Lies About My Family: A Memoir

Stuffing

80 stuffing My grandmother was known for her cooking. My father remembers her canning fruit all summer—peaches, plums, cherries both sweet and sour. She stored the jars on shelves in the cellar, where they glowed deliciously in the darkness, orange, purple, red. “She would get soup meat and ask for extra bones. Those were free,” his sister, my Aunt Norma, tells me in an e-mail. “The leftover meat she would grind and make meat blintzes. With the chicken she would make soup, then roast the chicken, use the wings and feet for fricassee, and the liver she chopped with chicken fat and hard-boiled eggs and onion. So from one chicken we had several delicious meals.” That’s what she wrote: “deliciousmeals”—notexceptingeven the fat, the liver, or the feet. “It was the Depression,” she adds, and I think that it’s a good thing I was born during the prosperous fifties and did not have to endure the hardships of the older generation. I have certain textural aversions; I can’t eat even a soft-boiled egg, never mind a scaly, cartilaginous foot. What I remember of my grandmother’s cooking is strudel: she would arrive our house with a yeast version rolled with cinnamon, nuts, and raisins. That was okay. But her supreme production, which I always hoped for but which rarely appeared, was apple strudel. “When my mama made strudel she spread a white cloth 81 stuffing over the kitchen table,” says my mother. “She stretched and stretched the dough, until you could see through it.” Her comment surprises me. Usually when she talks about her mother’s cooking, it’s about the disgusting folk-cures she forced upon her, to fatten her up and stop her constant coughing: a whole onion, boiled in honey; p’tchah, calves’ foot jelly with garlic; and the dreaded, slimy guggle-muggle, a raw egg cracked into a glass of milk—which my mother in turn forced upon me, although she denies it up and down. I remember the gugglemuggle clearly. She made it with chocolate milk, which, believe me, didn’t help. Cooking makes my mother anxious—so many people to please and ingredients to assemble, and she herself has never been much of an eater. As a result, she’s terrible at it. Yet, you can’t tear her away from the stove. She takes it on, like Jesus the sins of the Christians, so others won’t suffer. “Let me make the dinner, Ma,” I suggest. “I like cooking.” I’m not saying this to persuade her; it’s the honest truth. I clip recipes from the newspaper; I subscribe to glossy magazines with pictures of roasts and cakes on the covers. My favorite day of the week is Wednesday, when the New York Times publishes its food section, while on Wednesdays my mother complains that there’s nothing to read. “No, no. I already went shopping,” she says. “You relax.” I remember clearly that it was my father’s mother who baked us apple strudel, not my mother’s—even if my father now marvels that she had the patience for such a project. On Passover she fried chremzls, matzo-meal pancakes, light and crispy, just for my mother, who adored them and who had been my grandmother ’s favorite from the moment they met. My father loves to tell the story of bringing her home to introduce her to his parents. After dinner, when my mother had disappeared into the kitchen to help out with the dishes, my grandmother pulled him to her and whispered loudly—was there any other way to whisper?—“She’s too good for you.” 82 lies about my family I fly to Florida to interview Norma about our family history, of which she is the guardian. She constructed a family tree that goes back to the eighteenth century, tape-recorded the older generation,andgatheredphotographsandotheroddsandends. She displays my great-grandfather’s samovar in her living room. “Later I’ll tell you about the samovar,” she promises. “What about it?” I ask. “Not now,” she says. I set up my tape recorder, and she begins without my having to ask her a thing: her earliest memory is of her mother chasing her around the kitchen table with a spoon. As a child, she wouldn’t eat. “Funny thing,” she says. “I was never hungry.” When her mother caught her...