sarah in nyc

 I hope that all of you had lovely Sedarim, we certainly did. It was wonderful to celebrate along with our nearest and dearest. As I prepared for the holiday I really missed being able to turn to my two cooking buddies Miriam and Shawna. I always loved consulting with each of them as I planned and cooked meals for Passover. Sadly, neither is still in the land of the living.  I especially feel the loss of my friends before the holidays--because now I have to cook without them. I kept thinking about Shawna as I decorated Mrs. Pascal's sponge cake. I topped the cake, (which was the tallest cake I have ever baked-- either of the Passover or the regular variety) with a tart lemon custard. We had a batch of beautiful but sour strawberries in the fridge and I sliced them up to top the cake. I kept thinking about Shawna and how she would approach making this cake lovely for the table.As I sliced and placed the berries I had a conversation with Shawna in my head. She probably would hav...

Another treasure from Vivian VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL This table cloth was part of Vivian’s mother’s trousseau. I  believe that it may have been hand woven or woven on a barely industrial loom. You can see that Vivian’s grandmother’s monogram was embroidered on  the cloth. I saw the same monogram embroidered on her embroidered batiste night gowns as well. The cloth is wonderful but it was heavily stained when I got it. I soaked it in Borax and that helped quite a bit. Despite the Borax, there were still several large brown stains on the white parts of the cloth. Today, I took the radical step of sponging the stains with a diluted bleach solution and then washing away the bleach. Then I washed the entire cloth in the machine with no detergent. It seem to have worked. This cloth will look wonderful with both my grey meat dishes as well as with my white dairy dishes. I might need to make red napkins. I feel like a domestic goddess.

We just came off of two days of holiday followed by Shabbat. That means lots of meals. Followers of this blog have seen lots of the prep work that went into those meals. Given how I was brought up, it isn't enough to cook a good meal, the presentation of that meals matters a whole lot as well. Each meal is presented with a set table. Each table is set with  an table cloths and appropriately selected cloth napkins. During the week, those napkins are every day napkins that may or may not get starched and ironed. For holiday meals I go into my stash of vintage napkins. Today I was ironing the napkins from all of those meals. While I ironed, I remembered other meals eaten with those very napkins. Some of those napkins came into my life early in my marriage. Others came into my life via Mary, Uncle Irving''s long -time girlfriend. Those have been used in our house for the past nearly twenty years. When my mother closed up her house, she gave me many of her table cloths an...