Nostalgia and Food Friday

Usually I end my Friday posts with some music videos. Today I start my post with one.

My parents used to sing this song often on long car trips. my earliest childhood was filled with many car trips to visit my ailing grandparents.

I am not exactly sure why this has been my earworm for the past while but I decide to look it up. The melody is an old russian military march, the words

רְשׁוּת הַדִּבּוּר לֶחָבֵר פָּרַבֶּלוּם

רְשׁוּת הַדִּבּוּר לֶחָבֵר תַּת-מִקְלָע

בְּעַד אַחִים טְבוּחִים בַּגֶּטוֹ,

שֶׁלֹּא הִגִּיעוּ לִגְבוּלָהּ –

נִתֵּן –

רְשׁוּת הַדִּבּוּר...

בְּעַד סְפינַת גּוֹלִים נוֹדֶדֶת

שֶׁלֹּא הִגִּיעָה לְאַרְצָהּ –

נִתֵּן –

רְשׁוּת הַדִּבּוּר...

A rough translation is

It's time to give the floor to our friend Parabellum

the right to speak to our friend the sub machine gun

on behalf of our brothers slaughtered in the ghettos that didn't get to arrive at our borders

on behalf of the ship bobbing on the ocean that hasn't been allowed to dock on it's shores

The song was written and first performed as a piece of political sarcasm in 1943 in reaction to the British White Paper that essentially shut down Jewish immigration to Palestine during the Shoah. There were strict quotas set and the British authorities didn't even allow that quota to be filled.

A Parabelum was a commonly used German gun. German forces were in North Africa, not far from Palestine, boats filled with Jews escaping the concentration camps were not allowed to dock in Palestine.

This song became one of the marching songs of the Palmach

So that's your history lesson for today.

So now back to food as it is Friday. tonight's main dish, chicken has been pulled out of the freezer. I had made it during the cooking rush of Rosh HaShanah. I am so happy to have it on hand during this short Friday. we will be having a green salad and pasta cooked in chicken juices from a previous week.

My husband is usually agnostic about food, so when he asks me to make something I will. this morning he wondered if I would bake a dessert. It is cool and autumnal, so I made up a cake for the season.

I faked a spiced sweet potato and granny smith apple cake. It smells really good so I am hopeful. the downside of faking a cake as opposed to actually using a recipe is that you can't exactly be sure of the result. If you go into the adventure of faking a cake with wide parameters of what would be acceptable then you will be fine. I plan to cut the cake into squares.I was even brave and made a streusel topping. It's a first for me. Several weeks ago my sister described how she made such a toppings so I more or less followed her directions.

It is time to shift your brain again to a different topic

There have been wildfires for the past week or so in both New York and New Jersey. I open my living room windows each morning so our apartment doesn't smell stuffy. This morning I let in a whole lot of wood smoke.

I know that I should feel terrible about all of the woodlands that are burning. But the smell reminds of ob the best smell of the fall, that of burning leaves. I also remember walking home from the Quincy Center Station on chilly evenings and smelling the fires neighbors had set up in their fireplaces. it seemed like a promise of warmth and family. I actually do hope for a good rain to put out the fires but until then I love this reminder of crisp New England autumns.

Shabbat Shalom!

מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים

וְנֶאֱמָן אַתָּה לְהַחֲיוֹת מֵתִים: בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים You are faithful to restore the dead to life. Blessed are You, Adonoy, Resurrector of the dead. That particular line is recited at every single prayer service every day three times a day, unless you use a Reform or Reconstructionist prayer book . In those liturgies instead of praising God for resurrecting the dead God is praised for giving life to all. I am enough of a modern woman, a modern thinker, to not actually believe in the actual resurrection of the dead. I don't actually expect all of the residents of the Workmen's Circle section of Mount Hebron cemetery in Queens to get up and get back to work at their sewing machines. I don't expect the young children buried here or the babies buried here to one day get up and frolic. Yet, every single time I get up to lead services I say those words about the reanimating of the dead with every fiber of my being. Yesterday, I e...

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...

Food friday - your grandmother's food processor

My grandmother bought my mother this wooden bowl and a chopping knife, known in Yiddish as a hock-messer, soon after my parents got married. Yes, she also got them a dairy set as well. these wooden bowls and chopping knives were a big part of food prep when I was growing up. meatloaf and meat balls were mixed in this bowl. Chopped liver was made in this bowl as well. Sundays we often made chicken salad for lunch made out of chicken left over from Shabbat chopped with vegetables and mayo. That too, was made in this bowl. When I was in college my parents got their first food processor and the chopping bowls were not used as much. Several years ago, my father asked if i would like the bowls and the hock-messers. I was happy to have them. I like the sheer physicality of chopping up a big bowl of stuff into teeny pieces. While the wooden bowls have stood up well to the years of use, the hock-messers had not. The bladed which were bolted into their handles, wobbled. The blades wouldn't ...

sarah in nyc

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