Holding memories

Last night my youngest and I went to see the delayed by Covid, New York City live-in-person premier of a wonderful poignant funny film made by my friend Judith Helfand.

You can watch the trailer above or watch the entire movie by clicking on this link Love & Stuff (well, only until November of this year).

Watching this movie that deals so much with the objects in our lives that carry the memories of people who are no longer with us was so right for me this week.

I have spent two days this week making what for my family, for me are the touchstone foods of the High Holiday season. I made a big pot of tzimmis earlier this week.

I more or less followed the recipe I extracted from my mother during a very long digressive conversation more than thirty years ago.

I wrote out more explicit directions here. I am my mother's child so the directions are a bit digressive but it is hard to get tzimmis wrong as long as you have lots of meat and root vegetables cooked along with brown sugar and sour salt for a long long time.

In all honesty, I didn't make enough tzimmes, so it will be served as a side dish and not a main dish.

Today was stuffed cabbage day. I had steamed all of the cabbage leaves a couple of days ago which made assembly much easier. To my friend Anne from Quincy---yes with raisins, sorry.

I am writing this several hours after this photo was taken and the cabbage is still simmering away in the oven.

I was thinking last night that I pretty much have satisfied my need to connect with my no longer living parents through the big holiday cooking I do. And then I remembered the bag my husband brought home from our storage unit earlier in the week.

He brought home a bag filled with my mother's textiles.

There was a collection of brand new, never used dishtowels to be put out when there was company. Please allow me a digression, during my mother's Shiva I put out a dishtowel with the Remick's of Quincy price tag still on it. Remicks had been shuttered for several decades by the time my mother had died. These towels were more recent but still unused.

Also unused was this set of luncheon napkins I had made for my mother out of Liberty of London tana lawn backed with cotton batiste in slate blue

Continuing in the theme of saving for nice...

Was this set of beautiful hand woven placemats. Actually one of them was used on the center of our kitchen table with a ceramic vase of seasonal dried flowers in the center. Just one of the set was used. The other five napkins all have their original tags.

The hand woven placemat replaced this little cloth which had the center of the table honors for several years before.

I don't know where this little cloth came from but I suspect that it is Scandinavian in origin. My mother's Hebrew name was Zipporah, bird so I suspect it may have been a gift .

Both the handwoven cloth and the bird cloth lived in the top center drawer of the dining room buffet that held our Shabbat candlesticks. Another resident of the drawer was

the lace mantilla my mother wore when she lit candles. I remember that this mantilla replaced a less elegant lace head covering made out of a much lesser nylon lace. This is lace appliqued onto silk tulle.

The last item in this bundle from the past was

the shadow work dresser scarf that lived on my mother's dresser for all of my childhood. Seeing this piece---now yellowed, felt like a visit from my mother herself. I plan on giving the dresser scarf a good soak and restoring it to glory.

So returning to the topic of Judith's movie, Love & Stuff. Not long after Judith's mother died she asked me to turn a bundle of her mother's scarves into a Jewish object to be used to wrap up her new baby at her baby naming. You can see the piece in progress here and see it completed here. You will see the piece in the movie. ( Yes, I was filmed --twice but the movie isn't about me so I don't appear in the film.)

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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