Post Passover ironing

My youngest and I were both at the kitchen table this evening. He is making himself a duct tape wallet to replace the one he has lost earlier in the week. I am ironing some of the cloths and napkins that we used during Passover.

As I was ironing the napkins pictured below my son mentioned that when I die he does not want to inherit the napkins. He went on a riff about how it’s stupid to have stuff and not use it.

I responded that these napkins were probably about one hundred years old and were probably not used for the past many decades. They are part of my stash of Vivian treasures. I told my son that many people would not use the napkins because they were so old. I explained about how I liked using them.

As I ironed the dozen napkins I could see how they all had the same monogram but they were not exactly identical. Some of the monograms looked quite different from the back. I thought about how nice it was to use the napkins with my mother’s Israeli embroidered cloth from 1955.

My son then offered that if he could use them as napkins, he would not give them away or sell them when I died.

I finished ironing the dozen napkins and then got to work on some of the doilies we had used during the holiday. I’m not a fussy hostess at all. I like to keep things simple and comfortable when I serve. I have inherited serving dishes and linens from another era. I have inherited so many of them that it’s simply foolish not to use them.

I had grown up using paper doilies on serving plates for small desserts. So now I use the real thing, embroidered linen,

This may have been a luncheon placemat from a set or perhaps just a small dresser scarf.

In this case I have both the silver plate bread dish as well as the Battenberg lace trimmed liner.

I know, this rate pretty high up on the list of linens one does NOT really need. But I have more than one.

I even have more than one silver plate bread dish. So now my useless serving dishes can be properly accessorized.

Despite the fact that it’s easy to live a fulfilled and fulfilling life without such frippery, I have become quite fond of these small pieces. Most of my mother’s elegant stash of linens were hand made but for commercial sale.

Much of Vivian’s stash was made at home for a particular household. Some pieces are pieced together from bits of older linens that had seen better days. Some are just a bit wonky, perhaps made by a young needlewoman early in her career. Others seem to be cobbled together from bits of pieces of trims that were hanging around. Some are beautifully patched. As I use these old pieces and launder and iron them, I feel like I am having a conversation with the women who made them decades ago for a different sort of a life in Austria.

After a while my son noted how restful it felt making something. Well, yeah.

His wallet looks awfully good and even has a pocket for a guitar pick.

On a different note, my husband and I are going on vacation for a week, no kids, just the two of us. It’s the longest we have been away without kids.

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...

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night. I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1) אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2) אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3) יָאֵר יְהֹ...

A Passover loss

My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin. You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...

sarah in nyc

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