As I was contemplating my potato kugels (making them, not eating them), I realized that by now I have made that recipe so many times that I don’t need to open the cookbook. Now this is no major accomplishment as far as I can tell since there are not a lot of ingredients and it’s not a complicated recipe, but for me, it is unusual. You see, over the years I have cluttered my brain with lots of facts that I simply have no practical use for. What good does it do me to remember that our phone number in 1970 was 531 0485 (in Pittsburgh)?? Why do I need to know the name of the staff chaplain at Fort Knox, Kentucky in 1967 (Bermel)?? Why am I remembering useless information???
Well, knowing that I have been craming my poor little brain with useless information, I chose not to learn any of my recipes, satisfied that the cookbook would remember and all I had to do was remember which cookbook had which recipe. And that worked. Over the years, one could trace which were my favorite recipes by seeing which pages the books opened to and how dirty they were. The dirtier, the more loved the recipe. None of that plexiglass cookbook holder stuff for me. I’m hardcore. If its going to get dirty, well, then, so be it. I am expressing my love for the recipe in this way.
And I started to think… we have all sorts of measures of personality from the 16 PF to the Myers-Briggs to the MMPI. All of them have their uses. But I was thinking that maybe we could learn a lot about a woman (yes, I do think that men and women are different, but that’s another entry) by looking at her cookbooks. Maybe even we could ferret out the nurturer in her by seeing what she chooses to make. We certainly could see if she is daring or conservative. We can see if she’s a “health food” person or an “eat, drink and be merry” person. We can, of course tell her age by the yellowing of the pages. Of course, in my case, you would have to take into account that some of my cookbooks were my mother’s and in that case, some of the paperbacks have begun disintegrating.
Well, I began my foray into this type of personality testing by looking at my own books and by and large, we’re talking comfort foods- carbs of all sorts. After all, meat and fish kind of speak for themselves. Most of the time, in my experience, anything you do to meat detracts from its taste. Fish can be sweetened, but then is it really fish? (Of course I exclude gefilte because after all, that is a very special hybrid kind of fish that grows complete with bread crumbs, egg, onion, salt, and sugar already in it.) Same thing with vegetables. To me, they are all pretty delicious with very little intervention. Desserts? Yes, well, desserts. In the days when I weighed in at a hefty 125 when I was 5ft 6inches, my favorite recipe was for chocolate cheesecake. At this point, typing the words just added 3 pounds to my weight. Need I say more? Lemon meringue pie? I did that a few times when we lived in Oklahoma. It was so much fun and very delicious, but on went 2 more pounds just typing about it. I don’t know if I can continue …
And I began to think about my mother. There were a lot of things about my mother that were hard for me. But when I think about her recipes, it makes me appreciate that fact that she did care. She did want to give us good things to eat. She did want to nurture us that way. Her cabbage borsht was not just delicious; it was love. Her spaghetti sauce was caring. Her Passover apple kugel provided sweetness that lives on after her.
mmmm apple kugel