Heap of Living, Heap of Matzo Balls – Ingredients for a Home

One of my favorite rooms in my childhood home was the cypress-paneled den. It was a small space, with a huge wall of bookshelves and built-in storage on one side and display shelves and more storage on the other. It was tucked into a shady corner of the house and the thick rattan shades didn’t make it any lighter. But it was a cozy place to curl up in the winter or on a rainy day.

I was entranced by the souvenirs, gifts and knick-knacks that crowded closer and closer together on the glass display shelves over the years – a mechanical bear toy that drank Coca-Cola, a plate depicting the Follies Bergere, jewel-toned ashtrays and intricate barware. More than that, being an avid reader from a young age, I spent many an afternoon literally climbing the bookshelves in search of something new and interesting to devour.

One day, when I was about 10, I came across a poetry anthology and read the first verse of this poem, entitled “Home”:

It takes a heap o’ livin’ in a house t’ make it home, 

A heap o’ sun an’ shadder, an’ ye sometimes have t’ roam 

Afore ye really ’preciate the things ye lef’ behind, 

An’ hunger fer ’em somehow, with ’em allus on yer mind. 

It don’t make any differunce how rich ye get t’ be, 

How much yer chairs an’ tables cost, how great yer luxury; 

It ain’t home t’ ye, though it be the palace of a king, 

Until somehow yer soul is sort o’ wrapped round everything. 

What caught my eye originally was that the poem was written in dialect and was difficult to make out. I had no way of knowing at the time that the author, Edgar Albert Guest, was born in England and moved to the United States as a child, penning the poem in 1916 when he was 35. (The dialect appeared to be from Michigan, where Guest grew up, and, when I lived there briefly as a young adult, I was surprised to sometimes hear the same vernacular as the poem.)

For a 10-year-old who had always lived in the same house, the poem was puzzling, and not just because of the language. I read it many times over my childhood, sometimes even reciting it aloud. In my heavy south Georgia accent at the time, I’m sure it was completely unintelligible.

My conclusion was that the poet was saying you had to live somewhere a long time to make it your home, which made sense to my 10-year-old self.

More than 50 years later, I have a slightly different interpretation. It isn’t just how many years you spend in a house but also what you do there and with whom.

That concept is especially poignant for me because, as Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, approaches, my husband Marc and I are beginning the process of making a home out of a new house – or, at least, a new-to-us house.

We lived in our previous brick Georgian-style house for nearly 20 years. When we moved there at the beginning of 1998, the house had rotting carpet, peach vertical mini-blinds, a treacherous wooden deck and a plethora of bizarre molding and other carpentry added by the do-it-yourselfer former owner. By the time we left it, in July, the house had undergone a complete renovation.

While we began work on that house before we transported a single piece of furniture, we later had some unexpected help with the demolition. Just a few months after we fully moved in, the house was hit by a tornado. Thanks to our dogs at the time, Jack and Hanni, who cried out when the careening barometric pressure hurt their ears, I awakened to recognize the severity of the storm, turned on a radio and heard the tornado warning for Dunwoody. After cajoling Marc to join us in the basement, we safely road out the storm, which created an impressive hole in the side of our house over our bed. The damage estimate was more than $60,000.

We knew we were going to need a new roof but certainly didn’t expect to get it that way. I’ll never forget the screeching noise as the tornado literally pulled the nails out of the shingles.

All in all, we fared better than some of our neighbors, and our house had been repaired by Rosh Hashana, where we entertained guests for lunch the first day. By my estimation, that was the first of more than 100 times we had a full table for holiday meals at the house on Tillingham Court and that doesn’t count the number of times – greater or equal -- we had friends over for lunch or dinner to celebrate Shabbat.

That’s a lot of brisket, chicken and challah.

Many happy times – often religion-oriented – occurred at the old house. We hosted bar- and bat-mitzvah brunches for our wonderful godchildren, the annual Jewish Festival brunch, sometimes feeding nearly 100 friends, and the baby-naming party for our great-niece Goldie. Several times, we were on the “Sukkah Hop” circuit, and the makeshift structure we built for that festival was overflowing with delirious neighborhood children filling up on sweets.

As happens in life, the house also was the setting for more somber occasions, which also part of my memories. Marc and I sat shiva for both of our mothers at that house, and, many of those evenings, our neighbor Isaac Goodfriend, a world-renowned cantor of blessed memory, led the services. The very walls of the house were transformed by his hauntingly beautiful voice.

In recent years, we had the honor of hosting our extended family for Thanksgiving; one year, when our Aunt Doris turned 90, we transformed our garage into a dining area to seat more than 50 relatives for the meal on an usually cold November day. We also had countless birthday parties – including my 50^th and 60^th – as well as wedding showers and just general celebratory events.

Now, I truly understand what “a heap of living” means.

My mother-in-law used to say that aging isn’t for sissies, and I understand every day how correct she was. Marc and I came to realize we needed to live in a house different from the sprawling “five-four-and-a-door” with the upstairs master suite and the huge backyard.

We had the house on the market about three years ago, but, for various reasons, that never worked out. What to do next was a constant topic of discussion for Marc and me.

That’s why it seemed bashert when, shortly before our 25^th wedding anniversary, I received a call from a lovely young woman who attends our synagogue. We had met her a few times at meals at friends’ houses, but I was puzzled as to why she was calling.

She explained that she, her husband and three children were looking to buy a house and had heard we might be interested in selling even though our house wasn’t on the market. We chatted for a few minutes and agreed that they could see the house when we returned from our anniversary trip the next week.

I updated our longtime realtor and then Marc and I headed out to Ponte Vedra beach for a few days. The day we were returning to Atlanta, we noticed a new house had been listed and wondered if we should see it.

We did see it – on May 3, our anniversary – and decided almost immediately to make an offer on the house we ended up buying. The family decided they wanted to purchase our house, so we now live not much more than a mile from our previous location but in a house with a very different configuration and location that works better for us.

The sale of the old house and purchase of the new house might have seemed bashert, but that doesn’t mean it was easy. Perhaps the worst moment came when the fully-loaded moving truck was headed to the new house, and the contractor working here told me he thought the air conditioning might be off. It was, and we ended up moving in 95-degree heat without air-conditioning. (The upshot is that we now have a new HVAC system downstairs.)

Watching the movers lug heavy furniture, sweat pouring off of all of us, the happy times at the old house – and the possibility of good times in the new ones – seemed very far away indeed. Now, with everything put away and a functioning air-conditioning, the future seems more positive and the past has a more satisfying golden glow.

The strange part is that neither Marc nor I were particularly sad about leaving our old house. Life has seasons just like the natural world. Being in the autumn of our lives and with Rosh Hashanah approaching, we are ready for a new phase.

Our new house is somewhat smaller and has a master bedroom on the main floor, instead of upstairs. Our yard is much smaller than the one where our young cousins played football at the Thanksgivings hosted at our previous house and is maintained by the homeowners association.

While the dining room is a bit tight, we discovered a few weeks after moving in that our new house entertains quite well. My sisters, all of our first cousins and our aunt were here for brunch. We have a group photo taken in front of a stand of trees and pictures of Goldie and her brother Avraham at the fountain which is the primary backyard feature.

This weekend, I’m beginning preparations for the holiday meals. I’ve kept the menus from years back, and it is interesting how much – and little – they’ve changed over the years.  Without question, the food was much more kid-friendly when the under-12 set took up one side of our dining room table.

Over the years, I’ve happily offered gluten-free food, vegetarian options and every other accommodation imaginable. This year, one of our dear friends, who has had a Rosh Hashanah meal with us every year for more than 20 years is – thankfully – recovering from throat cancer. I’ll make sure there is extra chicken soup broth and plenty of applesauce made from the fruit grown near our mountain house in Hendersonville, NC.

On Shemini Atzeret, which occurs near the end of the eight-days of Sukkot, we’re serving fish as the main course because, as with many of our friends of a certain age, our aging digestive systems can handle only so much fatty red meat. In our younger days, that holiday was often when I broke out the meat-stuffed cabbage and homemade corned beef.

No doubt it will be disconcerting to do major cooking in a kitchen that is not yet completely familiar to me. Only my readers older than 50 will really understand this, but, even though I put everything away, that is no guarantee I’ll remember where everything is. On the other hand, the pantry we had installed is much better organized than the last one, which might make up some of the time I spend searching for appliances and pots and pans.

What already feels like home is that I’ll be cooking under total Brittany supervision, as hope springs eternal from Betsy and Rusty that I’ll drop something. And, as always, Marc will be available – and good-natured  – to run to the grocery store or farmer’s market at the last minute when I discover I’m missing an ingredient.

It might be a strange conclusion in a blog that is supposed to be about food, but what we put on the table doesn’t matter nearly as much as who is sitting around it and the spiritual longing that brings them together.

As the poem says, it’s about a “heap of living” that makes a house a home. Of course, a heap of matzo balls never hurt anything either.

Happy New Year.

Nothing Scary about Halloween That More Sweets Can't Fix

Growing up in a small Southern town the middle of the last century, ghosts, spirits, haints – the creatures known for prowling on Halloween – were really never that far away. Whether it was the spirit of the dead child at the boarding house, or the otherworldly little girl in white my friends and I saw on a deserted road one evening or even the ghost who lived with the music store owner and her sister, the supernatural was woven into the tapestry of our lives.

No one was very shocked by it.

The music store owner and her sister not only told funny stories about their ghost but actually liked having it around because it regularly found lost items. One afternoon when I was walking to my parent’s store from junior high school, I passed their house and saw through the window a shadowy figure watching soap operas. When I told them about it 10 minutes later – they both were working behind counter at the store – they laughed and laughed and insisted it was a ghost.

None of this was really surprising in a county where one of the few tourist attractions was “the ghost light” viewable down the railroad tracks in a remote area. Generations of scientists tried to find an explanation for it but none came up with anything better than the old tales --  that it was either a woman who had been hit by a train or her long dead husband come looking for her.

Over the years, it was seen by virtually everyone in the county.

As strange as it may seem, I never found Halloween to be particularly scary until I saw the movie “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and realized the possibilities. (Because it was less visual, reading the book had not had the same effect.) In that movie, the scary creatures were very much alive, however.

My theory is that Halloween only surpassed mild scariness when adults took over what had been a child’s holiday somewhere around the 80s or 90s.

To me, the holiday wasn’t about being afraid anyway. It was about food.

Back when the best trick-or-treat loot was homemade, my mother went all out – both caramel and candied apples, translucent amber lollipops and moist cupcakes decorated to look like black cats, witches, pumpkins, whatever came to her mind. It was magical what she could do with strings of licorice, peppermint Lifesavers and striped candy corn triangles.

While no one else did it quite as well as Mama – I’m biased, I know – everyone in our neighborhood was offering freshly prepared treats. Giving out Hershey bars or candy corns was a last resort only for the busiest or most cooking-averse mothers.

Most of the treats we got weren’t wrapped, let alone X-rayed at the local hospital. Any “poisoning” was self-inflected and the result of way too much sugar.

Trick-or-treat night wasn’t the only opportunity to eat too many sweets. Every year, we went to the local Halloween carnival across town. It was usually the first chilly night of the season, and I was wearing the latest iteration of a corduroy coat – often red – over that year’s costume. The air was aromatic with burning leaves and carnival food.

As soon as we got there, I always headed to the same place. It was a great point of pride for me that my mother’s baked goods played such a starring role at the popular cake walk. I loved watching the mobs of carnival-goers compete to take home one of her luscious German chocolate, or spice or lemon-coconut cakes; they were tall and beautiful with swirls of sea foam icing in white or pastels.

For those of you too young to understand, in a cake walk, a group of people bought a ticket for the right to circle chairs to music and quickly sit down when the music stopped. Because a chair was removed after each round, someone invariably was left without a place to sit and would be eliminated The last person sitting won a cake.

My problem was that I really loved the cake walk but considered it unfair – and certainly unnecessary – to compete when one of my mother’s cakes was featured as the prize. That meant sitting out almost half the rounds.

When I finally did win a cake, it was a luscious caramel cake baked by a family friend. As unnecessary as my victory was – the woman was happy to bake the cake for us anytime we asked – I still savored my victory as much as the moist yellow cake with sugary icing.

As if a year’s worth of sugar hadn’t been or wasn’t going to be ingested on trick-or-treat night, the carnival featured cotton candy and more candied apples, occasionally balanced by buttery, salty cones of popcorn. All of this was washed down with apple cider which, drunk after a sugary treat, tasted a bit like a laboratory specimen.

Yet, by the time we climbed in the Pontiac to go home well after dark, I was a content little girl. My parents invariably smelled of some carnival treat – popcorn, burnt sugar or hot dogs – because they had been working in a booth to support a charity backed by the fire department, the Rotary Club, hospital auxiliary or some other group. I would watch their silhouettes from my perch in the middle of the back seat, literally too exhausted and hyped up on sugar to sleep.

We all knew Halloween was a turning point and not just from the oppressive heat of summer to pleasant, crisp days.

The last high school football game usually was played around that time, and Homecoming was long past. It was close to a month before the holiday decorations would be unpacked at the family clothing store. Now, we were focused on the next big event in our household: Thanksgiving.

 

Memory and Hot Dogs Answering to a ‘Higher Authority’

It’s been decades since Orthodox Jewish authorities have considered Hebrew National hotdogs appropriately kosher and, as a result, I haven’t had them in my house for at least the last 25 years.  A recent lawsuit – which was thrown out because the court said it couldn’t rule on religious matters – claimed that non-kosher meat was used to make the frankfurters. Those accusations went even farther than past concerns that some of the finer points of the kosher laws weren’t being followed by the manufacturers.

That’s unfortunate for two reasons. The first is that, at least in my memory, the all beef hotdogs were very tasty with a satisfying and juicy crunch when you bit into them. Secondly, the hotdogs played an important role in my childhood, being one of the most identifiable and readily available Jewish foods in the 1960s and 1970s. That the manufacturer answered to a “higher authority” was a point of pride, especially in my small Southern town where no one knew from bialys and kishka.

Hebrew National hotdogs were the centerpiece of many cookouts and parties when I was young. I especially liked them charred off the grill and then wrapped in a soft bun. That truly was the taste of summer for me.

Yet, I also strongly identify them with another event in my memory – in the nation’s collective memory. The association is so strong, in fact, that whenever I smell boiling hotdogs, I see a very specific and disturbing scene – Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald.

Children like me were traumatized after Kennedy was shot; after all, it hadn’t been that long since we were instructed to “duck and cover” in case of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember walking home from school with my friends and scoping out the ditches along Fourth Street, strategizing what we would do if we saw a missile heading our way. At some level, we all feared President Kennedy’s death was the work of the Soviets and that we are heading into the third world war. Having a second murder occur before our eyes was almost too much to bear.

Like so many Americans of a certain age, I have vivid and very specific memories of the day Kennedy was shot and the days following. In my memory, there are a series of scenes, like a movie preview:

·         It’s early afternoon Nov. 22, 1963, and I’m sitting in a desk in the front row next to the window in my 4^th grade classroom at Orange Street Elementary School. I see my 3^rd grade teacher Mrs. Anderson tapping on the window; when I turn to look, she asks me to call my teacher Mrs. Nichols over. I overhear the two of the talking and realize what has occurred: Someone has shot President Kennedy. Mrs. Nichols turns on the television to watch Walter Cronkite announce that the president was dead.

·         I’m in the car with my mother a few hours later, and we are driving up to the high school to pick up my sisters. Linda is waiting out front and gets into the car, but we’re looking for our oldest sister Susan. After a minute, she comes out clutching her books and sobbing. When she gets in the car, she tells us that some of the other kids were cheering because Kennedy was dead and calling him a “N-----lover.”

·         My entire family is sitting in front of the television on Saturday – which never happens. My parents have closed their clothing store, and we are watching news coverage of the assassination. Kennedy’s body has been returned to Washington, and we see heartbreaking vignettes of his family.

·         Midday Sunday, we’re still so engrossed in the news that my mother decides we’ll eat hotdogs in the living room in front of the television set. I’m setting the old card table with paper plates and watching television. Suddenly, a man shoots Lee Harvey Oswald, who is being escorted by police. I scream, and my parents come running from the kitchen.

This was before children routinely saw violent acts such as close-range shootings. To the degree that anyone got killed in the movies and television shoes we watched, it was a bad guy in a black hat falling off of a horse never to be seen again or a similar bad guy clutching his chest and falling in a cartoonish shoot out death scene.

Furthermore, the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby was horribly real. There was a loud shot and blood and chaos. I wanted to avert my eyes but couldn’t. It was even worse than the horrible scenes of civil rights protesters being beaten or chased by snarling dogs or the merciless beatings of protesters by the Chicago police, which I watched five years later.

When we heard the identity of the shooter, Jack Ruby, we were concerned and then had those worries confirmed: He was Jewish. It was uncomfortable to have one of our own kind in the spotlight for a violent act. To comfort ourselves, we said to each other, “Thank goodness, he killed the assassin, not the President.”

(My husband Marc tells me that his mother, who had immigrated to the United States less than 10 years before after hiding from the Nazis during the Holocaust, was petrified from the moment she heard Kennedy was shot. She insisted they leave a doctor’s appointment and was convinced revolution would occur any moment. Marc, who was just 7-years-old, wasn’t all that aware of what was going on.)

As terrible as the Oswald shooting is in some ways, it also is poignant. How I wish I could have screamed and had my parents come running when I watched the plane hit the second tower on 9-11-2001. As an adult, I still crave that sense of safety, of everything being right with the world, that comes from having your own mother and father comfort you after seeing something disturbing, of having your sisters nearby and a warm meal on the table.

Strangely, I do have some recollection even after we watched the endless discussion and replay of the Lee Harvey Oswald shooting that afternoon. Eventually, we went to the kitchen, and my mother pulled the slightly-desiccated Hebrew National hotdogs out of the pot and put them in a bowl. One sister brought the massive can of Charles’ chips, with the other grabbing the buns. My father opened a jar of dill pickles, while I pulled out the mustard and ketchup and put them on the card table.

What else was there to do at that point?

Maybe it the end of our innocence, maybe it was the beginning of a downward spiral for a nation. The commentary on all of that was still years in the future.

We just did what families do to cope with crisis. We sat down together and ate a late lunch. It may have been simple, but it was one of the most memorable meals of my life.

Marcel Proust may have had his madeleines, but for me, this November 50 years later, remembrance is about Hebrew National hotdogs.

The Ghosts of Passover Past

 

Getting ready for Passover this year, Marc and I juggled our time between work and preparing for the holiday. That meant cleaning and organizing and some heavy cooking.

But we didn’t do it alone. I don’t just mean that the two of us worked together; that’s a given. I prepared the pantry for the Passover groceries; Marc cleaned out the refrigerator. Once the kitchen was kosher for Passover, I prepped and brined the half-sour pickles, while he made the orange marmalade. While I baked Passover-appropriate brownies, he assembled the homemade cranberry sauce.

Yet, even when Marc was out running errands or trying to get in a few minutes at his office, I was not alone. Something about the holiday—and preparing for it—makes the presence of loved ones, now of blessed memory, so tangible. Sometimes I feel their presence so strongly, the memories are so vivid, I can almost touch them, feel them, smell them.  For lack of a better description, you might call them my Ghosts of Passovers Past.

We start visiting just after the festival of Purim when I pull out my special Passover notebook. Many of my favorite recipes are written in my mother’s distinctive cursive handwriting with her precious notes in the margins. As I read them, I hear in her voice: “You can use orange marmalade if you want” (I’ll have a lot of that) or “Be careful how much sour salt you put in.”

Some of the recipes, which perfectly capture the mid-century zeitgeist, would never grace my table. But reading the recipe for “Busy Day Fish Bake,” which uses—ugh—gefilte fish from the jar, gives me insights and empathy for what she had to juggle this time of year. Yet, she took enough time away from the family clothing store during Passover to pick up my sisters and me from school before lunch each day, bring us home to a hot meal, and then  drop us back off. What a treat , even if lunch was a casserole of gefilte fish and Passover potato latke mix!  

As I employed my trusty Magic Eraser cleaning pad on the baseboards, I thought of how she and our beloved housekeeper, Earlene,  scrubbed the kitchen in my childhood home until it shone like a new penny.  Earlene, who was considerably shorter than my mother, would wipe down the bottom cabinets—I can still smell the Pine Sol and hear the cloth squeaking across the mauve paint – while my taller mother would stretch to reach the top ones. (Remembering that, I wished, just for a second, that my floors were made of knee-friendly vinyl like those from my childhood instead of solid Cyprus wood)

When I closed my eyes, I could see my mother, her face pink from exertion, pushing an errant strand of damp hair behind the yellow pencil stub resting behind her ear. (She always had one there when she worked at the store but also kept one handy at Passover, in case she needed to add something to her grocery list – usually scribbled on the back of a paper sack or notebook paper I had discarded.)

Earlene, who was a beautiful, full-throated soprano, often would sing to break up the monotony of the task. Appropriately, one of her favorites at Passover was “Go Down, Moses.” When I walked in, she sometimes would begin singing, “A tisket, a tasket…” because she knew “Little Yellow Basket” was one of my favorites. Even as a toddler, I loved singing along, “No, no, no,” which was very apt for a 2-year-old.

Preparing for Passover this year, I laughed a little at myself, quietly singing the song in my can’t-carry-a-tune-in-a-bucket range as I sponged down cabinets.

When the house was clean and I begin to haul out the cookware, I thought again of the past. Gazing at  my mother’s  old frying pan, passed down to me, I pondered why her Passover hamburgers –often cooked in this very pan--were so delectable. She would mix the ground beef with egg and matzoh meal, then season it with whatever she had handy—which could range from paprika to onions to the super-sweet Passover ketchup.  She then fried the burgers until they almost doubled in size. That, with mashed potatoes, is the ultimate Passover comfort meal for me.

Digging further into my Passover cookware and utensils, which have been tucked away and out-of-sight for nearly a year, I pull out a few items previously owned by my Bubbie, bringing on another cascade of memories. I recall how the mahogany table, supplemented by the kitchen table and whatever flat surface was available, stretched nearly the full length of her living room and dining room combined. My grandfather sat proudly at the head of that table, filled with dear relatives--he and so many of them now gone.

Memories flash through my head:  the sweet wine in the burgundy colored glasses; the Haggadot with photos of upside cows, which gave my cousin Holly and me the giggles; the flutter in my stomach when I was asked to read with a table-full of adults looking on, and, finally, the food. After what seemed like an interminable first part of the seder –it usually takes less than an hour, in actuality—nothing tasted better than the hardboiled eggs dipped in saltwater, followed by a mound of gefilte fish drenched in beet red horseradish.

Then there was always a few minutes of escape from the house, as steamy as the bowls of chicken soup served after the gefilte fish. I would sit on the front porch steps with my cousins, enjoying the cool breeze and sucking in the fragrance of early spring blooms in south Georgia. Between the heavy meal and the fresh air, I was a teenager before I could keep my eyes open until the end of the seder .

Also hard to forget were the hour-long rides home in the early morning hours, the Pontiac slicing through the intense darkness of the pine forest-lined two lane blacktop. My sisters and I dozed in the backseat, huddled like baby birds in a vinyl nest, while my mother spoke quietly to my father, making sure he stayed awake for the drive. Usually, preparing for the holiday was stressful for my parents: My father resented the price-gouging by the Passover manufacturers , and my mother was trying to buy enough to feed a family of five for more than a week, while still placating her husband. Maybe it was the wine or the family closeness, but the storm had always passed by the time we were driving home after the seder, and I felt very safe listening to their gentle conversation.

More memories bubbled up a few hours before the seder, when I was mixing the matzoh balls. I could see my  late mother-in-law, Erika, standing in an earlier iteration of this kitchen, stirring together the matzoh meal and oil, then tossing in ginger, her secret ingredient. She would already be dressed for the seder , wearing a necklace , earrings and an apron to protect herself from any greasy splashes. The kitchen would be redolent with the smell of ginger powder mixed with Erika’s cologne.

It’s not really surprising to have these strong memories at Passover, which is all about symbolic food and erasing the barriers between past and present. In some ways, the entire holiday creates a time warp, where the past is now and the present then.

The Haggadah is very clear that the story of the flight from Egypt should be told as if you were actually there. You taste the bitterness of the herbs, feel the mortar-like texture of haroset, partake of the saltiness of tears in the dipping water, all to both empathize with your ancestors and experience the Exodus yourself.

I often talk to my young guests about another way Passover is outside of time. If a Jew from the 15^th or 17^th centuries  dropped into our suburban community the night of the seders, I tell them, nearly everything would be beyond their comprehension – the streets, the houses, the cars. But if they walked into our house, they not only would know exactly what we were doing but would be able to join in.

Even in a very pragmatic way, however, Passover pulls you into the past. Because dishware and utensils last quite a while when they are used only eight days a year, a Passover tool I pull out of a drawer is most likely 20-years-old but also could be 50- or even 80-years-old, passed down from generation to generation. The colander with the star-shaped perforations has been around for Passover my entire life, and even before. The same is true in Marc’s experience; for him, the holiday always has been associated with the red handled utensils, now so chipped that only a few blotches of paint remain.

So, of course, as time folds over on itself, the important people that you’ve lost become somehow more accessible. Maybe it is because I’m older and moving inexorably closer to where they are, but the memories of the departed grow more vivid each year, not less so.

Passover is also very much about the present: My godchildren around the table during the seder, looking and sounding like men and behaving like the mensches they’ve become; the friends with whom we have shared the holiday for a decade or more, looking older yet even more precious to us;  the fun supper we shared with our beloved nieces and great-niece, who now says our names in her soft, sweet voice.

And even about the future: We’ve already begun to discuss plans for next year’s holiday and how to make it even more family-oriented, including those who are still very much alive and those who are only still alive in our memories.

 

Does South of France Count as Southern?

With the holiday of Shavuous just a few days away, planning and shopping are done. All that is left is going elbow deep in the cooking.

Of course, not a lot will actually be cooked for this holiday, which celebrates the giving of the law at Sinai.

We were in Philadelphia this past weekend for the death of my beloved aunt, and spring was in its full glory there. Back home in Georgia, the colors are quickly changing from spring green to a darker, verdant hue. By midsummer, a drive down a shady street will be reminiscent of a prehistoric rain forest, so heavy will the kudzu and wisteria fall across the sun and create shadows.

It’s already hot, and that calls for cold food. Luckily, the tradition at Shavuous is to serve dairy products, so that opens up some tasty possibilities.

I’ve decided to start with cold cucumber-dill soup, followed by a salade Nicoise and then two kinds of lasagna – white with spinach and zucchini (the scourge of midsummer) and a more classic variety called Hadassah-style. It is the traditional meatless dish served at Jewish women’s club meetings for decades and actually includes muenster cheese instead of the more Italian mozzarella. Dessert will be tiramisu.

At this point, you may be thinking: “Why is she writing about this on the blog. There is nothing Southern about this, except maybe the south of France.”

I can understand your concern but keep reading, and I’ll explain.

It all starts with supper. Many theories have been offered as to why, in the past, Southerners had dinner and supper instead of lunch and dinner, as in more sophisticated regions. Some posit that it has to do with a farm schedule; men needed a big meal during the day to work until dark. Others suggest it has to do with the region’s English roots, at least in the coastal areas; Southerners just turned high tea into supper and put some ice cubes in their cups.

While both of those ideas are likely true, I think it also has something to do with summer weather. Without air-conditioning, it is theoretically possible to cook a hot meal in Georgia before noon, after which the thermostat moves from stifling to sizzling on summer days. Cooking the meal at 4 or 5 p.m., on the other hand, would be inviting heat prostration.

Growing up in south Georgia, we always had a big meal at lunchtime, winter and summer. Dinner was never much of a production, but, in the summer, it became even simpler. Sometimes it would be cold chicken or roast beef left over from lunch and eaten on a slice of delicious Gottlieb’s Bakery pumpernickel. Other times it would be a dairy meal, with the centerpiece a pan of biscuits prepared by our beloved housekeeper before she went home from the day. My mother would fire up the oven just long enough to get the succulent biscuits brown and then serve them with butter and syrup.

The other ingredients would come from the refrigerator, which included certain staples in the summer different from the rest of the year. There usually was a large purple jar of beet borscht (sometimes left over from Passover) and occasionally schav, the bitter Eastern European soup made from sorrel. Those were often accompanied by a glass container of pickled herring or herring in cream sauce. The Breakstone sour cream vessel, tucked somewhere behind the sweating metal pitcher of sweet tea, was giant instead of large. The same usually was true of the Kraft mayonnaise jar, sometimes bent from overuse in making tomato sandwiches with the fresh produce left in carport by our friends with green thumbs.

That plus the biscuits would be the makings of our supper. Sometimes we actually had lox or whitefish imported from Savannah or beyond. (And therein is the explanation for the blog’s name.) More often, albacore tuna and herring would accompany the salad, fresh vegetables and cold soup dolloped with sour cream. Sometimes, my mother would even open a can of black olives.

Are you beginning to see a pattern here? Salade Nicoise traditionally is lettuce with tuna, new potatoes, green beans, anchovies and whatever vegetables are fresh, topped with vinaigrette.

I’m not saying all Southerners ate the same cold food as we did. Some of our non-Jewish friends sang the praises of biscuits floating in cold buttermilk. Others waxed eloquent about bacon, lettuce and garden-grown tomato sandwiches. None of us, however, was putting together a hot evening meal in the summer heat.

So, to go back to the Shavuous meal, what I’m serving is just a slightly more Mediterranean version of what I grew up eating on hot summer evenings.

Also, when describing the menu, I left out one dish. The first good watermelons are coming out of Florida and Texas now, and I couldn’t resist serving one.

Now, admit it, serving watermelon at Shavuous is both Southern and Jewish.

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