park and explored that area, including a stop to look inside the World Trade Center and ride the elevators.(In some ways, it was good that my father had been gone four years when the Twin Towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001.)

Without doubt, that was my favorite meal ever in an Italian restaurant. Touring my father’s hometown with him was an incredible experience as a young adult, much different and much more fun than our trips to the city when I was a small child.

I remember what my father said at Mama Leones and repeated many other times when we ate out together. “If you leave here hungry, it’s your own fault,” he said as he gaped at the massive platters of food.

Often, I think Daddy, who was married for more than 50 years to his soul mate and had many, many friends for life, was talking about more than a restaurant meal.

Bottom of Form

How many meals can we fit into one month?

If sleep deprivation and time disorientation are tools of interrogation, I would have told you anything by the end of last week. From Labor Day until the first days of October, I spent many, if not most, of my waking hours, and some half-asleep hours, preparing for or celebrating Jewish holidays. During Sukkot, which comedian Jon Stewart defined as “How many holidays can Jews fit into one month,” Marc and I ate out four times and had guests in our Sukkah twice.

            That’s close to an entire week of eating late and getting into bed even later.  Despite the bags under my eyes and the few extra pounds around my middle, I really enjoyed stepping out of my routine, getting outside and spending time with friends and family.

            The food has been interesting and mostly really good. There were some unexpected pleasures, such as a scrumptious vegetarian zucchini soup and being served tasty London broil after we had eaten so much chicken we were clucking. There were some crave-worthy dishes that I enjoyed but only allow myself to eat at celebratory meals, including a fried South African-style gefilte fish and an extra slice of a cake made with ginger ale. And there were the recipes I plan to duplicate, such as a colorful baked squash  and a chicken roasted with apples.

            Because Sukkot meals are eaten outside in the sukkah, the temporary booth-type structure you build each year, I tend toward barbecue during the holiday. For my niece and nephew, we slathered beef ribs with a Texas-style rub, smoked them on the grill and then finished them in the oven. (Beef ribs are another “celebratory” food that seldom grace our table, and we sent home the leftovers.) We finished the meal with a non-dairy lemon meringue pie.

            The next night, with a gaggle of g-dchildren and their mother, we served shredded barbecue brisket sandwiches, baked beans and coleslaw. While we somehow had eluded the raindrops long enough to eat the entrée in the Sukkah the night before, the barbecue brisket meal was strictly an indoor affair with hail, roars of thunder and flickering lights.

            Then, I made a full meal for Shemini Atzeret, which technically is a separate holiday from Sukkot.  It is our tradition to leave the Sukkah, sadly, and eat inside on that day.

            The weather in Atlanta had moderated a bit, so I started with a sweet-and-sour cabbage soup from my mother’s recipe.  I remember writing a creative essay about the soup when I was in the sixth grade; my teacher, a friend of the family who had been served the soup many times, said she could hardly read the essay because she was drooling so vociferously.

            (An even better compliment to the soup came from a dear friend who, when we discussed whether G-d acts in the world at Shemini Atzeret lunch, said he found hints of the divine in the cabbage soup.)

            Marc so liked the Moroccan carrots I served at Rosh Hashana, that they made a reappearance at Shemini Atzeret. The carrots were served with lamb-potato moussaka, made with no dairy products, and herby lemon chicken breasts. Green beans and salad rounded out the meal. Pumpkin bars, honey cake and pineapple were on the dessert tray.

            (I was able to find non-dairy cream cheese icing, made by Pillsbury, so the pumpkin bars actually had the traditional topping.)

            At the beginning of the holiday, I baked and froze challah, the traditional Jewish egg bread. For this holiday, we served the last of the mammoth round raisin challahs and a smaller whole-wheat loaf.  None of the wheat bread remained, but the leftover raisin challah, about half, got tossed into the freezer. In its next life, it will be a bread pudding made with almond milk and probably served at Thanksgiving or Chanukah.

            Two recipes are below. The first is my approximation of my mother’s cabbage soup. The second is a variation and some suggestions for Cooking Light magazine’s lamb moussaka.

Mom’s Cabbage Soup

(Plan on 2 ounces of chuck roast for every person and one medium cabbage per 12 servings.)

24 ounces of chuck roast, weighed after trimming

1 medium to large green cabbage

1 envelope low-sodium onion soup mix

2 cans pareve condensed tomato soup (available in many store brands)

1 can no-salt-added tomato sauce (about 12 ounces)

Sour salt and brown sugar (or Brown Sugar Twin) to taste

Black pepper to taste

Trim away the fat and rinse the chuck roast. Pat dry and cut into 1 inch chunks. Put in a stockpot, cover with water, add the packet of onion soup mix and cook on medium-to-low heat until the meat is beginning to soften, about 30 minutes. Add the tomato soup with two cans of water. Add the tomato sauce. If the soup is still too thick, add more water, a half cup at a time until you get a full-bodied, not thin, broth. (If you mistakenly add to much water, thicken the soup with another can of tomato sauce.)

Continue cooking on low heat until the meat is soft. While the meat is cooking, prepare the green cabbage. Begin by cutting out all of the hard core.  With a half cabbage at a time, slice off thin crescents and then break them up further as needed.

Add a teaspoon of sour salt, available in kosher markets and most grocery stores, and a tablespoon of brown sugar. Taste. Add more sugar or sour salt as preferred but be careful with the sour salt. A little goes a long way. After the first tablespoon of real brown sugar, you can use an artificial brown sugar if you prefer. Add black pepper.

When you are satisfied with the flavor, add the cabbage. Cook on medium heat just until soft; overcooking will produce that soggy cabbage smell and taste. Serve and enjoy.

Lamb Potato Moussaka from Cooking Light Magazine

I’ve made a few alterations to make this recipe kosher.

Ingredients

·         Cooking spray

·         2  pounds  peeled baking potato, cut into 1/4-inch-thick slices

·         1  cup  chopped onion (about 1 medium)

·         2  garlic cloves, chopped

·         1  pound  ground lamb

·         1/2  cup  chopped green bell pepper

·         1/2  cup  chopped red bell pepper

·         1  cup  no-salt-added tomato sauce

·         1  teaspoon  salt

·         1  teaspoon  ground cumin

·         1/2  teaspoon  freshly ground black pepper

·         1/4  teaspoon  ground cinnamon

·         1/2  cup  finely chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley

·         1  cup  soy milk

·         2  large eggs, lightly beaten

Preparation

1. Heat a large nonstick skillet over medium heat. Coat pan with cooking spray. Add one-third of potato slices to pan; cook 3 minutes on each side or until lightly browned. Transfer potato to bowl. Repeat procedure with cooking spray and remaining potato slices.

2. Preheat oven to 350°.

3. Recoat pan with cooking spray. Add onion, garlic, and lamb to pan; cook 3 minutes or until lamb begins to brown. Add bell peppers, tomato sauce, salt, cumin, black pepper, cinnamon, and parsley; cook 10 minutes.

4. Arrange half of potato slices in a 13 x 9–inch baking dish coated with cooking spray. Arrange lamb mixture over potatoes; top with remaining potato slices. Combine soy milk and eggs in a small bowl; pour over potato mixture. Bake at 350° for 30 minutes or until top is golden and set. Remove from oven; let stand 10 minutes before serving.

When I make this again, I probably would double the lamb and spices and cut the potato slices thinner to reduce carbohydrates. I also would add a bit more cinnamon and cumin plus ground red pepper and some oregano on the top.

Fast Times

Why would anyone write about Yom Kippur in a blog about food? To discuss the break-the-fast, of course.

The problem is that I’m not much of a fan of late 20^th or early 21^st century break-the-fast celebrations. For one thing, I’m really don’t like the ubiquitous sweet noodle kugel. For another, after a day of fasting and spiritual contemplation, attending a party is the last thing I want to do – definitely far down the list from taking a bath and going to bed.

What bothers me the most is that, for too many Jews, the holiday has become more about the meal afterward than the fasting and prayer that come before. The tendency to end the fast early, often as much as two hours before sundown, is often related to someone’s desire to serve the break-the-fast meal at a more civilized time than well after 8 p.m.

It’s probably been a decade since I attended a break-the-fast and, as best as I can remember, I haven’t hosted one for at least 20 years. On that occasion, my friends and I didn’t dip into the whitefish salad until nearly 9 p.m., well after the prohibitions had lifted.

As an adult, I only remember enjoying one break-the-fast meal, and that was because it beautifully captured the spirit of the day instead of perverting it.

Shortly after we were married, Marc and I were invited to end the fast with a meal at the home of some close friends. Those friends, at the time, were in their late 70s or early 80s, and had a very different idea of “celebrating” the end of the holiest day on the Jewish calendar.

The other guests, like our hosts, were old enough to be our parents, yet made us feel both welcome and cherished. The conversation was low-key but warm as befit the occasion. After all, we had just stood in judgment before the highest court imaginable and our fates had been decided, although we did not know the verdicts.

We were honored to be at a table with people with true wisdom. They understood how the sweetness and hardships of life work together to grow souls.

The meal started with a steaming bowl of cabbage borscht. Chunks of beef were enveloped in a tangy tomato soup filled with cabbage, beets and other vegetables. It tasted great and felt good going down. (My blood sugar also probably appreciated its slow rise rather than the kind of spike caused by sweet kugel.)

A plain but satisfying meal of roast chicken, potato and vegetables followed, Our hostess, who is still very much alive in her 90s, finished the meal with some homemade cake. Her husband, of blessed memory, led the blessing after the meal.

(To this day, when we recite the blessing after the meal, Marc and I both hear in our heads his southern-accented Hebrew. We feel privileged to have known him and to not be able to forget the sound of his voice in prayer.)

The entire meal took a little more than an hour, and we then headed home to the aforementioned showers and bed. We were full with dinner and friendship and ready to face the workday the next morning.

There is a time for celebrating after Yom Kippur, of course. It’s called Sukkot and starts four nights after the fast ends. Indeed, the holiday is often called, “the season of our joy.” The meals take place in specially-constructed booths from which you can view the sky and remember who provides far greater protection than a mere roof.

Sukkot is my favorite holiday, at least partly because it is a showcase for autumnal cuisine. This year, I won’t be cooking as much as usual because our friends have been so kind in inviting us to eat in their sukkahs.

So far, I’ve only made one dish for the holiday. It’s a version of cabbage soup, and, with fond memories of our friends who no longer live here, I plan to serve it with a side of friendship.

Calls and Matzo Balls

3 p.m. Erev Rosh Hashana


Matzo balls are cooking in a pot on the stove, 31 of them, to be exact. I’m hoping that will be enough for a Rosh Hashana lunch with 4-5 teen-aged boys.

None will be left over, I’m fairly sure, because after the first round of soup is eaten, a gangly mob usually surrounds the pot and finishes off everything that is left.

As soon as the matzo balls cook to fluffy perfection, I’ll refrigerate the soup mixture and head upstairs for a bath and a nap. With dinner beginning at 8:30 p.m. or so, after services, it will be a late night.

I’m looking forward to the festive meal with a combination of old and new friends. It makes me think of the rhyme I learned as a child, “Make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other gold.”

If only….

If only we could keep the people we love, so every holiday isn’t as much about who is absent as who is present. That may sound a little sad, but I can’t stop thinking about the telephone call that won’t come today.

Just before Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, Passover and Hannukah, my entire adult life, the telephone would ring and one of my oldest friends would be on the line. Some readers of my blog know her only as Potty; others recognize her as Earlene Fuquay.

She would wish me a happy holiday and then always ask the same two questions, “Are you going to see your sisters?” and when I said I was celebrating the holiday at home, “What are you cooking?”

Potty, along with my mother and Julia Child, was one of the three greatest influences on my cooking style. When I would tell her what was on the stove, she would begin reminiscing.

“Do you remember how good that cabbage soup smelled?” she would ask. “I could eat a bowl of that soup right now. Right now!”

Or, maybe, if it were around Passover, she would recall how she and Mom worked together to scour every cabinet and put the special dishes in place, or, around Hannukah, how they would fry up batch after batch of potato latkes.

In recent years, as she got older, Potty got a little confused sometimes, although her heart always remained in the right place. Last spring, she told me she had called my sister Susan at her business to wish her a happy holiday. She wasn’t there, so Potty told me she left a message with a young man to “tell Susan Happy Hannukah.”

I didn’t say anything, but she obviously meant “Happy Passover.”

“I don’t think he ever gave her the message,” she told me a few days later. “I don’t know why he didn’t tell her.”

I agreed that was a shame but couldn’t help laughing to myself at the thought of the young store clerk, puzzling over whether he should tell his boss that some old lady called to wish her Happy Hanukkah in March.

It’s true, her stated messages may have become less accurate over time or that, in recent years, she might call me twice and forget to call my sister Linda. But telephoning us before major Jewish holidays and on our birthdays was Potty’s way of keeping in touch, of remaining an integral part of our lives.

She also would call if we hadn’t picked up the telephone to talk to her for a few weeks. “I just wanted to make sure everything was okay,” she would tell us.

Staying in contact was the same reason I sent her cards for her birthday, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter and Mother’s Day – and often called too. Potty was far more reliable than the U.S. Postal Service and would telephone me immediately to thank me for the cards, whether she received them in two days or two weeks.

Now, all of this is reminiscence.

Potty died unexpectedly in an automobile accident this summer. I know that is a strange way to describe the death of someone in her 80s, but she was in fairly good health and took excellent care of herself. Everyone expected to be at her 90th birthday party, even her 100th. I took it for granted that those holiday calls would continue for a long time.

Sometimes, I regret to say, I was even a bit irritated when the telephone rang while my hands were immersed in matzo ball mixture or while I was lugging a heavy pan of brisket from oven to counter. Maybe I even rushed her off the telephone a few times because the oven was beeping and my challah was about to burn.

But what wouldn’t I give for the telephone to ring today and to hear her voice again, even if she had just called to wish me Happy Passover in September.

The Tale of the Tablecloth

When I was girl, maybe 10 or 12, my Bubbie announced that it was time for her to begin embroidering my tablecloth.


By that point, she already had made table coverings for my two sisters and two other older female cousins. After me, there was one more female cousin, Colleen, who, at the time, was barely in elementary school.

(The exquisite green and purple tablecloth she made for my sister Susan made an exquisite Chuppah [marriage canopy] cover when my niece Shayle married her Todd last summer.)

Sitting in her bedroom, Bubbie showed me the linen cloth, stiff with starch and dotted with the design. She also laid out an array of threads in a rainbow of colors and asked me to choose which I wanted.

Being, even then, a fan of the classic and the tailored, I chose a silvery taupe.

Bubbie looked puzzled and asked if I was sure that was the color I wanted. I nodded my head yes. She shrugged her shoulders and said okay.

I always had been a bit of a mystery to my grandmother. As a child, I was as withdrawn and bookish as she was dramatic and flamboyant. There is no question that she used her bigger-than-life personality for good; she had an immigrant good citizenship award from the Daughters of the American Revolution to prove it. Bubbie just found it easier to relate to her grandchildren with personalities more similar to her own.

To her credit, she had given me a choice and I had chosen a brownish-gray color. So, that’s what it would be.

The tablecloth turned out to be beautiful. The thread shimmers next to white china and gleaming silver. It also has served me well my entire life, looking as appropriate for a 56-year-old as it did for a 26-year-old. It clearly is one of the best gifts I ever received.

So, why am I telling this story the day before Rosh Hashana, when the Jewish New Year begins. One obvious answer is that Bubbie’s gift already is draped across my dining room table, ready for my guests the first night of the holiday.

There’s a lot more to the story, however.

That very tablecloth, created to be part of my trousseau when I married, played an important role in my engagement and subsequent marriage to Marc. It clinched the deal, so to speak, when we imagined ourselves to be beshert .

Beshert is one of the most overused and misunderstood terms in Jewish life. It refers back to a Talmudic passage that 40 days prior to the formation of the fetus, a Heavenly voice comes down from Above and decrees who is to be mated with whom..

Spending all of one’s life searching for your beshert would probably assure you a long spinsterhood or bachelorhood. Many couples marry because they see potential in each other and, with lots of love and hard work, have a very successful partnership. It may not have been love at first site for most people, but it created a tremendously satisfying relationship anyway.

After my first marriage ended, I certainly was not looking for my beshert. I wasn’t even sure I ever wanted to marry again.

Then, one Saturday in synagogue, I saw this man carrying the Torah. He had a kind face and was wearing a gray Brooks Brothers suit. It was the Shabbos between Yom Kippur and Sukkos, and I actually had prayed for guidance in my love life.

The man looked and me and I looked at him. It was as if we had known each other forever.

I wondered if that was the man the rabbi had told me about. As we had walked to his house on Yom Kippur, the rabbi had told me that he had met a man named Marc who seemed to be the male version of me. I wasn’t sure what he meant by that but I was intrigued.

Due to a confusing set of circumstances, Marc and I did not meet that first Sabbath we saw each other. We actually were introduced a few days later, the first day of Succos, inside of a booth that symbolizes the holiday. I didn’t like him at all.

He came across as a know-it-all, and he made it very clear that he had no interest in being traditionally religious. (I found that puzzling because, usually, the only Jews who show up for services on Succos, are either religious or interested in becoming so.)

That day, I went to some friends’ house for a holiday lunch. The other diners were two men with their children; in both cases, their wives had to work that day. They asked about my dating prospects but I didn’t tell them about the guy I had met. I truly thought nothing would come of it.

The next day, I spotted Marc across the sanctuary. He was sitting next to a woman and chatting with her. Inexplicably, I was jealous.

At the light meal after the service, he made his way across the crowd to talk to me. He mentioned that he had met a woman in services; she was in town with her husband for her conference and wanted to go to synagogue for the holiday.

I’m not sure why, but I was relieved.

Marc showed up for the entire string of holidays and by the time Simchas Torah had passed, we had made a date for a movie.

The movie was a Coen brothers flick called Barton Fink. It was kind of dark and disturbing. We both liked it a lot.

As we talked, we found a surprising number of commonalities. My close friend in college at Emory had been his close friend when he went to the Georgia Governor’s Honors program as a high-schooler. His former business partner was the father of my work colleague and friend. We had often attended the same movies at the same theaters on the same Sunday afternoons and had both shown up regularly for the delivery of the Sunday New York Times at a local bookshop.

And it went on and on.. What was nice, of course, is that we knew so many people in common that I didn’t worry that I would later find out he was a psychopathic ax murderer.

When we went back to my house and looked through my record albums (yes, it was a very different time and place), he was amazed that I had such a large collection of both Ella Fitzgerald and Stephen Sondheim, his favorites. Indeed, I may have been the first person he’d ever met who really loved Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures.

We began dating and, on the third date barely a week later, talked about getting married. There just seemed to be too many coincidences. Maybe, just maybe, we were meant to be.

One Friday night, we invited guests to my house to join us for a Sabbath meal. Marc was helping me cook and prepare.

I opened the drawer and pulled out Bubbie’s tablecloth. I told him how I had picked the color as a child.

He started laughing, and I thought he was amused because I had been so precocious in my taste.

That wasn’t it. A few days later, he came to my house carrying a dry cleaner bag. In it were freshly cleaned and starched linen napkins. They had been painstakingly embroidered by his mother. The pattern was very similar to my tablecloth and the thread….well, the thread was a silvery taupe.

My future mother-in-law, Erika, of blessed memory, had made them when Marc was a child.

Marc and I married in a traditionally Jewish ceremony a few months later, just after the holiday of Passover.

We’ll be using the tablecloth and the “matching” napkins the first night of Rosh Hashana this year. It will be the 18th holiday Marc and I have spent together.

I guess no one ever really knows if they are married to their beshert, but the tablecloth and napkins tomorrow night make a fairly good argument for us. Shana Tova to all.

Some like it hot

Nearly every year, the Jewish New Year spread in newspapers and national magazines is more of the same. The photos show steaming bowls of matzo ball soup, juicy slices of brisket, pans of tzimmes glazed with fruity syrup.


My question is also always the same: Where do these people live? The Arctic Circle?

They obviously don’t live in the South where early September, when Rosh Hashana begins this year, is as sticky and hot as July and August. After sitting in a crowded synagogue and walking half a mile in the heat to either your lunch destination or, in non-Orthodox areas, to your car, heavy food is the last thing you want.

It reminds me of going to the Atlanta Merchandise Mart with my parents to buy for the fall season at our clothing store. As the salesman would haul out wool slacks and sweaters for the back-to-school crowd, my mother would repeat her mantra, “Dark cottons. Dark cottons.”

(Strangely enough, these were the same manufacturers who, for Easter, would create sleeveless slips of dresses. That would send Mom in an often fruitless search for “little” cotton sweaters because, inevitably , a cold snap occurred just in time for the holiday. I can’t even imagine what storeowners in the Northeast and Midwest did. Sell matching pastel down jackets?}

As warm as Atlanta will be for this year’s holiday, it will not hold a melting candle to the Rosh Hashanas of my childhood. Then, we trudged through the streets of Savannah, our dark cotton sleeves rolled up as high as they would go, hoping to get to synagogue before our clothes were soaked through with perspiration.

The downtown synagogue we attended when I was very young was hot and stuffy. The thick, dusty velvet draperies didn’t help. Of course, it could have been worse for me. My father was wearing a wool suit and a tallis (a prayer shawl) over his shoulders.

The “new building,” which opened when I was slightly older but now is close to 50 years old, was like a meat locker every time we walked in on Rosh Hashana. The custodians had cranked the air conditioning up, the temperatures down, for the sweltering men. For someone in a slightly-damp cotton dress, it was …. Well, let’s just say a bowl of steaming matzo ball soup would have been very welcome.

I understood no Hebrew and knew little about what was going on in the synagogue. The services seemed interminable, and I would constantly cast my eyes over to the men’s section where, eventually, my father would give me a nod. We’d meet in the foyer and then cross the street to a restaurant underneath a giant globe.

By that point, I was a very hungry little girl. We’d have a sandwich and a Coke then, reluctantly for both of us, return to the service. I don’t know if ducking out of the synagogue service would be considered good parenting these days, but it is one of my favorite memories of my father.

I now pass the Big Globe, still standing, on the way from the expressway to the cemetery where my parents are buried. Seeing it recalls my joy at being with my father and out of a situation that was so uncomfortable for me.

Because we were “country Jews” and from out-of-town, my mother’s family didn’t cook elaborate Rosh Hashana meals. Instead, we ate in empty restaurants at 2 or 3 in the afternoon when we finally got out of synagogue and rounded everyone up.

Sometimes It’s hard to know what memories are real and what are just imagination, but, to me, we always seemed to be dining in a dark below-ground room, even though it was mid afternoon outside. Everyone seemed to have filet mignon without the bacon and lots of yeast rolls.

Because, during the year, we were unable to go to synagogue as often as my mother would have liked, we tried to make up for it by attending every service during the High Holidays. We were in the sanctuary early and often.

It must have been kind of religion by osmosis because, somehow, I opted to return to traditional Judaism in my early 30s.

The service that once seemed to go on forever is now, in some ways, like listening to my favorite greatest hits album. All of the prayers and songs touch me deeply and uplift me spiritually. To go home and share a meal with your closest friends just adds to the religious experience.

The first few years I celebrated the Jewish New Year with my own home-cooked meal, I filled the table with the heavy, rib-sticking favorites. Everyone was as stuffed and overheated as cabbage rolls by the time they went to Tashlich. I’m sure it was all they could do to not throw themselves in the cool stream with the symbolic bread crumbs.

I’ve gained some wisdom in my later years and now mix it up a bit. The first day of Rosh Hashana, when we have friends who are more like family, I serve a menu of both hot and cold foods.

This year, we’ll start with gefilte fish with spicy tomato sauce (cold) and then follow it with matzo ball soup (very hot.) The entrees are honey-balsamic chicken (served warm) and homemade corned beef (served cold in slices with mustard.) The only heated side dishes will be sweet potato/cranberry casserole and green beans. Homemade pickles, a red cabbage-apple coleslaw and a green salad will also be served. For dessert, we’ll have honey cake, fruit and sorbet.

If the holiday had fallen on Shabbat, when the rules of warming food are even more strict and everyone seems to have their own minhag (tradition), I probably would have prepared a brisket in the crockpot and served everything else cold, including gazpacho as the soup.

Because of our home’s proximity to the synagogue, three houses away, I probably can get away with serving more warm food than others who live farther away. The combination of weather and location also means that I might get a few drop-ins on their way from their lunches. In this heat, I’m sure they’ll appreciate the non-dairy sorbet and icy fruit.

I love to cook traditionally fall dishes but, this year, will have to save them for either the nighttime meals of Sukkot at the end of September or even to haul to my sister’s house in upstate South Carolina for Thanksgiving.

Of course, growing up in the lower reaches of Georgia, the weather at Thanksgiving was often warm. One of my mother’s elusive dreams was that one cold Thanksgiving where she could light a fire and serve spiced apple cider. I honestly don’t think it ever happened.

It would be like getting to wear a woolen suit to services on Rosh Hashana and actually craving the bowl of hot soup. That might be the case for some people, but not down here where some like it hot and some, like me, just put up with the heat because I don’t want to get out of the kitchen.

Currying favor with great chicken dishes

The first time I tasted Indian food was in the late 1970s at newly-opened restaurant in a strip shopping center near Emory University, where I went to college.


It was a revelation. The spices were unbelievably delicious -- and familiar.

Familiar? To a Jewish girl who grew up in south Georgia in the 1950s and 60s?

Here’s the rub. I didn’t just grow up in south Georgia. I grew up 30 miles from the coast and 60 miles from Savannah, GA.

My favorite entrée in the world, my mother’s barbecued chicken, had curry as a key ingredient. The entire house was fragrant with spices whenever she made that dish. It may seem exotic for the place and time but it really was not.

Savannah is a port and its cuisine was highly influenced by the spices that were brought in by ships from all over the world. Those ships carried rum, molasses, fruit and, tragically, slaves. The African slaves added their own cooking heritage to the cuisine.

One of the most famous dishes from the area is called Country Captain. There are many versions of its history, but the New York Times recently recited this version: “…it was the favorite recipe of an English skipper who served in Bengal and introduced the dish to friends in Savannah.”

Country Captain is a braised chicken dish with curry, almonds and raisins or currants. It is quite different from my mother’s barbecued chicken but shared some ingredients and possibly some provenance.

(As long as you braise the chicken in something more acceptable than bacon fat, Country Captain also can be a useful entrée in kosher cooking. The longer it warms, the better it tastes. It works extremely well for Yom Tov or even Shabbos, for those who hold by warming.)

Growing up, we spent a lot of time on the coast, and I became very familiar with the food. We traveled the hour to Savannah not only to attend synagogue but also for specialist doctor’s appointments, entertainment and shopping for items that were not available in my small town. We headed 40 miles the other direction, to Brunswick, GA, to dine on fresh fish or to go to the beach at Saint Simons or Jekyll Island. We learned to love the coastal cuisine, spices and all.

Our housekeeper, Potty, had grown up in the area and knew how to make many of the dishes we loved. She was an amazingly talented cook and figured out how to make many traditional Southern foods appropriate for a Jewish family.

Of course, there was her basic philosophy: If a little pepper is good, a lot most be better. My husband Marc still complains that I have a tendency to use too much pepper in mashed potatoes and vegetables.

My mother, meanwhile, loved to collect recipes and pulled many of her favorites from local cookbooks as well as national magazines.

I don’t know where she found the barbecued chicken recipe, which isn’t barbecued at all but is cooked in the oven. Here it is with some of my slight variations:

Brush two cut-up chickens with oil and sprinkle with salt, unless you are using already-salted kosher chicken. Sprinkle on two cloves of garlic thinly sliced.

Bake for one-half hour at 350 degrees.

Meanwhile, sauté a large onion (Vidalias work extremely well) in canola oil in a large pot. When the onion is cooked as you like it (slightly charred works for me), begin to add the liquids and spices.

Start with 2 and one-half cups of tomato juice. (Tomato juice sometimes can be difficult to find with a reliable hechsher or kosher symbol. Your best bet is grocery store brands such as Publix.)

Stir in two tablespoons of white vinegar and one-half teaspoon of salt.

Then begin to add the spices. The amounts are from my mother’s original recipe although I tend to go heavier on them:

¼ teaspoon dry mustard

¼ teaspoon curry power

1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1/8 teaspoon hot sauce such as Tabasco

1/8 teaspoon black pepper

1 bay leaf

Let all of this simmer together for 15 minutes. If you house smells less than fabulous and you’re not drooling, you must have left something out.

Pour the sauce over the chicken and let it cook for another hour to hour and a half, basting the chicken frequently.

If some of the skin or onions get too brown, that makes it even better.

The sauce is especially delicious on mashed potatoes or couscous.

Like Country Captain, the barbecued chicken is wonderful rewarmed.

Below is a Country Captain Chicken recipe from Diana Rattray, who has a great southern food site on about.com. I’ve altered it slightly to get rid of the bacon, suggesting a touch of smoked paprika to replace the smokiness.

Ingredients:

• 1 broiler chicken, about 3 pounds, cut in parts

• Canola oil or chicken fat

• 1/2 teaspoon salt

• 1/2 teaspoon pepper

• 3/4 cup chopped celery

• 1/2 cup chopped onion

• 1 green bell pepper, chopped

• 2 cloves garlic, minced

• 2 cups fresh tomatoes, chopped

• 2 teaspoons Madras curry powder

• 1 teaspoon smoked paprika

• 1/2 teaspoon thyme leaves

• 1 cup chicken broth, hot

• 1/2 cup currants or raisins

• 1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley

• 1/2 cup slivered toasted almonds

Preparation:

Add chicken parts and fat to the pan; cook for about 15 minutes, turning, or until browned. Sprinkle with 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon of pepper; transfer to an ovenproof dish and keep warm.

To pan drippings, add celery, onion, bell pepper, and garlic; cook, stirring, until onion is transparent, about 5 minutes. Add tomatoes, smoked paprika, curry powder, thyme and 1/2 teaspoon of salt. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, cover and simmer for about 10 minutes.

Place currants in a small bowl, pour hot chicken broth over them; let stand for 20 minutes or until plump.

Return chicken to the pan; cover and cook for 20 minutes. Add currants and broth; cover and cook for another 10 minutes or until chicken is done. Sprinkle with parsley, and toasted almonds. Serve on rice.

Serves 4.

Just a bit more of Country Captain lore; President Franklin Roosevelt became a fan of the dish when he spent time in Warm Springs, GA, where he took spa treatments for his polio-induced paralysis. Gen. George S. Patton supposedly visited him there and also fell in love with Country Captain.

Believe it or not, in honor of Gen. Patton, the Pentagon in 2000 made Country Captain one of the packaged M.R.E.’s, or Meals Ready to Eat, for soldiers in the field.

I’m not sure if they created a kosher version of it, but that is quite easy to do.

Everything's chicken, including the fat

Clipping recipes from old magazines recently, I was amused to see a recipe for chicken fat puff pastry in Bon Appétit.


Chicken fat is the oleaginous gold that makes an ideal replacement for lard in southern Jewish cooking. I was surprised to see it mentioned in a trendy cooking magazine. In an age when pork fat graces the menus of fabled “farm-to-table” restaurants across the country, chicken fat remains a relic of the last century. When unsaturated fat became the healthy cooking standard – was it the 1960s or 1970s? – chicken fat became passé.

Growing up Jewish in south Georgia, chicken fat was a refrigerator staple. We kept it in an old Kraft mayonnaise jar. Normally, the golden color of the fat distinguished it from the creamy white mayo. If you were in a hurry, however, there always was the danger of grabbing the wrong receptacle and spreading chicken fat on your tomato sandwich or dropping a dollop into your tuna salad.

The job of rendering the chicken fat fell to our housekeeper, whom we called Potty.

(Before you start entertaining visions of old retainers and stereotypical mammies, let me set you straight. In later years, this remarkable woman served on the local school board and was instrumental in bringing a vocational-technical school to our rural county. I knew her for more than 50 years. She was truly my second mother; we consider her family to be our family. We were connected for life, talking by telephone several times a month until her death earlier this summer. )

Every time she cooked chicken, which was quite often at our house, Potty would set aside the fat and excess skin and put it in the refrigerator. When she had enough, she would chop it up and place it in a heavy duty pot with chopped onions. She then would boil until the fat was rendered, turning to a golden liquid. The deep fried pieces of skin and onion created a delectable snack called gribenes , kind of the Yiddish version of pork rinds. The gribenes didn’t last the afternoon.

The liquid would be poured into the ubiquitous Kraft jar and would reside in the refrigerator until ready for refilling. The chicken fat replaced butter in mashed potatoes, was used to brown vegetables for stuffing and added flavor and texture to chopped liver. With butter for dairy meals and Crisco for baking and deep frying, it was the third of the trio of commonly used cooking oils in my childhood home.

Liquid Wesson oil was primarily used for my mother’s addictive salad, but that’s another blog post.

I assumed the method of rendering chicken fat had come down from my great-grandmother and grandmother. Bubbie kept her own chickens and probably had the freshest chicken fat in town – or in Vidalia, GA, perhaps the only chicken fat in town.

Of course, my memories of chicken fat in the 1950s and 1960s are fairly modern. The uses of chicken fat in our house were fairly limited compared to earlier times.

Some of my older Jewish friends wax elegiac about chicken fat and garlic spread on matzo as a Passover snack. And, similar to older Southern cooks who use lard in almost everything, chicken fat was their gold standard shortening.

If you breathed deep in their kitchens, you could experiencel generations of eastern European Jewish cuisine in the chicken and onion smells. The dishes may have been filled with saturated fat and salt – probably not a bad thing if you had to work to exhaustion and have enough weight to get through the winter – but they were delicious.

True confession time. I don’t have a jar of chicken fat in my refrigerator. I also don’t buy the suspicious blocks of frozen chicken fat in the freezer cases of kosher markets. In fact, I’ve never cooked with it. My husband Marc and I use olive and canola oils almost exclusively with an occasionally pat of butter for a dairy meal. That makes it much more difficult to recreate the depth of flavor transmitted by chicken fat.

Maybe that will change. New research suggests that chicken fat is more than 70 percent unsaturated, and, honestly, I can’t say that my ancestors had higher rates of cancer and heart disease than we do now.

Lard came back into fashion. Maybe chicken fat isn’t far behind. Chicken fat puff pastry could be just the beginning.

The mystery of my mother's honey cake

My mother was an outstanding baker. Each Thanksgiving, she would create dozens of from-scratch cakes for her 40 or so guests. It always was cake – coconut layer, spice, nut, pound, bourbon, chocolate and so many more – because Mom disdained pies. She thought they were way too much work to feed so few people.


The cakes were legendary in my hometown. At the Halloween carnival, the cake walk suddenly became the most popular attraction when my mother’s cakes were the prize. Any kindness to my family, no matter how small, was swiftly rewarded with a cake. Everyone from the nurses at the hospitals to the teachers at the schools looked forward to them.

In later years, Mom would bake to help out my sisters and me. I once served her cheesecake to a post-bar mitzvah brunch filled with New Yorkers. Several of them told me it was the best cheesecake they ever had tasted. When I took her baked goods to my office – my colleague Glen affectionately dubbed them “Mom cake” – the contest for the last piece almost would result in fisticuffs.

With all of the delicious cakes my mother would bake, each one a work of art, one was arguably more special than all the others. That was the honey cake which made its appearance each fall, near Rosh Hashana.

Once we were grown, my sisters and I would each receive a boot box full of loaf cakes, tenderly wrapped in foil and labeled in Magic Marker on masking tape. (My parents had owned a clothing store, so they seemed to have an endless supply of boxes of every size.) Some would be placed in the bread box for the first of the high holidays and the others would go into the freezer to be retrieved for the Yom Kippur break-the-fast or Succot. If hoarded carefully, there might be, in the very back of the freezer, a slightly misshapen foil rectangle left over for Thanksgiving.

That probably seems surprising to many of my fellow Jews who grew up with honey cakes so dry they could be employed in cleaning up the Gulf Coast oil spill. I’ve tasted that kind of honey cake, thrown together from a recipe in a Sisterhood cookbook somewhere. You have to take a swallow of tea after every bite to keep from choking.

Needless to say, my mother’s honey cake was nothing like that. It was dark and rich and sweet and moist, like the best brownie you ever had but made with honey instead of chocolate. No one really could understand how it could be so good when other honey cakes were so bad. Maybe it was the ultra fresh honey provided by our friends the Yorks from their bee company. Maybe it was the precision with which my mother baked, exactingly smoothing out each cup or measuring spoon. Or maybe it was more spiritual – the cake was the embodiment of my mother’s essential sweet nature.

In 2002, Mom died shortly before Rosh Hashanah. In fact, her shiva, the eight days of mourning, was cut short by the holiday. I had to “get up” from sitting shiva to have time to prepare the festive meals.

My niece Faith and her then fiancé, now husband, Jeff stayed with Marc and me over Rosh Hashana that year. Miraculously, I had found, buried in my freezer, an unused honey cake from the year before. We alternately ate cake and cried during the entire holiday.

When the next year came around, my sisters and I realized that if we wanted Mom’s honey cake, we would have to recreate it ourselves. We looked at every honey cake recipe we had, trying to remember which was the correct one. We searched our memories for every detail -- it had pineapple juice, for example – as we dug through every recipe file she had left us.

Finally, my niece Shayne found my mother’s handwritten recipe among her memorabilia and typed it into an email to send out to everyone. She alerted us to a critical problem, however.

There was a place in the recipe where it was almost impossible to determine whether my mother had written “beat” or “heat.” It was not clear if the problem was her handwriting or an inconveniently placed oil stain, but there was definite confusion on how to achieve the “very thick” state called for in her recipe.

I asked for a fax of the original and studied it like an ancient scroll. I decided that the word was “heat” and proceeded to cook the mixture before then boiling the juice. The result was disastrous. It was more like a lumpy honey pudding than cake. I gave up and found another recipe on the Internet – passable but definitely not my mother’s.

Over the last seven years, one of my sisters found another version of the recipe and determined that beating not heating was the correct way to go. Both of them and Faith have made reasonable facsimiles of the cake.

So, I thought I would try again this year. I’m going to get the freshest honey possible from the farmer who supplies us with eggs so fresh that the yolks are the color of Forsythia in bloom. I’m going to take my time and measure everything with extra care. I’m going to stand over the stove to make sure the cakes don’t overcook and dry to dust. I hope it turns out well.

Yet, I know that it will not be as good my mother’s honey cake. Sometimes a cake, no matter how tasty, is just a lot more than a cake.