Potatoes for Dessert
My mother was a wonderfully inventive cook, until age caught up with her
My mother was a wonderful cook — not gourmet but (almost) always delicious comfort food. When there were family gatherings, they were generally at our house because my mother loved to cook and “cater.”
Almost every Sunday, the extended family (all the aunts and uncles — my grandmother’s siblings and their spouses — and some of the cousins) came over after lunch and stayed for dinner. Because several of the older generation were kosher, they wouldn’t eat meat at our house, so dinner was always dairy. It doesn’t sound like much, but my mom would make egg salad, tuna salad, a green salad, and often a kugel or pasta of some sort. To this day, I don’t think anyone makes egg salad as my mother did! I don’t know what she did that made it different from any other or if it was just the love I tasted in hers, but I have never had anybody else’s that could compare.
In those days, people of Grandma’s generation didn’t live as long as we do today, so whenever one of them turned 60 there was a big family party, usually at our house. Most of the food was “Jewish” and there was always a “chopped liver pineapple” — my mother’s specialty. She made her own chopped liver and shaped it into an oval on a platter. Coming out of the top she’d place the leaves of a pineapple. She’d score lines on the liver to resemble the pattern of the pineapple rind and at each cross put a slice of pimento-filled olive. I know it sounds ridiculous but everyone who saw it thought it was so pretty! (Or they were just being kind!)
Other things she made were just as odd — by today’s standards. She’d make chicken soup and put ketchup in to make tomato soup. In fact, almost everything had ketchup in it or on it! Ketchup, I was told, was “Jewish spaghetti sauce” because that was what went on our pasta. And ketchup was the topping to her meatloaf and what we dipped everything into.
Sometimes Mommy would try out new recipes. One that became one of her favorites to make was chicken livers and peas. She’d sauté the livers with onions and throw in a can of peas. Again, I know it sounds horrid but it was great on rice! I’ve often thought to make it but I don’t think anyone else would think it is as wonderful as I do!
My mother felt very strongly that meals should be “proper.” So, every meal had to have a set table. She never allowed bottles on the table — no soda bottles, no ketchup unless it was in a little bowl; even milk for coffee had to be in a pitcher. To this day, with my mother gone for so many years, if I put a bottle on the table I say, “don’t tell Mommy!”
Passover was not the big deal meal that it is in our house today, but after Bubby was unable to make it, we always had a “seder,” which in Mommy’s case was just another excuse to make a big meal with cranberry pot roast (which has become a staple in my seders).
And she made a great Thanksgiving — traditional turkey and stuffing and “sweet potato titties!” Sometimes she made sweet potato casserole with marshmallows but we all loved titties, ice cream scoops of mashed sweet potatoes with a mini marshmallow placed strategically on top to resemble, you guessed it, a nipple! My mother was nothing if not classy!
Whenever I came home from college, my mother knew that I’d want London broil and lokshen and cheese. These are two entrees that she’d always make together because I’d be so excited to have them. She would slather the meat with Chinese duck sauce and Daddy would barbecue it. She’d make the lokshen with wide egg noodles and pot cheese and we’d sprinkle sugar and cinnamon on top. I make it now, but I can’t find pot cheese anywhere so I have to use cottage cheese. It’s good, but not the same.
I also loved her “soup meat,” a hearty vegetable barley soup (Manischewitz dry soup mix) with flanken. Flanken is like beef short ribs but cut differently. The best part was the meat cooked into the thick broth with the bones left to suck on! I know, awful! But it really wasn’t. I adored that soup!
Mommy never really gave me lessons on cooking — I just picked things up by watching her. But one thing she did teach me was how to make salami and eggs! The first thing you do is fry the salami (kosher only). You can tell the salami is done on the first side when it resembles a bubble and then flip it. Only then should you add your eggs!
When we moved to Michigan and would come to New York for visits, Mommy would buy all our favorite foods and spend hours preparing and serving. For breakfast, she’d stand over the stove making cream of wheat or gashouse eggs (a slice of bread with a hole cut in the middle and an egg broken into the space then fried — and then, of course, served with ketchup). She’d serve bagels and lox for our traditional Sunday breakfast, with cream cheese, pickled herring, whitefish salad, chubs, onions, tomatoes, onion rolls, and coffee cake.
Lunch was all sorts of cold cuts, all the leftovers from breakfast (if any), and salads (from the supermarket deli section — not homemade, unless it was egg salad).
Dinner was her glory meal. She’d usually have more than one entrée, multiple vegetables and potatoes. Dessert was typically canned fruit salad or applesauce followed up by coffee, tea and Entenmanns’s cake. No one ever went hungry at my mom’s house! In fact, as we were eating one meal she’d ask us what we wanted for the next one!
As time went on and Mommy got frailer, she still tried to be the perfect hostess. But her meals got simpler; often only one entrée and more than one meal would be just reheated leftovers. She really tried but it got more challenging for her to see, stand and concentrate on what she was doing. And she would often forget part of the meal — which is why once we got potatoes for dessert!
