Recipes My Mother Never Gave Me

In these times of Covid -19, there is one bright spot in the day – Andrew Cuomo’s press conferences. This is according to my sister, who, apparently, has a crush on Cuomo. To be fair, and in her defense, what’s there not to like? The man is easy on the eyes – he is trim, well-dressed, with a nice head of hair. When he speaks, it is in grammatically correct English, with sentences that complete a thought. He is lucid and rational with his explanations, measured in tone, and well-informed. He knows history. His affection for his daughters – out there for all to see – is sweet. His visual aides are straightforward, comprehensive and comprehensible, based on scientific research. And the on-air riffs with his brother are hilarious. His eyes twinkle when he smiles. While he takes his position as governor seriously, he knows how to laugh at himself. No gaffes here, nothing like what we are routinely tormented with these days – unwittingly cringe-worthy statements consistently made by old men.

Given the current panoply of – well, frankly – morons out there who talk too much and yet have nothing valuable or helpful to say, who makes you want to tear your hear out – well, really – who can blame a mature, knowledgeable and discerning woman for crushin’ on Cuomo? You go, girl.

So my sister, who does not live in New York state, listens to Cuomo’s conferences every day in order to receive a clear, accurate picture of the current state of affairs. It allays, somewhat, the anxiety felt as we navigate through this pandemic. Sometimes, a little extra is thrown in – like a tour through the Governor’s mansion. It is human, and it is a connection between a true political leader and his constituents. Next step, the White House? A girl can only dream.

On Memorial Day, we honor true heroes – men and women who have laid down their lives to protect certain ideals: democracy, liberty and honesty. And to protect them for everyone, young, old, vulnerable, poor, black, white, sick, healthy. Loving others is not a weakness – it is the truest measure of a man.

So, here’s to Cuomo – you can check him out every day, around 11:30 EST – a little piece of clarity in the midst of all this chaos.

***

Sour Cherry Cake (for the picnic) (and to gain even more weight)

• 3 T dried breadcrumbs
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 ½ t baking powder
• ½ t kosher salt
• 1 ½ sticks unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1 ¼ cups sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 ½ t vanilla extract
• ½ t grated lemon zest
• ¼ cup milk
• 1 ½ cups sour cherries, pitted

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Lightly grease a 9-inch round cake pan and sprinkle with the breadcrumbs.

In a bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt.

In a mixer, beat together the butter and sugar at medium speed until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating each until incorporated. Beat in the vanilla and lemon zest. Add half the flour mixture and beat at low speed, scraping down the sides of the bowl, until just incorporated. Beat in the milk, then the rest of the flour mixture.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Top with the cherries. Bake until golden brown and a skewer inserted into the center of the pan comes out clean, about 40-45 minutes. Transfer the cake pan to a wire rack to cool.

They met in a bar on Jaco Beach. She walked in, early evening, sat at the corner of the counter, off to the side, ordered a beer and quietly nursed her drink. It wasn’t that she looked lonely or uncomfortable, and yet… He was tending bar that night, took note of her. It was a slow night, so, after a while, he started talking to her.

She’d just finished her Master’s in education and had a teaching position at a private school lined up for the fall. She’d decided to have one last fling before settling down to the rest of her life, so had bought a ticket to Costa Rica and intended to visit for a month. She’d spent a week in the Arenal Volcano region, and decided to learn how to surf, something she’d always wanted to do, so rented a place in Jaco. And here she was, first day of surfing done.

She had an air of quiet vulnerability about her. Although he’d known her all of an hour, he felt oddly protective of her. Wanted to keep her near. So he offered her a beer on the house as she listened to his story.

Two years into medical school, he’d discovered, to his family’s horror, that he didn’t really want to be a doctor. He’d taken a leave of absence and boarded a plane to London. Three years and twenty countries later, the leave long expired, he’d landed in Jaco and started working at the bar for a much needed infusion of cash. He figured he would keep wandering until he figured out what to do with his life…

They were both surprised at how comfortable they felt with each other, how easy it was to be together. When the bar’s owner announced last call, they each felt that there was still so much more to share. So they agreed to meet the following afternoon and visit Manuel Antonio National Park.

He picked her up the next day, and they drove in companionable silence. The day was hot, humid. They walked deep into the park. Their shirts were soon drenched in sweat. A bird rustled in the suddenly still air. 

She spoke. 

“There is a folk tale about a princess who tests her suitor’s love by sending him out into the wilderness to find the one thing she does not have – bird’s milk.”

“There is no such thing,” he said.

“Exactly.”

“So he spends the rest of his life seeking the unattainable?”

She shrugged. They spoke of the impossibility of desire. Or was it the desire of the impossible? 

And then, inevitably, they made love, in the grass. And it was in that moment – in that hush among the trees – the melding of their bodies – that they were undone.  Unbeknownst to them, the shape of the years to come, those years that would hold both joy and sorrow, triumph and disappointment, love and despair – their shared destiny – was forged at five o’clock in the afternoon. Gods at play in the woods.

She took him back to her shack and extended her stay for three weeks. They spent her remaining time in the country together. She listened as he spoke to her of his confused desires, his blank future terrifying him. He dreamed as she described the city, her apartment, her life-to-come.

And then came the moment to say goodbye. On a whim, the morning of the day she was to return home, she slipped a piece of paper with her address into his shirt pocket. He drove her to the airport. As she was about to pass though security, she hesitated, waiting for him to say something that would hint at the promise of future contact. He hesitated, confused, not sure what he wanted. So he watched as she boarded her plane and vanished into the clouds.

She returned home, to what became the unrelenting monotony of days filled with teaching math to high school students and not much else. At night, settling into bed after a few glasses of wine, she would remember the moments spent in that shack by the ocean. He spent a few more months in South America, but suddenly became acutely aware of the loneliness in his wandering. He surprised himself: feeling that he’d had enough, he bought a plane ticket. And, one morning, she walked out of her apartment building to find him outside, waiting. 

It was the hubris that only the young have. They had each decided, in the blink of an eye, that the other was to be their savior. Did either experience a twinge of doubt? How ironic that it was the small acts in life, those most easily taken for granted, never properly thought through, that were the ones most fraught with danger. Innocent traps that ensnared a person’s destiny while the individual was not looking – the foundation of a house that Jack and Jill would build. 

It took him awhile to find himself. He never did have that flash of inspiration, so wound up working at an investment bank. She had three children. They moved to the suburbs, where she discovered, to her dismay, that she had developed “Achilles Heel” – a condition resulting from too much driving, inducing excess contact of the right heel of the foot with the floorboard of an over-sized SUV, creating numbness in the heel, cramping of the toes and flabbiness of the thighs. Recommended course of treatment: numerous diet fads, various gyms, sculpting treatments and trainers – the spending of an amount of money that probably could have bailed out a bankrupt small nation.

He was restless, irritable. Too secure, too comfortable. Irrationally, he began to remember those years of sad wandering with a certain fondness. As his mind receded into the past, he became distant. They became strangers occupying the same space.

One evening, she went to see a ballet performance. The choreographer, Danish, came out onstage to speak with the audience after the show. Asked to describe the source of his inspiration, he talked of the “vo-ka-bu-lary” of dance. That’s when she understood – it was all about where you put the accent on the “syl-la-ble” of life. Passion – obsession. Flip sides of the same coin. “Pain perdue” (lost bread) – is what the French call “French Toast”. Is it all a matter of perception? 

They’d gone through life learning the rudiments of a language whose cadences were familiar, reassuring. Now, suddenly, they were uncertain of a gesture’s arc. Cut adrift from the mooring of shared meaning, each word began to weigh heavily on the tongue.  Those years together – had they really accomplished nothing?

Somewhere along Route I-95, despite the good intentions of the parties involved, their marriage sputtered to an end. It took them three years to leave each other. It was difficult to discern the leaver from the leavee – so they both suffered. Once the surge of passion ebbed, all they had left was the taste of ashes in their mouths. The dust of unsettled dreams.

Infidelity committed but not admitted. Infidelity contemplated but not committed. It didn’t matter, really. They each endured the sensation of being suddenly-bereft of the body-next-to-yours. A life together full of color and meaning had become meaning-less. Once they were a couple.

She was no longer the Wife. He was no longer the Bright Young Thing. Half-baked decisions had thrown their lives into strange tangents. Were they has-beens? In their minds, they had just started out of the gate. Shifting sands of time made it so they were unable to stand firm on the ground.

So much for the steppes of life. It now became a question of identity. Des she keep his last name and remain someone she could no longer claim to be? Or shake the mothballs off her maiden name and return to someone she no longer was? She was suddenly a nameless free agent. The conundrum of last names.

It would take additional decades for them to understand that those once  loved were never left behond. You carry them within the recesses of your soul, conjuring them up in times of need or sorrow or joy. A never-ending rope that chains you to the ground. Only Icarus could fly high enough to be scorched by the sun. Mere mortals, the ones who live to be old and full of lost love, are left to puzzle through their could-have-beens.

They thought they had bequeathed the gift of their success to their children. That the specters perched on their shoulders would grace those of their progeny. It was, after all, the circle of life. Yet another illusion.

Her son, when he was fifteen, told her he knew what an ellipsis was. So did she. It was the loss of the illusions of youth that brought on the hard-edged lines of old age. And so it goes…

Those woods still stand to tell the tale of two young adults at play one afternoon – two naïve individuals who believed in fusion without combustion, endless possibilities and happy endings. Does life lose its dazzle once the bright future morphs into the painful past? Should we reach out to these two souls soon to be lost and tell them to hurry up and wait? But then, their sorrows, their lives, their particular legacies, would not exist. 

Within each of them still lives the child hoping, dreaming, of bird’s milk.

***

Challah French Toast

6 eggs

¾ cup milk

½ teaspoon kosher salt

6 slices of challah

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

Maple syrup and ground cinnamon, for serving

In a shallow dish, whisk together the eggs, milk, and salt. Lay the challah slices in the egg mixture and let sit, turning once, until soaked through.

In a frying pan, melt butter over medium heat until foaming. Fry the bread slices, flipping once, until golden brown on each side. Serve immediately, drizzled with maple syrup and sprinkled with a bit of cinnamon.

“Mom, am I what you were?” asks my ten year old child.

“What are you?” I reply.

“What were you?” he responds.

            Fathers and daughters, husbands and wives, sons and mothers. We are defined by our relationships – a web of articulated bonds.

            I learned about the “Maradona” from my soccer-crazed younger son. Named after a famous Argentinian soccer player, it’s a move that involves faking to your right while kicking the ball with your left foot. Or something like that. I pretended to understand as my son flicked the ball, seemingly dancing on the field of green grass.

            What my sister and I grew up to fear most was failure. The inability to meet expectations. More specifically, the goals set by parents and family:

• We must be a high-minded and productive member of society, ergo, a doctor, lawyer, teacher or, lower on the status pole, a social worker.
• We must be philanthropical, which requires our being wealthy.
• We must be the best, code for the smartest in the room.
• We must be a mentsch, but also pleasing to the eye.
• We must conquer the world, but in a nice way.
• And, most important of all, we must be more successful than the children of their friends.

So what my sister and I came to dread, most of all, was being mediocre. When you are a child of Holocaust survivors, plain living is a denouement. Bleeding gums is not a tragedy. Although, my family heirloom, passed down to me from my mother – were my grandmother’s dentures, the only keepsake my mother could sneak into her pocket as her mother lay dying in Auschwitz. The specter of my mother weighing 80 pounds at the time of her liberation – what am I to do with that image knocking around in my head? Or seeing her agonize over her guilt at outliving her two sons, aged four and six, taken out to a field and shot as she, along with the remaining Jews in her town’s ghetto, were loaded onto trains during the final deportation to Treblinka. 

My parents met after liberation, in a DP camp in Germany. Two lost souls, they found each other and, together, attempted to wend their way through a world of shadows and ghosts. They went on to have two children, my sister and me. The irony was in my recognition, early in life, that, but for Hitler, I would not have been born. My existence shaped by hearing my mother’s cries at night, wracked by the shame of having survived and, in so doing, wanting children again. Her ambivalence at having been given a second chance at being a mother.

My parents immigrated to the States, landed in New York City in 1950. They wound up running a restaurant in the basement of a magnificent Beaux-Art mansion on the corner of Madison Avenue and 78^th street. They were handed this opportunity by the Jewish Labor Bund. The building was owned by the Atran Foundation and housed various Jewish charities and philanthropies. The idea was to have a cafeteria that would feed the inhabitants of the place. But, through the years, news of my mother’s succulent roast chicken and sumptuous mushroom barley soup spread among the gallery and boutique owners of the Upper East Side, so that, with time, well-dressed doyennes of Fifth Avenue mixed with staff from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jewish artists and socialists,  and hungry students from the art institute down the block (to whom my mother would serve a heaping bowl of soup and chunk of bread for fifty cents) all crowded into the cafeteria. Everyone, as equals, seated around small tables covered with red-and-white checked tablecloths, cigarette smoke hovering over conversations occurring in a babel of languages, from Yiddish to English to French to Italian to German.

My sister and I helped, in the kitchen, washing thousands of dishes by hand. There were three sinks – one to spray the dishes, the second to soak them in soapy water, the third to rinse them in boiling hot clean water. We would then stack the dishes on wooden tracks to dry, beads of perspiration forming on their surfaces. 

“The dishes are crying,” my father would say. My father – a poet. Go figure. This was my world, one my own children will never know, could not fathom. The birth of my consciousness. 

As for my mother- well, when we were little, she would tell us the tale of her seven years of enchanted living. Born into a family with too many daughters, in a small town in Poland, she was sent to live with her grandparents, to work in their tiny buttons-and notions store. Growing up, she was always hungry, lonely and cold. She could hear her friends playing in the courtyard outside the store, in the early evening. She was made to stay inside and retire early, to be ready for the next day of work. Her future was bleak, in this village with no escape.

In spite of these circumstances, she had grown into a beautiful eighteen-year-old. On a sultry summer day, a rare day off, swimming at a lake with her family, she caught the eye of the good doctor – a sought-after eligible bachelor twenty years her senior. He was a prominent member of the Jewish elite, a member of the Bund, had an apartment at the Jewish Hospital over which he presided. He started courting her. Her family incredulous, one of her aunts stating that a cactus would sooner grow from her hand than the good doctor would marry my mother. But propose he did – instead of a ring, he gave her a bicycle. And whisked her away.

 There followed seven years of utter joy – working as a nurse beside this man she adored, safe in his arms, surrounded by friends, no longer hungry or cold. She was Cinderella, at home at last with her prince. And with time, two children were born, two boys. Hearing this story, how could my sister and I not grow up believing that a prince would appear in our own lives and carry us away to a castle of our own? Or, at the very least, to a spacious three-bedroom ranch in Westchester. 

All was like a fairy tale – until Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939. So while we envisioned joy in our future, we were also taught its flip side – that one must pay for one’s happiness. That life, in the end, is a Greek tragedy. And my mother paid, with the death of her husband and two sons.

Her strength to live on is something I can’t begin to comprehend. Her ability to love again – nothing short of miraculous. Her agonizing and self-demonizing guilt over her ability to do both – heart-breaking. I am humbled by my mother’s ferocious will. She was just a woman in love, who had it all and lost it, and then tried to rebuild the happiness she had once known. Nothing ever measured up in this recreation. How do we live with that?

Two days before my father died, he asked me to trim his hair. He was always very particular about personal hygiene. He claimed that the sole reason he survived the camps, from September, 1942 until April, 1945, when he was liberated, was because he kept himself clean, washing himself in the snow outside the barracks. My father was mostly a quiet man – he didn’t share much about his life in Poland before the war, his time in the camps, or the wife and daughter he lost. I cut his fine, gray hair in the companionable silence that was our way together. His love for me had been evident throughout our lives together – as my mother left early in the morning to prepare the food at the cafeteria, my father had taken care of getting my sister and me off to school. He braided my hair and filled my lunch box with overstuffed pastrami sandwiches (god forbid his children would ever feel the hunger he had). He paid for private college and law school. And he absolutely and unconditionally loved the two grandsons I gifted him, my boys. An unassuming man, who led a quietly exceptional life in the love and fortitude he exhibited to those around him. No man could ever live up to that. 

They have long since passed, my parents and most of my family. Their stories are branded in my memory, their souls enfolded in mine. What will happen when I am gone? 

Ingredients

***

Chicken soup (what else?) –

1 whole chicken

3 large carrots

3 celery stalks

2 yellow onions

1 large parsnip

¼ cup dill

1 T kosher salt

Freshly ground pepper

Prep

Place the chicken, carrots, celery, onions, parsnip and dill in a large soup pot and cover with cold water by one inch. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low and gently simmer, skimming off any foam that accumulates, until the chicken is tender and falling off the bone (about 2.0 hours). 

Remove the chicken and vegetables from the pot and let cool. Strain the broth through a sieve and return to the pot. Remove the chicken meat from the bones and chop. Discard the dill. Slice the vegetables into bite size pieces and return the vegetables and chicken to the pot. Stir in salt and pepper, to taste. Serve hot. 

To know a city like the back of your hand: each street as familiar as the steadily encroaching lines on your face, traffic noise as insistent as the onslaught of years, the incessant ebb and flow of the city crowds as comforting in its existence as it is frightening in its absence. A pulse outside your own, a breath enveloped in yours. Rhythms inherent in the seasons: summertime evacuation to the beach, wintertime escapes to the slopes, spring to the south to see cherry blossoms and autumn to the north for the changing leaves. The momentary hush that befalls a city caught naked on the heels of a newly fallen snow. The throbbing of clubs, the search for the ultimate high-low-new-old thrill, the all-too-bright, all-too-loud, all-too-muchness of it all. An in-your-face attitude touting cellulite-destroying, breast-enhancing, wrinkle-devouring, muscle-developing treatments/pathways/systems. All to be had at the drop of a large bundle of money. To live seduced by the sounds of a city’s pain, the sights of its triumphs, the song of its promise. To be part of the hottest new trends in this hottest of cities at this end-of-a-decade.

            Yet, to entertain the thought of leaving it because of its overwhelming-ness. To run to a desert, the eyes of a coyote staring you down on an impossibly-hot-early-summer morning. Or to another city, deceptive in calling itself a city because it turns out to be small and not-all-that. Or to the mountains, with its mute expanse of black star-crazy sky. To the silence of a wind howling outside a window. A bird’s call echoing the sound of wind chimes. Where one’s breath is measured against the ticking of a second-hand. Where a New York minute becomes an unnecessary hour.

            To reject the thought of escape, because, after all, there is nowhere like New York, where the sunrise is carelessly thrown above a still-slumbering city. Where you reach out your hand and never come up empty. Where the days are full of color and meaning, so life never becomes meaning-less. Where your heart is bursting and your soul filled with regrets. Where you tremble in anticipation of Armageddon. Where you don’t follow the north star but the smell of a good hot-dog vendor. 

            It’s all about beginnings and endings, except that you never know you were at the beginning until you’ve reached the end. 

            So you start over. You go to the square and look up at the sky to see a crystal ball descend from the heavens.

            Happy New Year, New York.

***

Ring in the New Year with a Champagne cocktail

Ingredients:

• 1 sugar cube
• 2 to 3 dashes bitters
• 1 ounce brandy
• 4-6 ounces Champagne
• Garnishes – orange slice, maraschino cherry

Place the sugar cube at the bottom of a Champagne flute. Pour bitters over the cube. Add the brandy. Fill the flute with Champagne; the sugar cube should dissolve. Garnish with the orange slice and maraschino cherry.