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

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.