Back to the land of the living

I feel a little like the family in that famous Jewish folk tale once the ckickens and the cows and the goats were out of the house.

Things are far quieter.

My community does death well. We feed mourners. So all week, beautiful comfort food arrived to give us sustenance and comfort. The food people cooked for us wasn't flashy trendy food.

One of the nights of the shiva my dear friend Elisheva told me about a stressful moment in her life. Her husband decided to make things better. he took Elisheva to a diner and instructed to cook to make Elisheva soft eggs made with lots of butter. She said that the apple cake she made me was the cake equivalent of soft eggs. Elisheva can make seriously fancy cakes.The apple cake was truly soft eggs with lots of butter. You put that cake in your mouth and knew that someone really cared about you.

Who knew that tea sandwiches served with strong tea could make one feel so loved and cared for? That a 1950's noodle kugel made with canned fruit cocktail could make me feel five years old again, as if a soft old lady with floppy upper arms were handing me that plate of kugel with a nice smile on her face.

It was so lovely to be cared for during out time of sadness. it is so nice to stumble back to the land of the living.

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Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee. If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it. My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid. I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed. A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

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מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים

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sarah in nyc

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