Tag #124147 - Interview #95940 (Victoria Almalekh)

A part of my granny’s image is how she used to make rooster soup. Not only did she use to do the cooking but she also grew the necessary vegetables as well as the animals. Rooster soup was cooked once a year – when a new rooster entered the household. Usually this happened at the beginning of the summer when the old one was slaughtered. That time of the year would be the time when green plums would form their pits, celery and lovage would come up. Those used to grow in our little vegetable garden in the backyard. Actually it was not much of a vegetable garden. What kinds of vegetables Jews would grow for God’s sake. It’s more of a joke than vegetable production proper. My grandmother learned how to grow vegetables from her Bulgarian neighbors, not from handbooks and manuals. Probably they also taught her to take a bag of ash and to sprinkle tomatoes and peppers with it. She had vegetables enough to help herself with early morning cooking if the market hadn’t opened yet. She would just pick a couple of tomatoes and peppers. The garden couldn’t sustain our household and grandma always said: ‘This is your pastime’.