The deadline for the 2008 Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award, a $2,500 grant given to a woman writer of 32 years or younger, is this Thursday, May 15. For more information, click here. - - - - |
Jewish Food.BY JOAN LARKIN
It's the worst—but it tastes so good. - - - - I came from school to warm breadand tsibele bulkes: Russian rolls, onions in wells her palm pressed in the dough, softened in sweet butter and baked in. Little pillows, fragrant as flesh. I'd eat a few with cold milk at two. Five-thirty, supper was on the table, Dad home between shows and hungry for soup with knaidlach and boiled chicken. I was still hungry afterward for a heel of black bread smeared with rendered chicken fat. Shabbes, supper had to be chicken. No milk on the table. Onions, salt, and fat were what she put in chopped liver, start of a fleysh- edik meal. To end it, fruit in thin, sweet syrup: compote—pears, prunes plumped with cooking, sweet- ened with raisins. No one left the table hungry or thought there was anything wrong with fattening childflesh at three meals and between: mon cookies, hunks of rye bread, batter licked from the bowl. I watched her knife cleave onions, carrots for tzimmes, beets for borscht. Pesach, supper was called a Seder—not an ordinary supper. Matzo folded in a cloth napkin, goblets filled with sweet red wine—they spilled drops for each of the plagues. Glazed onions and brisket waited while uncles prayed. I sat there hungry, wondering at the strangeness of a week with no bread. In candlelight, my grandmother's warm flesh- folds shone, the rough crepe of her peasant flesh smoothed with Jergens lotion. She scoured sinkfuls of pots after supper then sat and ate some of her own unleavened bread baked with matzo mel and sucked sweet tea through cubes of sugar. I sat with her, hungry for stories of the old days, when sometimes even onions were scarce but everyone told jokes. Onions couldn't make you cry if you ran water while you cut their raw flesh. She always knew you were hungry, everyone was hungry, and she sneaked cream into your coffee, if it was a milchik supper, even if you said you wanted it black. Her voice was Russian music, sweet even when she said harsh things. I can't think of her without tasting bread— no one made better bread. She gave me the taste for onions, the oily flesh of carp, the cold thick sweet- ness of sour cream on a blintz for supper. God forbid I should be hungry. - - - - tsibele bulkes—onion rolls
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