I never have knowingly eaten kosher meat.
And then I remembered; being sent down to the kosher butchers as a child to buy a boiling fowl for my mother.
How rapidly memories return... Watching her clean a chicken so carefully & thoroughly. Knowing that she’d been made an orphan at an early age I always wondered who had taught her. A box of matches sat by the sink, with which to singe every hair. When I think of the way I clean a chicken, make sure the giblets aren’t inside, wipe its bum and slam it in the oven, it’s not a skill I inherited from mother.
The unformed eggs from the boiling fowl were poached in the soup. The giblets would be added, the liver saved for chopped liver. The heart was given to the cat but the cooks perk according to my mother was the pupik, the belly button. Bet you didn’t know that chickens have belly buttons.
The food we ate was Ashkenazi, from Eastern Europe. This explained the passion my mother has for putting sugar on the weirdest things. Sugar on omelettes and potato latkes. Sugar in stews; the attempt to sweet and sour everything possible.
Sunday morning had its own routine.
Hebrew classes, (alas), down the road for sweets & fizzy drinks, and to Jacks, the much loved delicatessen, always crowded on Sunday mornings with people talking as much as shopping. At the front of the shop, Jack himself would wield his long serrated knife and expertly carve soft slices of smoked salmon. Alongside him sat deep dark barrels of new green pickled cucumbers lurking beneath the surface in their sweet salty brine. At the back of the shop we picked up little plastic tubs of chilled rich cream cheese, chopped herring, and chopped liver. There were piles of bagels and platzels. Nothing varied, everything the same. Cake was pound cake, with the same piped icing around the edge. Bread was bagels, white caraway seed rye bread, soft sweet platted cholla.
Then home to watch Thunderbirds, eat lunch, watch The Persuaders, and begrudgingly head upstairs to do our homework. With the sound of Stars on Sunday; down to tea, supper, play time, bed.
Home cooked food if Jewish never varied either. Fish balls always had their little circle of carrot anointing each one. Fish fillets were fried in egg and matzo meal and served cold. If poached it was salmon, if chopped, it was herring. There was no salami but there was Hebrew National wurst, and instead of sausages, viennas, both bright red, no doubt with food colouring. To this day I won’t eat frankfurters unless I know the provenance of the meat.
I have an unfinished poem about the way food identifies us. It starts;-
‘We were stained with chrain our Jewish stigmata….’
I took it as a complement if someone told me that I was the most un-Jewish person I know, but I still love meeting Jewish people. Like members of a secret club, we know what chrain is. We understand the pain of Hebrew classes, and being forced to go to shul. We know what it means to have Jewish grandparents. We know the jokes and we know the reality.
There were occasional trips to Blooms and other East End Jewish delis, for barley soup, salt beef, fish balls and latkas, but it wasn’t a regular occurrence. We were just as likely to eat out at a Chinese restaurant or a vegetarian one if with our salad loving grandmother.
At junior school, during Passover we were excited to be called apart. Mainly because we got to bring a packed lunch to school. And the foods so strange to others were normal to us. We made Scooby Doo sandwiches with matzos and marmite, piling little pieces up as high as we could. Nibbling at our almond biscuits, we swapped and rooted around in each others lunch boxes.
Never one of those families that searched out every scrap of levan and had separate crockery for milk and meat, my mother and her friends still threw themselves with gusto into Passover baking and the almond industry did very well.
Cinnamon balls, coconut pyramids, almond macaroons, almond pudding, and the sedar night meal with burnt eggs and a lamb bone on the table. We ate eggs in salt water because we liked them. I’ve not thought about that dish for many years.
Back in the Jewish kitchen, my mothers’ food bible was and is the redoubtable Florence Greenberg, first published around 1934 and revised in 1951 to include ‘foreign’ influences in the kitchen.
Commissioned by her husband, Leopold Greenberg the controlling editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Florence wrote the JC’s first cookery column. She served as a nurse in Gallipoli during the First World War, and was decorated for bravery. Whether this contributed anything to her determination to make it easy for Jewish women to cook is not recorded.
‘Let’s see what Florrie says’ was my mother’s usual phrase. Whilst not bothered about keeping kosher, there was never a breath of bacon in the house. No pork, no shellfish. Once when our next door neighbours gave us a box of frozen prawns, they stayed in the back of the freezer for years. When I dared to defrost them mum wrinkled her nose in disgust and gave me no encouragement as to what to do with them. They ended up in the bin.
At school we were introduced to pale, flabby pork (with thick gravy and apple sauce) bacon rolls served with liver, and sad, thin, pork sausages. But still the only sausages at home were beef ones.
We were amazed to see our father and uncle strolling along the seafront at Cliftonville munching on shellfish, a trail of pink carcasses crushed by the disapproving heels of my mother and aunts spike heels.
The introduction of non Jewish foods was a drip drip, dripping, slow and steady. When I left home and could eat what I liked, I still found myself repulsed by my flatmates eating habits. Butter on a meat sandwich? Yuck. Bacon on a roasting chicken? Can I sneak it off without them noticing?
And do I still eat Jewish food? You bet. I make the best chopped liver, my chicken soup is fantastic, and I’ve occasionally attempted fish balls. I love chopped herring and I’ll go out of my way to find a decent bagel. The difference is, the meat I use is free range or organic. I’ve made this food for non Jewish friends and they always love it. Food as ever, crosses boundaries especially when it’s comfort food and Jewish food is nothing but.
It took years before I ventured to eat a cheeseburger. A ham and cheese sandwich still feels wrong. I can and do eat lardo, air dried ham, sausages, salami. Hand made sausage rolls, scotch eggs and pork pies are bliss; give me a decent bit of free range pork and I’ll embrace it. And I’m sorry Mother, but I love crispy pig ears.
Just don’t expect me to put butter on my bacon sandwich.
*For those who need to know, chrain is a rather delicious condiment, a combination of horseradish and beetroot.
Wurst is beef salami
Viennas are of the frankfurter family
You’re in the wrong place if you need to know what a bagel is.
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