Coming of age in a suburb where salt and pepper were considered exotic spices, I grew up eating corned beef on white bread with Miracle Whip. My parents served egg nog for Chanukah. I had never heard of kugel, kishke or knishes. The thought of chopped liver made my stomach roil. And don’t even get me started on tongue.
When I became active in the Jewish community, this culture gap became embarrassing. On our second date, my now-husband served me an appetizer of chopped herring and I had no idea what it was. Since so much of Jewish life is about food, my milquetoast upbringing made me a woman without a country, a minister without portfolio in the Jewish world.
I now know a number of women who are converting to Judaism, and most of them worry about what kind of Jewish moms they’ll be without family recipes to hand down to their daughters. I feel their pain.
When I graduated from college, all I had in my Jewish recipe file was my grandmother’s date cake studded with bits of Hershey bars. So I was delighted that when Joel and I got engaged, my mom’s chavurah (group of friends) offered to host a recipe shower to celebrate. Imagine my surprise when members of the Temple Sisterhood and friends proudly presented me with such recipes as Adele’s baked brie en croute, Jan’s Irish soda bread, and Deanna’s authentic spaghetti sauce.
Thankfully, my mother-in-law came through with her noodle kugel recipe, my aunt ponied up her mom’s recipe for poppy seed cookies and my mom valiantly reconstructed my great-aunt’s recipe for chicken soup, which I made for our first Rosh Hashanah as a married couple.
From there, I decided that it was up to me. I bought a Jewish cookbook and started to clip holiday recipes, most from the Chicago Tribune! When our daughter toddled home from preschool with recipe packets for every Jewish holiday, I tried making them. I bought the Youth Group cookbook, and asked my friends for their recipes.
Then, one Erev (night before) Chanukah when Jenna was 4, she asked me when we were making sufganiyot. Not “if,” when. My mouth went dry. Jelly doughnuts? Deep fried? I tried to deflect my little girl’s request with an offer to make latkes from actual potatoes instead of a Manishewicz box. She would not budge, patiently explaining that Israelis made sufganiyot, and so should we. I looked into my child’s earnest eyes and pulled out the canola oil.
The resulting doughnuts—and I use the term loosely—were burnt on the outside, raw on the inside. Jenna declared them delicious. The next day, she announced to her preschool class that her mother was a great Jewish cook who “always” made sufganiyot for Chanukah.
I might not have inherited all the recipes, but it no longer matters. Yes, I make my great-aunt’s chicken soup and my mother-in-law’s kugel for Shabbat, and my grandmother’s chocolate date cake makes an appearance every Sukkot. But it’s Joan Nathan’s hamentaschen for Purim, and an apple cake on Rosh Hashanah from an apple orchard’s cookbook. My cousin Emmi and I created our own flourless chocolate cake for Passover, and Jenna and I have switched to making my friend Aaron’s Sephardic-style latkes for Chanukah. I make cheese blintzes for Shavuot with a recipe I found on the Food Network website. And for any holiday dinner, when in doubt, I make my friend Lisa’s mom’s brisket.
Recently, as Jenna and I were watching “Throwdown with Bobby Flay,” she said: “Bobby Flay should challenge you to a throwdown. He could never beat your chicken soup.” And I realized that I had arrived.
Linda S. Haase Cohen is associate vice president of marketing communications for the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago.
