The Grandma Zone
40 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).
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.
Frances Toren was one of my grandmother’s best friends. Frances was one of the nicest people… genuine, kind, warm, trustworthy… managing to be incredibly sweet without being saccharine. Neither my grandmother nor I put much credence in the supernatural, but I was present for a very odd experience regarding Frances. At the time, Frances was quite elderly and frail, but still very much in the world. She had been ill and my grandmother had been in regular contact by phone. I was home from school and in my grandmother’s kitchen late one afternoon when suddenly grandma gasped and grabbed for a chair to sit down. Concerned, I asked what was wrong. My grandmother (who was sharp as a tack until the day she died) looked at me with utter confusion written on her face. She said, “I don’t really know. I just heard Frances’s voice in my ear, plain as I’m speaking to you.” “Oh!” I paused, equally at a loss. “What did she say?” “She said, ‘Don’t worry, Jeannette, everything will be alright. It’s going to be okay.’” My grandmother’s delicate eyebrows were pinched with worry. “I don’t know what it means.” My grandmother tried calling Frances, but got no answer. A couple of hours later, Frances’s husband called with the news that Frances had passed away. Below you’ll find the scrap of paper my grandma had in her collection with Frances’s potato salad recipe jotted down.
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.
In the 41 years I knew her, I never knew my grandmother to make cupcakes. It just wasn’t the sort of thing she made. I know this pale blue scrap of paper is very old, but with nary a spatter or folded corner… I think it’s safe to say she didn’t use this recipe much. Still, she kept it all those years. So here it is.
My grandmother wrote down a lot of recipes from friends… especially from her hairdresser Marge. But she didn’t necessarily make the recipes in question. I’m pretty sure this one is an exception.
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.
This recipe is written on the back of a letter from my youngest uncle to my great aunt Bessie, who was such a wonderful person that I named one of my children after her. Herring with milch is a very traditional Eastern European/Ashkenazic dish. Milt/milch is the male fish equivalent of roe, and considered a delicacy. I’m not sure where you can get a herring with milt today, but if you have a fishmonger who sells these… here’s a recipe for how to deal with it to make spiced pickled herring with it.
My aunt and uncle lived next door to me in childhood, and I grew up in my aunt’s kitchen as if it were my own. Her Sephardic cooking was very different than the Ashkenazic cooking of the rest of the family, but I thought nothing of this because I ate it so often. Somehow all these different flavor profiles worked just fine together, with little to no distinction being made. I wish more of the world worked together just as easily.
Vicky was my aunt’s aunt, so related to me by marriage. My aunt’s family always treated me as their own… I did not realize until I was in my teens that I was not a blood relative, so kind were they. My grandparents were great friends with my aunt’s parents, and socialized with them whenever possible. My aunt is of Sephardi heritage, and the two families exchanged recipes often, each mystified by the other’s flavor palette. I was not surprised to find an “Aunt Vicky Recipe” in my grandma’s recipe box.