Tag #149045 - Interview #96258 (Polina Leibovich)

My mother was a housewife and we had a housemaid to help my mother do the cleaning and some housekeeping while my mother cooked herself. She made delicious Jewish food: gefilte fish was number one, of course. Jews like gefilte fish. She also made chicken broth, yeisek flesh – sweet and sour meat stew. My mother made delicious pancakes from stretch dough. It stretched like parchment paper – very thin. She filled them with cottage cheese adding fried onions – very delicious. Our family also liked pte [petcha] – hardly anybody would know the word. It was cooked from calf legs bought at the market. It was cut to smaller pieces, cold water was added and it was cooked for seven to eight hours like holodets [holodets: a cold meat dish, usually made of boiled bones with little meat on them, the meat is mixed with the bouillon and cooled, after which it becomes jelly-like because of the high percentage of gelatin in it]. Two hours before the end of cooking, onions, carrots, garlic and spices were added, and then vinegar or lemon juice. It was served hot, but I never ate it for I didn’t like it unlike the rest of the family. I liked Moldovan mamaliga [boiled corn flour] that my father cooked. This was the only dish my mother allowed him to cook. When the family felt like having mamaliga, my father made it. It goes without saying that my family followed the kashrut.