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My mother prepared all kinds of things. Goose necks. Mince flour with poultry fat, add salt and pepper, stuff the neck with it and cook in broth. Yummy! Or sweet rice. Cooked with raisins or apples, with eggs, and casseroled.
Cooked noodles, mixed with eggs, layered with fruit like a layer cake, and baked sweet. When my mother made something like that and I took it to work, I had to take a really large chunk because all my colleagues wanted me to treat them. Because it was really very good.
Dumplings with matzah flour. To serve four, you take half a liter of water, four eggs, some chopped onion fried on poultry fat, add salt and pepper to taste, and matzah flour about a cup, a cup and half.
This is at first rather runny, but after it has stood for some time with the matzah flour, it gets thicker and you can form dumplings. I also add a pinch of baking soda. You cook it in salted water, and then pour broth over it. This is an Easter dish.
My mother also made potatoes to accompany chicken soup. Potato pancakes. You make it like that: one mid-sized potato per person and one eggs per person. You mix the cooked potato with the egg, salt, pepper, to taste of course, add a beaten egg white, and fry the pancakes on fat.
Then you pour chicken soup over it. This is an elegant potato dish for a festive chicken soup, not for Easter, but for Sabbath.
My mother also made a buckwheat groats pie. She certainly made it with rough puff pastry. She cooked the groats beforehand. Then she roasted them with onion. That she baked and cut into pieces, and it didn’t fall apart, it held together, so I guess she added eggs. It was quite good.
Chopped liver with egg and onion, fried liver of course, always with chicken fat, very good. Kidney beans cooked and then minced – to hull it – in a mincer, and then with egg and onion, also other things.
Those were the appetizers, my mother made them. Sometimes she fried a piece of meat, because my father could abstain from eating for the whole day but dinner had to be with all the supplements, an hors d’oeuvre, and dessert.
You made all kinds of things. My mother made something that today would be regarded as a poor man’s dish. If she had any stale bread or challah, she cut it into pieces, poured boiling water over it, added salt and a piece of butter.
That’s a kind of poor man’s soup. For me, it was great. Not because she made it out of poverty, she simply had various uses for that stale bread. And war taught me that you never throw bread away.
My grandmother made borscht. She never cooked it with raw beets, but always pickled them first. And she didn’t season it – as the Poles do – with cream, but with egg yolks. Cream was forbidden because that would have made the soup a dairy dish.
That borscht was like wine. My mother always said, ‘Mum, how many yolks have you added?’ ‘Not many, only two!’ came the answer. Eggs used to be cheap. For three eggs you could buy a pack of cigarettes.
The best thing was matzebrei, my daughters like it to this day. Matzebrei means ‘fried matzah’ in German [editor’s note: actually ‘matzah mash’]. I make a lot of onion with fat, chicken fat is the best, goose fat as a last resort, you have to brown the onion a bit, so that it gives off the scent.
You add soaked, broken matzah, fry it a little so that the matzah absorbs the salt, pepper and fat, then you add an egg, mix it all, and you have a delicious dish.
We made cholent, the classic one, with kishke. My mother peeled the potatoes, onion was added too, of course. Salt, pepper to taste. You bought beef intestine by the meter, with suet on the surface.
My mother stuffed the intestine with flour, salt, and pepper, and – stuffing – turned the suet side inside. She sewed up the ends. Then she scalded it again and cleaned thoroughly. That intestine went on the top, on the potatoes, you wrapped the pot with rags, newspapers, whatever, to make it tight.
In the Jewish quarter you took the pot to a baker, to a bread oven, but we had a stove with an oven of its own. You put the pot into a hot oven and on Sabbath you took it out, and you had regular cholent. Crisp brown kishke and crisp potatoes.
That was Jewish cholent, our own. But when I lived in Warsaw, my sister-in-law made it differently. Hulled barley, fat flat rib, kidney beans, and potatoes. Simmer the meat with the beans and the barley, so as to boil away almost all water.
Add raw potatoes, salt, pepper, onion, of course, then wrap it up tightly and put into an oven, on a very low heat, 100 degrees Celsius, no more. It roasts for a whole day, then another – I turn the heat off for the night just in case – and on the third day the guests come and eat. As my birthday falls in February, when it’s cold – I won’t be making in the summer – I make cholent in the winter. For my birthday guests. They love it.
Cooked noodles, mixed with eggs, layered with fruit like a layer cake, and baked sweet. When my mother made something like that and I took it to work, I had to take a really large chunk because all my colleagues wanted me to treat them. Because it was really very good.
Dumplings with matzah flour. To serve four, you take half a liter of water, four eggs, some chopped onion fried on poultry fat, add salt and pepper to taste, and matzah flour about a cup, a cup and half.
This is at first rather runny, but after it has stood for some time with the matzah flour, it gets thicker and you can form dumplings. I also add a pinch of baking soda. You cook it in salted water, and then pour broth over it. This is an Easter dish.
My mother also made potatoes to accompany chicken soup. Potato pancakes. You make it like that: one mid-sized potato per person and one eggs per person. You mix the cooked potato with the egg, salt, pepper, to taste of course, add a beaten egg white, and fry the pancakes on fat.
Then you pour chicken soup over it. This is an elegant potato dish for a festive chicken soup, not for Easter, but for Sabbath.
My mother also made a buckwheat groats pie. She certainly made it with rough puff pastry. She cooked the groats beforehand. Then she roasted them with onion. That she baked and cut into pieces, and it didn’t fall apart, it held together, so I guess she added eggs. It was quite good.
Chopped liver with egg and onion, fried liver of course, always with chicken fat, very good. Kidney beans cooked and then minced – to hull it – in a mincer, and then with egg and onion, also other things.
Those were the appetizers, my mother made them. Sometimes she fried a piece of meat, because my father could abstain from eating for the whole day but dinner had to be with all the supplements, an hors d’oeuvre, and dessert.
You made all kinds of things. My mother made something that today would be regarded as a poor man’s dish. If she had any stale bread or challah, she cut it into pieces, poured boiling water over it, added salt and a piece of butter.
That’s a kind of poor man’s soup. For me, it was great. Not because she made it out of poverty, she simply had various uses for that stale bread. And war taught me that you never throw bread away.
My grandmother made borscht. She never cooked it with raw beets, but always pickled them first. And she didn’t season it – as the Poles do – with cream, but with egg yolks. Cream was forbidden because that would have made the soup a dairy dish.
That borscht was like wine. My mother always said, ‘Mum, how many yolks have you added?’ ‘Not many, only two!’ came the answer. Eggs used to be cheap. For three eggs you could buy a pack of cigarettes.
The best thing was matzebrei, my daughters like it to this day. Matzebrei means ‘fried matzah’ in German [editor’s note: actually ‘matzah mash’]. I make a lot of onion with fat, chicken fat is the best, goose fat as a last resort, you have to brown the onion a bit, so that it gives off the scent.
You add soaked, broken matzah, fry it a little so that the matzah absorbs the salt, pepper and fat, then you add an egg, mix it all, and you have a delicious dish.
We made cholent, the classic one, with kishke. My mother peeled the potatoes, onion was added too, of course. Salt, pepper to taste. You bought beef intestine by the meter, with suet on the surface.
My mother stuffed the intestine with flour, salt, and pepper, and – stuffing – turned the suet side inside. She sewed up the ends. Then she scalded it again and cleaned thoroughly. That intestine went on the top, on the potatoes, you wrapped the pot with rags, newspapers, whatever, to make it tight.
In the Jewish quarter you took the pot to a baker, to a bread oven, but we had a stove with an oven of its own. You put the pot into a hot oven and on Sabbath you took it out, and you had regular cholent. Crisp brown kishke and crisp potatoes.
That was Jewish cholent, our own. But when I lived in Warsaw, my sister-in-law made it differently. Hulled barley, fat flat rib, kidney beans, and potatoes. Simmer the meat with the beans and the barley, so as to boil away almost all water.
Add raw potatoes, salt, pepper, onion, of course, then wrap it up tightly and put into an oven, on a very low heat, 100 degrees Celsius, no more. It roasts for a whole day, then another – I turn the heat off for the night just in case – and on the third day the guests come and eat. As my birthday falls in February, when it’s cold – I won’t be making in the summer – I make cholent in the winter. For my birthday guests. They love it.
Period
Interview
Anna Mass