All Recipes

Having now made this myself, I can say that butter is the obvious choice unless you are baking for a fleishig meal. Butter represents a significant upgrade in flavor. You might try coconut oil in place of shortening if you like the flavor, but I have not tried this myself. They're outstanding, by the way. Don't let the rolled oats deter you.

For my formative years we had this recipe every Rosh Hashana and Thanksgiving. I'd looked through my grandmother's recipe boxes a few times in search of it, but didn't find it until now, 10 years after her passing. I'm so happy that I found it that I am using it to inaugurate a new section of my site called "The Grandma Zone" which will consist of recipes I have of hers, or those I find in her recipe boxes, many of whom she attributes to various friends who have now also passed on. This recipe has been retrieved from my grandmother's recipe boxes and the original paper (images below) was heavily spattered with food and almost illegible. I have rephrased it without changing any ingredients or techniques into a more traditional recipe format.

I really can't help you on the number of carrots, sorry. It is a lot, though. They cook down quite a bit. Also, she doesn't mention it, but she cut the beef into chunks, perhaps an inch and a half to 2 inches on a side.

This soup is very hearty - a meal unto itself. It also has the charming attribute of freezing very well - it's great for stocking your freezer so you don't have to cook when you're sick. A final note - Soup bones are usually not on display, but you can ask for them at the butcher's. They don't usually cost much. They freeze well, so you can get enough bones for several batches and store them in the freezer. You can make the soup without the bones, but the bones help for both both flavor and thickening.

Frances Toren was one of my grandmother’s best friends. Frances was one of the nicest people… genuine, kind, warm, trustworthy… managing to be incredibly sweet without being saccharine. Neither my grandmother nor I put much credence in the supernatural, but I was present for a very odd experience regarding Frances. At the time, Frances was quite elderly and frail, but still very much in the world. She had been ill and my grandmother had been in regular contact by phone. I was home from school and in my grandmother’s kitchen late one afternoon when suddenly grandma gasped and grabbed for a chair to sit down. Concerned, I asked what was wrong. My grandmother (who was sharp as a tack until the day she died) looked at me with utter confusion written on her face. She said, “I don’t really know. I just heard Frances’s voice in my ear, plain as I’m speaking to you.” “Oh!” I paused, equally at a loss. “What did she say?” “She said, ‘Don’t worry, Jeannette, everything will be alright. It’s going to be okay.’” My grandmother’s delicate eyebrows were pinched with worry. “I don’t know what it means.” My grandmother tried calling Frances, but got no answer. A couple of hours later, Frances’s husband called with the news that Frances had passed away. Below you’ll find the scrap of paper my grandma had in her collection with Frances’s potato salad recipe jotted down.

I have no doubt my grandma knew exactly what she meant by this. I’m just going to spitball for an interpretation, but as you can see from the photo, I basically had an ingredient list to go on, so I could be very very wrong.

We often ate a very heavy meal on erev Yom Kippur. I guess the idea was that indigestion is preferable to hunger? Grandma had several brisket recipes she used, this being one of them. I didn’t realize it came from one of her closest friends, Ethel Hellman, until I was picking through the recipe boxes. Its spattered and illegible state is testament to the fact that it was clearly one of my grandmother’s favorite versions of brisket.

I’m not sure why this recipe is appended with “good luck” at the end, given that the handwriting is my grandmother’s. It’s an odd enough phenomenon that I included it in the title. I like that it can be either poultry or beef given that I eat far more of the former, but the latter is more traditional.

I’ve had a heckuva time reading this spattered piece of paper. I’m pretty sure this is a quick and dirty version of cabbage borscht with lamb shank. But it might be less of a soup and more of a main dish with that flavor profile. I assume large can = 28 oz and a “small can of sauerkraut” is a typical 15 oz. can.

This envelope has two recipes: my grandma’s giblet’s/hamburg recipe on one side, and this one on the other. I just love how this impeccably tidy and organized woman had such a haphazard means of recording her recipes which were carefully stashed and cared for in these two containers. It’s a quirk that I relate to, a napkin slightly askew in an otherwise perfectly set table. The back of the envelope lists a Sharon address with a 2 cent stamp on the envelope. My family moved west in 1957, so this recipe can’t be from much later than that.

My grandmother had multiple cabbage borscht recipes, and she made more than one version regularly. They primarily differ in terms of how sweet vs. sour they are, which reflects a fairly well characterized phenomenon: the Ashkenazi culinary palette used to vary based on geographic area of origin, but after the incredible upheaval of the 20th century, Jewish families are often comprised of members of the tribe hailing from culinary traditions even within a given subset of Jewry. The rule of thumb is that as you move northward through Eastern Europe, Jewish cooking traditionally became less sweet and more sour. Some of this had to do with the climate - there is also more pickled food as you go northward so as to keep over the long winters, and pickled foods are typically sour. This recipe is somewhat unintelligible because it’s actually one index card with the original barely legible version taped to one side and a much more legible partial transcription written on the back of the index card. As a result, the recipe is lacking some of the ingredients and the directions are confusing.

In the 41 years I knew her, I never knew my grandmother to make cupcakes. It just wasn’t the sort of thing she made. I know this pale blue scrap of paper is very old, but with nary a spatter or folded corner… I think it’s safe to say she didn’t use this recipe much. Still, she kept it all those years. So here it is.

My grandmother wrote down a lot of recipes from friends… especially from her hairdresser Marge. But she didn’t necessarily make the recipes in question. I’m pretty sure this one is an exception.

This recipe is handy for Pesach, when you don’t want to have to use the typical kosher l’pesach yogurt full of guar gum, pectin, modified food starch and other low quality ingredients. You can make this directly in the metal instapot lining pot, or you can choose to use containers placed inside the instapot lining on a rack. I have come to prefer the latter. I use quart mason jars, and can get 3 into a pot at once on the rack and still close the lid. I know this looks like a wall of text, but it really takes more effort to explain than to do.

Puffs:

Technically, this recipe is a cross between a true sponge cake, a classic genoise and a chiffon cake. I like it because I do not have to separate the egg whites and yet I get a well- textured cake. It is an exceedingly MOIST cake that keep well and is a good foundation for fresh fruit, pareve, Passover mousse, or a chocolate ganache topping. Although the eggs are not separated you must treat them with care. Another must is a good, stationary, electric stationary mixer (e.g. such as a Kitchenaid, Rival or Sunbeam) with a whisk or whip attachment that will properly mount the warmed, whole eggs. "Are you sure this is a Passover cake" is the reaction most people have on their first bite of this flavorful cake. For people who loathe dry cakes and think Passover cakes are suspect at best, this is a must. A good cake to have if someone in your family has a birthday during Passover.

This may in fact be my grandmother’s handwriting. Her cursive script was lovely, and mostly what she used. But every now and then she’d write something out in block print - this may be that, or it may be from someone else. Anyway, this is clearly a recipe she used. Kreplach is the Yiddish word for dumpling. They can be dairy or pareve, but are most commonly filled with meat as they are here. They are often served in chicken soup which is why I put them in that category.