Family Recipes, The Stories.

Talking about recipes is a magnet for stories. Every recipe, a tale to tell. Every ingredient, a purpose. Every tradition, an innovator; a person behind the wheel of its first turn.

If food is love, dishes start as glances. Have you perfected the stare? Or the I-like-you-so-I'm-not-going-to-look-at-you? Do you throw rocks and pull hair when you crush out on someone? Are you a premature Love announcer? Would you say you could slow cook something for hours on end? Do you like courting or is first base you haven't thought about since gym class in elementary school?

I don't kiss and tell. My food reveals itself to me in its own sweet time and has been known to exit if I jinx it. Everyone I've ever worked with knows not to ask me what it is I'm working on before I've nailed it.

But of course my family has recipes like the next person. Some of them I learned and asked for recipes, others I look forward to getting to know later. A few I wish I'd made the time to see firsthand.

My mother made the best Sweet & Sour Stuffed Cabbage Jewish comfort food has ever had the pleasure of knowing. She said the dish wasn't simple because it took all day to create, but the recipe was straight out of a book. My mother never rarely cooked with recipes, she had the touch.

My mother's amazing stuffed cabbage led me to one family recipe story that is not my own, but I have told it so many times, it could be.

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There is this large Jewish family. The grandmother, who is quite elderly, is still the main cook of all the family gatherings. She will not pass on her torch, she will not let her children or grandchildren in the kitchen, and she will not share her recipes.

One morning, before light, she wakes to a pain in her chest and believes she has had a heart attack. She waits for the pain to subside, and pads down to the kitchen. Finding paper and pen, she sets herself to the task of making Stuffed Cabbage, and writing it all down.

The grandmother painstakingly writes out every detail. Each leaf is boiled just so and the filling is gathered with the lightest of touches. Pinches of this and dashes of that and splashes from various bottles go into the simmering sauce. Only the right tomatoes. They must be these golden raisins from this store. You must go to the butcher on this day and call the meat by this name. Only then will he know it is for me and give you the right part of the animal.

By afternoon her Famous Stuffed Cabbage is made and a paper recipe is produced.

When the dish is done, she sits down and calls her eldest daughter and tells her of the morning heart attack. 'But it's late afternoon now! Have you been to the hospital? Should I call an ambulance?' The daughter is frantic and can not understand why, for the life of her, her mother is as calm as a cucumber on the other end.

The daughter rushes over and takes her mother to the doctor.

The doctor says it was not a heart attack. It must have been a cramp.

The grandmother goes home, rips up the recipe and throws it away.

Comments

[whimsy2]

Wonderful story, Shuna!
I love your writing and look forward to the day when you feel "ready for Portland". You have a lot of friends here!

[Giff]

you have a wonderful touch with words Shuna. And that story at the end is marvelous!

[Diane]

Thank you for the link to the stuffed cabbage recipe. My grandma died last year at 99 (feisty and politically engaged to the last), and I've been regretting terribly the last few weeks that I never got her stuffed cabbage recipe, as I've been craving it. I miss her, and it feels like a link. Sometimes what you want just appears to you. I;'m going to try it out and see if it's the same(ish).

[Diane]

Oh, gosh - the link doesn't work! I hope it's something you can post (or maybe even e-mail to me).

Diane, It's so wonderful to hear your words here again! We missed you. There was not a link until just now. A quick look on Google produced a lot of the same recipe. I imagine my mother didn't use margarine but besides that she followed the recipe and made it hers according to her tastes and memories... ~ Shuna

[Aran]

oh how i love this post! in my mind, food is family, food is love.

[Sharon]

I love the story and your writing, Shuna.

I want to add that I don't understand the reluctance some people have to share recipes. Cooking is such a personal experience . . . everyone's touch and emphasis will naturally be a bit different.

Best wishes for your adventure in the UK.

[Malini]

Grandmothers come in all shapes and attitudes! Take mine for instance-she hates cooking, absolutely hates because the weather in India dictates that you stay as little as possible in the kitchen that fast heats up into an oven!

BUT, the dishes she makes are absolutely DIVINE. Be it a simple spinach dal or boiled potato curry or complicated Indian sweets..they all taste yummy...but no amount of cajoling would work, she has to be convinced that she needs to enter the kitchen!

I have made transatlantic calls in the dead of the night to her to confirm and clear recipes.

Just thought I would share.

[Natalie Sztern]

As a kid eating cholishkes (cabbage rolls) each time i could not eat them made with rice..used to think the rice looked like a worm - kids....to this day I do not use rice.

[Tartelette]

The foods I cook or the handwritten recipes I read from my mother and grandmother make me closer to them. Sharing a moment even miles away. Recipes are a history book as well as a story book.

[Irene]

That is SO my grandmother, it's not even funny. She is superstitious about not sharing her recipes. Of course, I don't know if there even would be a point in writing them down because she had, as you say, "the touch" and she never cooked from actual recipes, only from her head. And, naturally, everything is "a little of this and a handful of that" and the meat has to be from a specific store and the tomatoes of a specific kind. *Sigh* I love my grandma. :)