Tag #135636 - Interview #101687 (Berta Grunstein )

My mother was a great cook, she was a good housewife, she enjoyed cooking. I remember that in my childhood, at Pesach we had separate dishes we kept in a chest. Each of us had their own plate, every child knew which was their own. We had meat-soup made of beef. We didn’t eat bread at all for eight days; we had fried matzah, ‘reminyi’; we cooked beet soup with potatoes. I often prepare beet soup as well. The beet needs to be grated and boiled a little in salted water. It gets white within a few minutes, then it has to be strained; but it mustn’t be cooked for long, because it would loose its color. The strained soup must be put back on fire, you put some vinegar and a little sugar, and an egg stirred in it. You serve it with potatoes cut into cubes. That’s all. They used to make ‘pldli’ for the meat soup, balls from matzah meal. That’s very tasty. You beat an egg, you add a little salt, pepper and matzah meal; it must be somewhat thicker than the pancake dough, but not much more, because it will grow, and the ‘pldli’ would get hard – it’s not like semolina, that’s not so substantial –, so it needs more egg. So you put it into the meat soup. It is very tasty.