Love in the Kitchen

Memoir | Nadja Maril

I remember from childhood a special sausage wrapped up in a sheet of white butcher paper. Grandmother would buy it for us at the city farmers’ market. 

Plump and pink, we cooked the links in a small tightly covered frying pan until the grease they created began to sizzle and pop. So different from the skinny little sausages in cardboard  packages from the supermarket, I wondered how they could share the same name.  The sausages were ready when the outsides were crusty and brown and the insides white and tan.

Jews were not supposed to eat pork, but my mother’s family reinterpreted the rules. Her grandmother born in Nashville, Tennessee, in deference to kosher laws didn’t serve bacon or sausage on the Sabbath that started at sundown on Friday and ended on sundown on Saturday, a day of rest and prayer observed by devout Hebrews. But on other days of the week she served whatever was in season. Her menus included glazed ham, pan fried pork chops, country sausages and Smithfield bacon alongside fresh asparagus and hand-made noodles that were said to be legendary. Traditional favorites like potato latkes and tzimmes made with carrots, sweet potato, prunes and brisket were served  alongside dishes of mashed turnips, fried chicken and catfish. She made an angel food cake, it was told to me during childhood, so light and airy it would float off the table.  

“How is that possible?” I’d ask.

“You had to be there,” Mother and Grandmother would say. 

My father’s parents came to the United States from Lithuania as teenagers. Strict Orthodox Jews, they kept a kosher household. No meat was consumed with dairy. No shellfish. No pork and no bending of the rules. Father was the youngest of six children. Butter could not be on the same table with meat. For a special treat, his mother would give him schmaltz (chicken fat) spread on rye bread. Food was precious.

When my parents got married, my father was the one who knew how to cook. He taught my mother how to make a meat loaf smothered with onions and surrounded by slices of zucchini, carrots and mushrooms.

My mother elaborated on my father’s meatloaf recipe and invested in several cookbooks including The Joy of Cooking. She became proficient at making split pea soup, lentil soup, and chicken soup with matzo balls.  Starting with the basics, she kept adding new dishes.

 I remember the first night she proudly brought a roasted pork shoulder seasoned with garlic and fennel to the dinner table. A crisp brown sheath of fat encircled the moist fragrant meat. Oven browned potatoes surrounding the roast luxuriated in the drippings. On the side were baked apples stuffed with raisins.

My father, remembering the kosher laws of his childhood, asked “What kind of meat is this?” 

“It’s good meat,” my mother answered. “Trust me.” He ate the pork reluctantly, because my mother served it. Such is love.