Food coverage is supported by a generous donation from Susan and Moses Libitzky.
For most of us, latkes are simply a delicious reminder of the resilience of the Maccabees and of the temple’s oil lasting miraculously for eight days. “They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat,” goes the Jewish adage.
But for retired professor and Holocaust scholar Arthur Shostak, the symbolism is more personal: Latkes are a comfort food that remind him of his own resilience when Catholic kids bullied him on his way home from grade school in Brooklyn.
“Anxiety is always in the corner of the mind of an American Jew,” he said.
Shostak shared his memory at “The Dinner Party,” a Sept. 24 event tying food to memory at the San Francisco Campus for Jewish Living, where he is a resident.
Art and music therapy are already well-established, non-pharmacological modalities of care for those with memory loss. The idea of using food therapy to stimulate memories is being studied now by Jake Broder, an Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health at UCSF’s Global Brain Health Institute, and Zach Bandler, also a GBHI fellow.
It was under those auspices that they brought “The Dinner Party” to the SFCJL. At a public program co-sponsored by J. the night after the dinner, “Food for Thought: The Power of Food for People with Dementia,” I moderated a conversation with Broder and Dr. Virginia Sturm, a professor in the departments of neurology and psychiatry at UCSF. A short film about the project was shown.
For two weeks prior to the Sept. 24 dinner, Broder and Bandler spent time with five residents of the campus, all of whom have some memory loss. Broder, an actor and playwright, interviewed participants, helping to draw out recipes from their pasts and the associated memories, and then cooking the dishes with them. Bandler, a filmmaker, captured all of it on film.
They hope the pilot model can be replicated in other places, further exploring how recalling favorite foods and tasting the dishes can spark memories and stories among those with memory loss.
The dinner was a multicultural representation of comfort food in its many forms (carbs and fried foods dominated). Jewish residents at the campus make up about 40% of the population, and the participants were ethnically diverse: Lee Lamb, an African American woman, spoke about her grandmother’s okra that she grew in her Georgia garden and then fried it. Geri Garcia, who is Mexican American, chose her mother’s chile relleños, describing in detail how her mother looked. Ron Martorana shared his Italian family’s recipe for spaghetti sauce with beef, which reminded him of his return from Vietnam. Alice Piccus, who grew up in Shanghai, chose an almond cookie. And Shostak shared his memories of latkes, which he said represent generosity, abundance and Jews being secure enough in a place to have the time to make them. To him, they are a source of comfort.
Shostak ended his memory with a bit of humor. As a widower, he said, “If I were to be casting about for an amorous relationship, I would sit across the table from her and ask her a very important question: ‘Sour cream or applesauce?’ And no matter what she answered, she would pass, provided she didn’t say, ‘What’s a latke?’”
After the laughter subsided, a longtime campus board member, Jim Davis, told me, “Whenever I have a latke from now on, I’ll think of him.”
Martorana, who grew up in San Francisco near the SFCJL as the youngest of three children, invited his two older sisters to be his guests. They agreed that the tomato sauce was a good replica of their mother’s, except that it was missing the Italian sausage (as per the Jewish facility not serving pork).
Piccus, a former head of the Christie’s auction house in Hong Kong, began by telling the group she was shy, though she later told me she was glad she shared her story. One of her earliest memories was of her father, a journalist who wrote in English, bringing almond cookies for her every day when he came home from work.
“They weren’t fancy,” she said. “They were small and crunchy and tasted of vanilla and almonds.”
But then came the Japanese occupation during World War II, and her father started receiving death threats. It became so serious that he had to flee. The family stayed behind, and for a long time they feared he was dead after learning that his ship was sunk by a Japanese torpedo. But he had already disembarked, and at some point they received an encoded message that he was alive.
At the end of the war, her father returned, but he didn’t look like the man she remembered.
“I hung back,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if he was an impostor. But then he said, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t go to the office, so I didn’t get to the store to get you the cookies you love so much, my dear.’”
She paused.
“And then I knew. I ran into his arms. It really was him. My father really was back home to us. And this is that cookie.”
Small Bites
On a related note, cookbook author Shannon Sarna led a session on food memories at Camp Newman’s first-ever Jewish Food & Wine Retreat last month — next year’s is already on the books for early September — where more than 50 people gathered at the Reform-run camp in Santa Rosa to eat, drink and learn about wine and cheese-tasting, pickling, cocktail mixing and much more.
Sarna said that what we consider comfort foods or memorable foods may not necessarily be good food. That really stuck out to me.
“There are lots of examples from our childhoods where the foods we were served were ritualistic, and they provided that sense of tradition, like ‘If Aunt Ida doesn’t make that kugel, it’s not a holiday,’ she said. “But do you like it? It doesn’t matter.”
This theory was illustrated when Sarna asked people to share a core Jewish food memory.
Roberta Weber, who grew up in Oakland but now lives in Oakley, said that in her family, her grandmother was always the one who made the gefilte fish.
While her grandmother was an excellent cook, she said, she also happened to be a heavy smoker, “and she always had a cigarette hanging from her mouth,” Weber said.
Inevitably, whatever she made, but especially her gefilte fish, would have this “faint taste and smell of smoke,” she said. “It wasn’t the same without the ashes.”
When Weber took over gefilte duties for the family seders, her brother told her, “It’s not her gefilte fish unless you taste Granny’s smoke in it.”
Also at the Camp Newman retreat, I convened a panel of five Bay Area Jewish delis, something not possible until recently, since most opened during the Covid pandemic. They were: San Francisco’s Wise Sons; Drewish in Healdsburg; Ethel’s in Petaluma; Loveski in Napa and Larkspur, and the soon-to-open Bubbala’s in San Anselmo. All brought tastes to share. Evan Bloom of Wise Sons was the elder statesman of the deli owners, even though he was the youngest there.
A question that elicited some fun responses was inspired by one of my own memories from many years ago, when I took my visiting East Coast family to Saul’s Deli in Berkeley. At the time, then-co-owner Peter Levitt shared that one of his favorite questions to ask customers was, “Is anything OK?”
I asked those present how they deal with overly critical customers who share mostly unsolicited feedback.
Bloom got a huge laugh when he told the crowd that his training manual has a section for new employees called “I am from New York.” Drew Ross of Healdburg’s Drewish Deli said the most common refrain he hears is, “You know what you should do?” And both Nick Abrams of Ethel’s and Sharin Mendelson, general manager of the Larkspur location of Loveski, said they just do their best to listen. “Some people just need to be heard,” Mendelson said. It was clear she was talking about a lot more than just food.
Israeli British chef Yotam Ottolenghi is touring the area soon to promote his latest cookbook, “Comfort.” His talk at the Sacramento Public Library, where he’s in conversation with Sacramento Bee food writer Benjy Egel, happens to be on Erev Yom Kippur, Oct. 11. Apparently, they don’t need us; it’s full.
The Bay Area’s culinary community received a huge shock just over a month ago with the news that Hugh Groman, a Berkeley chef and founder of the Hugh Groman Group, had died unexpectedly on Aug. 29. He was 53. I did a full obituary about him for Berkeleyside and had written about him in my J. column in 2020.
Groman was raised in Lafayette, and after attending Yale University and learning the food trade at New York City’s Gramercy Tavern under head chef Tom Colicchio and owner Danny Meyer, he returned to the Bay Area and lived in Berkeley. Temple Isaiah, his childhood synagogue, was a huge help when he was just starting his business, which later came to include Greenleaf Platters and Phil’s Sliders, and his food could be found at many a Jewish event over the years.
My 2020 column in J. about him began:
“‘Hughie, where are the forks?’ It’s become an occupational hazard that when Hugh Groman caters an event at Temple Isaiah, the Lafayette synagogue where he became a bar mitzvah, inevitably someone will call him by his childhood nickname.”
I also shared an anecdote about how as a child he decided he’d make his own potato chips, and caused a kitchen fire by leaving the pot of oil on a burner unattended to go for a swim.
To know or work with Hugh was to love Hugh. His sister Nina Ruebner, who also works for the Groman Group, told me they will carry on without him, which is a testament to the team he assembled. But it’s hard to imagine the Bay Area culinary world, Burning Man and so many other communities he was a part of without him. May his memory be for a blessing.