All Recipes

This is a recipe I invented recently, and I can't classify it in the Ashkenazi or Sefardi categories. But my father loved it!

This one is for garlic lovers only.

My grandmother makes this recipe; it's a family favorite. You can make the meatballs small-sized for an appetizer, or larger for a main dish. DON'T serve them over spaghetti, its not Italian, its Ukrainian!

This is likely quite old, as my grandmother has written “Spry” instead of “vegetable shortening” or “Crisco”. Spry was a brand of vegetable shortening that was popular from the 1930s - 1960s. I have struggled to interpret the recipe because it is not written in a particularly organized way and is very vague, written haphazardly on both sides. This, too, speaks of this scrap of paper being quite old. My grandmother was an excellent cook, and had an eye for order and organization and I suspect would have written this down differently later in life. Anyway, fruit pie is one of the few desserts I am fairly comfortable with, so in the instructions I will be drawing on my own experience making pies when there are gaps to fill.

Beverly is my mother. My mother was a good cook, but didn’t have much patience for the process nor passion for the result, so there are very few recipes that I have that are distinctly hers. This recipe is one of the rare few, and my grandmother evidently kept a copy in her recipe box. The relish was always on the table for Rosh Hashanah and Thanksgiving, although I myself have not made it lately. It’s a nice alternative to the widely-available weird squiggly canned cranberry sauce, but I will admit that I have a strange affection for the canned stuff, too.

I do not recognize the handwriting on this note, although it strikes me as the writing of someone whose first language was probably Yiddish, written in the Hebrew script who studied the Roman letterset from typewritten or printed text. This means it is most likely the handwriting of either my great Aunt Bessie, my great Aunt Ida (unlikely), or my great grandmother, for whom I am named. I say that Aunt Ida is unlikely because she was brain damaged at the age of 9, probably in a pogrom. My grandfather refused to talk about it. The use of “Spry” in place of the more generic term “vegetable shortening” is a clue that this piece of paper is quite old. Spry was a competitor to the Crisco brand that got its start in the 1930s and peaked in popularity in the 1940s and 1950s. I don’t think the brand survived to the end of the 1960s. My great grandmother died in 1955, so it could be hers.

I mentioned smoked Brisket on another fora and was asked to post the recipie here. It is an original, so feel free to re-do the spices to meet you taste. This can be done on a smoker or in the crock-pot.

Deep Fried Version Egg Fu Yung: A deep fried omelet served with a sauce, Egg Fu Yung is a well known Chinese American restaurant dish, but in China omelets are not deep fried and are never served with a sauce. Here are both versions using the same ingredients, although the listing is arranged for the first version.