Tag: latkes

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Food Keeps Me Alive

Dobosch Torte

I read on Google that lemons are the world’s healthiest food. Imagine that! Go suck on a lemon if you’re hungry. Mexican food can be dreadful or delicious, as most expats here know. And all foods are a constant source of pleasure and controversy.

I grew up in a foodie family devoted to German, American and Continental cookery. Our guru was Grandma Elsie who ran the food fest with skill and laughter. I said the following about her in my memoir. When we ate weekly at her house,

the food was invariably superb. I would describe it as Continental-American-Jewish. Feather-light matzoh ball soup was a favorite. Latkes, extra-thin and crisp, were called German potato pancakes. A rare specialty of the house was Dobosch Torte, a rich sponge cake with twenty-one very thin layers interspersed with frosting of Maillard’s chocolate (ordered special from New York). This left everyone groaning. Elsie ran the show with humor and love. “Eat up,” she would say, “there’s another one (turkey, roast, etc.) out in the kitchen.”

Elsie’s pickles were famous and inimitable. She made them in big crock pots and passed the recipe on to my mother and sister who unfortunately could never quite duplicate her results. Food and its preparation is often the source of some mystery.

When you’re retired and looking for things to engage yourself, cooking is a welcome creative activity that gets your mind off everything else. In fact, cooking is therapy. A good friend brought me some nutless pesto that she had made. (I have a serious allergy to nuts.) I put some in a spaghetti sauce I was making, and it was a revelation.

At the supermarket the plastic-wrapped hamburger meat looked awful—pulpy and full of fat. I found some beef chunks and ground my own, so much better. The other night some folks came over for white chicken chili—beans, broth, chicken, corn, lime, onion, poblanos and spices. It was the first time I had made it, and fortunately it evoked compliments.

Over the last year or so I lost some weight, mostly because I was cooking better and eating better. The joy of cooking is more than the name of a famous old cookbook. It’s the essence of gastronomy.

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Being Jewish

First of all, being Jewish means recognizing your differences from the non-Jews, the goyim. For me this didn’t really happen until high school, as reported in my memoir:

Once, walking home from high school I got in a fist-fight with an Irish kid who called me all kinds of rich-Jew-bastard names and happened to be a good lightweight boxer from the other side of town. It was totally humiliating. I had no idea of how to duke it out, none, and he kept popping me until finally I just walked away in disgrace, blood from my nose dripping on the snow. After this incident, the kid would go out of his way to say friendly hellos to me at school. I wanted to take his life.

Jews like me were brought up to be non-confrontational. In some ways we thought of ourselves as more like the gentiles than our co-religionists. And, it should be said, most of us didn’t have any real sense of religion, the stark, grim old-testament stuff that fueled our more conservative and orthodox brethren.

Reform Jews like me and my parents were practiced hypocrites about religion. My parents rarely went to temple (never to be called “schul,” of course). But they wanted me to be grounded in the faith so I went to what was called Sunday School starting in, I think, the sixth grade.

Finally, I found it just boring and unenlightening, and I told my mother I wanted to quit. She said that first I should talk with the rabbi, an amiable man named Dick Hertz, whose name made him the butt of many jokes. But I stood my ground and the elders gave way. To this day, I have nothing to do with the religion, though I love Jewish culture, its myths and memes and street wisdom.

In my teens I laughed at the funny pseudo-Yiddish jazz that Slim Gaillard recorded, tunes like “Drei Six Cents” and “Dunkin’ Bagel.” People like Slim and Cab Calloway weren’t mocking the language; they were having fun with it. Slim seemed to look at Judaism the way I did, as an amusing cultural artifact. Mickey Katz was funny, man. After them came Sid Caesar and a wave of Jewish comedians like Lenny Bruce. Mel Brooks was my hero later on.

Jewish humor finally permitted folks to dwell on the horrors of World War II after it was over. Earlier, my parents and grandfather Sam did not discuss these things, though Sam sent money early on to save some of the family in Germany. All of it was too grim to confront and, like many, they were living a life of ease.

The 1950s were a time of conformity, as we know. Life had been good for a lot of Americans during the war, and now it was time for some Jews to relax a bit and assimilate culturally. My family was part of this. They made a big deal out of food and sumptuous meals, with fare like matzoh ball soup and latkes (referred to as “German potato pancakes”).

In my later years I strove to recover the truths of what cultural Judaism had become since my family had glossed over it. I finally could take pride in my culture and its ability to survive not only Hitler but a whole history of antisemitism. As I grew older my nose, formerly straight, began to droop. You can’t read too much into that.