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I made him finish everything, from the chicken soup to the noodle pudding. We lingered, never imagining that we were needed back at the hospital. Minutes after our departure, the surgeon who had performed the first operation on my mother decided she needed a second one without delay.
He ordered her strapped to a gurney, then stood by, awaiting my father’s signature on a release form. As we walked through the front door, an alert guard spotted us and rushed us upstairs. Immediately, orderlies started pushing my mother through the hallway with me half-walking and half-running by her side. A sense of peril overwhelmed me. I was certain this was the last time I would see her alive.
As they turned to enter a waiting elevator, my mother grabbed my arm and weakly spoke my name. I nearly burst out sobbing, for I knew these would be the last words I would hear from her.
I leaned close.
“How was the soup?” she asked.
My mother is ninety-four and doing all right, although not as well as my sister and I would like. Ida and Norman still live in their Florida retirement community, which permits no dogs, no kids, and no striplings under fifty-five. I talk a lot with my sister, Lynn, about how long they can hold out. They have help, women who are hired to work twelve hours a day but who stay overnight on the difficult days, when the anguish of being elderly becomes an impossible burden.
The women who watch after them were not born in this country and are candidates for beatification, which should clarify my position on this nation’s immigration policy.
Pretty much to the exclusion of all else, my mother spent her adult life cooking for her family. (To be honest, she cleaned incessantly, too.) I understand that all Jewish mothers are expected to be kitchen enthusiasts, but my mother was defined by her cooking. She was admired for those skills, and even today, when she can’t do much, the people in her building greet her warmly, the sort of recognition André Soltner must get when he walks down Fiftieth Street near Lutèce. Indra Chattoo, F O R K I T O V E R
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who has commanded the team overseeing my parents for the past three years, says my mother remains a luminary among residents, acclaimed for her brisket of beef and her rolled cabbage. Chattoo told me, “The people remember the taste of her food, and they still talk about it.” Cooking gave my mother stature in the world outside her kitchen.
Long before the advent of celebrity chefs, she was the celebrity cook of our neighborhood, no matter where we lived. Her cooking was ritualistic, because she would prepare the same recipes over and over, but she was no different from the conductors of symphony orchestras, who have personal repertoires.
Food was her means of expressing love. Some might argue that a few hugs would have been more beneficial to a growing child, but I tried to understand. She wasn’t tremendously confident, and bestowing food was a wonderful way of making a fuss without chancing rejection. Even people who don’t want to be squeezed enjoy being fed.
I try to cook exactly as my mother did, even though she stubbornly resisted my efforts to learn from her. Her rolled cabbage stuffed with rice and ground beef, which she would not teach me to make, was the finest the world has known. Its secret is lost. By hanging around I picked up enough about her cheese blintzes and her brisket that I now do a credible job of imitating the former and am on the verge of a breakthrough with the latter.
One afternoon, to my disbelief, she prepared her poor-man’s soup before my eyes. It’s a blend of Manischewitz split-pea soup mix, beef-marrow bones, chopped onions, and grated carrots. I made a pot of it for my father a few months ago, to see if I’d gotten it right, and he reacted as though his only son had translated the Dead Sea Scrolls.
This man, who in his later years laughs hesitantly and smiles infrequently, beamed with such pleasure he reminded me of the young fellow I’d heard stories about—the captain of his college baseball team, a nimble and hard-hitting second baseman who tried out for the Cincinnati Reds in the 1930s but was denied an opportunity to play in the major leagues for the same reason as so many other Jews: he was remarkably slow afoot.
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Because I grew up eating only my mother’s cooking, I find it unsatisfactory to work from recipe books, prepare food devised by people I’ve never met. I believe I love restaurants so much because I ate in so few of them as a child that they seem the greatest of luxuries. When my mother and father went out for dinner, which wasn’t often, they seldom took my sister and me with them. When they did, my mother never failed to reinforce her dessert credo, which I adhere to even today:
“You can’t go wrong with ice cream.”
My mother still cooks, sort of. She sits in the kitchen with the saintly women who care for her and instructs them in modified kosher cuisine. She has taught them the difference between milchedig (dairy-based) and flayshedig (meat-based) meals. They made gefilte fish (Jewish quenelles) for the religious holidays. The recipe, as practiced by a ninety-four-year-old woman: Purchase one can of Rokeach gefilte fish. Remove fish and place in a pot. Add the goo from the can, sliced carrots, chopped onions, salt, pepper, sugar, and a bay leaf. Boil. Cool.
Serve. It isn’t her
