The Grandma Zone
19 recipesWhen my grandmother passed, I inherited several worn-looking coffee cans and small boxes full of scraps of stained paper inscribed with my grandmother's lovely handwriting. These dinged up containers number amongst my most cherished possessions, for this is the collection of recipes that my grandmother turned to again and again over the years, and they form the basis for some of my happiest childhood memories. She transcribed these from her mother in law and sister in law, clipped these from magazines, wrote down notes dictated by friends over the phone. They are often difficult to decipher… the ink or pencil has faded, the ingredients splashed the notes, the paper has grown brittle with time. And so I am slowly digitizing the recipes I love best, photographing the original scraps of paper and including them on the page, transcribing what I can make out, and then, when necessary, interpreting the recipe to conform more closely to modern conventions (e.g. I know what my grandmother meant by "a third of a yahrzeit glass" but not everyone else will know what brand she meant or that those candles are not made in those glasses any more).
This one is very short and contains no cooking instructions because I suspect she just put it inside the turkey rather than cooking it separately. Personally, I feel like this would be better with some chopped up celery and I'd probably cut that shortening with a fair amount of schmaltz. But I'm leaving that up here as a suggestion because I want the recipe to stay true to what my grandmother wrote. I am borrowing the instructions for my own Passover Stuffing Recipe. This recipe has been retrieved from my grandmother's recipe boxes and the original paper (images below) was heavily spattered with food and almost illegible. I have rephrased it without changing any ingredients or techniques into a more traditional recipe format.
This one is very short and contains no cooking instructions because, like her other turkey stuffing recipe, I suspect she just put it inside the turkey rather than cooking it separately. I am borrowing the instructions for my own Passover Stuffing Recipe. I decided to transcribe this recipe mostly because I was struck by the scrap of paper it was written on - a day-by-day calendar sheet. I have rephrased it without changing any ingredients or techniques into a more traditional recipe format.
A truly classic version. Also makes a truly obscene quantity, so consider scaling this down if you're not cooking for an event or an army.
I make my chicken soup in a 12 quart pot. That's huge. Most people have an 8 quart soup pot, maybe a 10. So, you will likely need to scale it back. I also do this almost entirely by feel - I know I've got the right amounts in by looking. I'll try to guestimate as well as possible amounts, but as a benchmark, know that the soup pot is pretty full of ingredients (with lots of airspace, of course) by the time it's time to add the water. This was transcribed from phone calls with my grandmother when I had just graduated college, so there is no scrap of paper to photograph. I just have it written in my own hand, from long ago, somewhere. I've made it so many times that I don't need to look... I'm putting this here for everyone else's reference.
Unlike the herring dish, the chopped liver really does benefit from hand chopping. It's not meant to be a puree, and hand chopping provides the correct texture. Use a mezza luna in a wooden bowl, ideally.
Grandma made this all the time, but it was a staple on shabbos.
"Luchshen" is Yiddish for noodle, and a "kugel" is a casserole. There are a great variety of luchshen kugels out there... and they can be either sweet or savory, or somewhere in between. My grandmother's kugel is a fairly simple one, and falls in the 'somewhere in between' category. It's a reliable old favorite that is easy to make, complements many dishes and refrigerates well. She made it every shabbos without fail.
Hey, sometimes we don't have a box of matzah ball mix lying around. It happens.
My grandmother served this dish every Pesach and Rosh Hashanah as one of many courses before the main meal. This dish had been served for many decades before I arrived on the scene, so that is a very old envelope! In those days, kosher chickens were bought from kosher butchers instead of big chain stores like Trader Joe's. (Chain stores did not carry kosher meat, so if you did not live in an area with a large Jewish population, you bought a stand-alone freezer and had your meat shipped in 3 - 4 X's a year from the nearest metro area with a kosher butcher.) When you bought a chicken, be it whole or cut up, it always came with its necks, pupiks (gizzards) and occasionally even feeseleh (feet). My grandmother would collect up the small parts from the shabbos chickens and freeze them separately, amassing quite a bit of material to be cooked up twice a year on the two holidays. Now I think you would have to order these parts expressly from a kosher butcher, and no, I have no idea as to what quantities, much to my sadness. She would serve this over a bed of white rice in delicate fine china high sided handled soup bowls. Individual servings would be around 1/3 of a cup over the rice. Wing bones were removed, but not neck bones. The bowls were served on saucers, and you sucked the meat from the neck bones and placed the little bones on the saucer. Despite its humble roots, this dish was very popular - even the kids would ask for seconds. This recipe is scant on both quantities and directions. I recall her talking about proportions in this - e.g. 2 necks to so many pupiks and feet. In part this is because the quantity of pupiks and necks was indeterminate due to how they were acquired. The meatballs were very small, no more than 3/4 of an inch, perhaps smaller, and they were seasoned although how is not mentioned on this envelope. I think for this recipe I will merely transcribe, rather than try to fill in.
I really can't help you on the number of carrots, sorry. It is a lot, though. They cook down quite a bit. Also, she doesn't mention it, but she cut the beef into chunks, perhaps an inch and a half to 2 inches on a side.
This soup is very hearty - a meal unto itself. It also has the charming attribute of freezing very well - it's great for stocking your freezer so you don't have to cook when you're sick. A final note - Soup bones are usually not on display, but you can ask for them at the butcher's. They don't usually cost much. They freeze well, so you can get enough bones for several batches and store them in the freezer. You can make the soup without the bones, but the bones help for both both flavor and thickening.
I have no doubt my grandma knew exactly what she meant by this. I’m just going to spitball for an interpretation, but as you can see from the photo, I basically had an ingredient list to go on, so I could be very very wrong.
We often ate a very heavy meal on erev Yom Kippur. I guess the idea was that indigestion is preferable to hunger? Grandma had several brisket recipes she used, this being one of them. I didn’t realize it came from one of her closest friends, Ethel Hellman, until I was picking through the recipe boxes. Its spattered and illegible state is testament to the fact that it was clearly one of my grandmother’s favorite versions of brisket.
I’m not sure why this recipe is appended with “good luck” at the end, given that the handwriting is my grandmother’s. It’s an odd enough phenomenon that I included it in the title. I like that it can be either poultry or beef given that I eat far more of the former, but the latter is more traditional.
I’ve had a heckuva time reading this spattered piece of paper. I’m pretty sure this is a quick and dirty version of cabbage borscht with lamb shank. But it might be less of a soup and more of a main dish with that flavor profile. I assume large can = 28 oz and a “small can of sauerkraut” is a typical 15 oz. can.
This envelope has two recipes: my grandma’s giblet’s/hamburg recipe on one side, and this one on the other. I just love how this impeccably tidy and organized woman had such a haphazard means of recording her recipes which were carefully stashed and cared for in these two containers. It’s a quirk that I relate to, a napkin slightly askew in an otherwise perfectly set table. The back of the envelope lists a Sharon address with a 2 cent stamp on the envelope. My family moved west in 1957, so this recipe can’t be from much later than that.
My grandmother had multiple cabbage borscht recipes, and she made more than one version regularly. They primarily differ in terms of how sweet vs. sour they are, which reflects a fairly well characterized phenomenon: the Ashkenazi culinary palette used to vary based on geographic area of origin, but after the incredible upheaval of the 20th century, Jewish families are often comprised of members of the tribe hailing from culinary traditions even within a given subset of Jewry. The rule of thumb is that as you move northward through Eastern Europe, Jewish cooking traditionally became less sweet and more sour. Some of this had to do with the climate - there is also more pickled food as you go northward so as to keep over the long winters, and pickled foods are typically sour. This recipe is somewhat unintelligible because it’s actually one index card with the original barely legible version taped to one side and a much more legible partial transcription written on the back of the index card. As a result, the recipe is lacking some of the ingredients and the directions are confusing.
This may in fact be my grandmother’s handwriting. Her cursive script was lovely, and mostly what she used. But every now and then she’d write something out in block print - this may be that, or it may be from someone else. Anyway, this is clearly a recipe she used. Kreplach is the Yiddish word for dumpling. They can be dairy or pareve, but are most commonly filled with meat as they are here. They are often served in chicken soup which is why I put them in that category.