Eyeballing the traditional foods of my Polish Jewish ancestors — the rich, fatty kreplach, the rich, fatty chopped liver and the tendency to shmear dollops of chicken fat on anything deemed not rich and fatty enough — I’ve often wondered how these people lived.
The answer is simple: They all died.
A chicken fat-based diet is surely an indicator of a culture in which one considers himself lucky if he makes it to 40 (and people have more immediate worries than heart disease). Back in the old country, if the cold or Cossacks didn’t get you, the kreplach would.
Case in point: gribbenes. A dish consisting of rendered chicken fat, onions and chicken skin fried in yet more fat is the gastronomic equivalent of Russian roulette. Zorba the Greek may have temporarily staved off the pressures of life’s catastrophes by doing the syrtaki; Eastern European Jews just ate incredibly fattening food.
Back in Poland, my great-grandmother sustained the five of her children who survived infancy by gleaning previously ploughed fields for the odd potato.
The searing pain of starvation was a constant presence for the Podbielak family. The youngest child, Joseph, came to this country scarred by the experience, in more ways than he knew. The after-effects of a malnourished childhood left him dead at 58 following his seventh heart attack.
For these people a greasy blintz
wasn’t a health hazard. It was a dream. Grandpa Joe may have been thin as a rail, but he desired the same for his children about as much as a return to the potato fields. To his generation of Jewish mothers and fathers, a skinny child was a sign of poor parenting.
By contrast, today’s enlightened parents negotiate with their children to get them to eat more. To appropriate a line from Joe’s contemporary, comedian Sam Levinson, Grandpa had two methods of negotiation: backhand and forehand.
But while my grandfather may have had the demeanor of Chef Gordon Ramsay, my grandmother — an aficionado of the one-minute egg — did not possess the chef’s stovetop skills.
My grandmother’s cooking was so bad that my mother later quipped, “Every student at P.S. 190 knew the vomit on the front steps was mine.” She would pay homage to the (anti-)dining experiences of yore by coining the term “The Oven-to-Garbage Cookbook.”
While my father may have been the beneficiary of chicken soup with bits of feet in it, or various other holdovers from the oven-to-garbage era, those days had long since ceased by the time yours truly rolled around. Of course, by then my mother had taken to dishes that evoked my father’s Sephardic childhood with a convert’s zeal. So (sorry, folks) I’ve grown to believe that the best Eastern European Jewish food is Slivovitz.
And still, in a time when we’re discovering new types of fats to shun every day, it’s hard not to envision a future in which the rich Jewish foods my grandfather cried himself to sleep over are reduced to a vestige of the collective Jewish past, across the street from the pickle barrel man and the marquee advertising the latest from Boris Tomashevsky.
Every once in a while, you may find a plateful of kugel or kreplach plunked in front of you — but you won’t even be able to complain properly. After all, if your mother didn’t make those foods, how can you disparage someone else’s as not being up to her standards?
In a world where the tongue-in-cheek phrase “that was before they invented cholesterol” dates you as old enough to remember the verdant green of Ebbets Field, fewer people will cook foods like this. And in a Jewish community in which the vast majority of us will go our whole lives without knowing the gnawing agony of true hunger, who will feel the near-pathological need to force his children to eat, eat and eat some more?
And yet I can’t help but feel pained by the ostensible demise of the Eastern European foods I thank God were never placed in front of me. After all, someone should be eating mamaliga.
Someone else, that is.
Joe Eskenazi got his kugel recipe from a blind lady on the BART train. He can be reached at [email protected].