Appetizers & Sides

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.

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.

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.

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.

From the Boston Sunday Globe magazine section.

This is a pretty simple, basic stuffing recipe. It's tasty, but nothing really unusual. I think it's a good recipe to start with and if you're into more wild stuff you can use this as a base.