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I didn't know what to expect when I picked up Miriam's Kitchen from the library. I found the memoir, written by Elizabeth Ehrlich, browsing through the library catalogue. I was searching for stories about food. There's something about the spring that makes me search out food lit. After the long, cold winter, both the sun and I want to play. It warms up the earth, I warm up my kitchen.
I knew nothing of the book. I knew that it was a story of a family's history. I knew it was a National Jewish Book Award winner. That's all, and as far as books go, that's not a lot.
What I found was a beautiful book. Like many Jewish-American stories, it is one of Holocaust survival and immigration. It's about moving ahead with the promise of a new life while your heart never stops mourning the old life. And it was about how the next generation keeps that old life in their hearts, and passes it on to the generations that will come after them. But mostly, it's a book about love.
I wasn't even 20 pages in when I found myself declaring on Twitter that if you hadn't read it, you needed to, and all but ordered you to add it to your library request immediately.
As Ehrlich explores Miriam's kitchen, I am pushed into mine. She shares Miriam's memories of being in her mother's kitchen. Miriam's mother was the real baker, as is mine. I remember the kitchen of the very first house I ever lived in. It was dark and not that much bigger than the one I currently own. I remember standing on a chair beside my mother as she added things to the bowl of her stand mixer, teaching me of the order of baking: First we creamed the butter and sugar. Then we added the eggs, each carefully cracked into a separate dish before being added one at a time to the mixture. The vanilla, in a glass jar, which she always measured with the plastic cap rather than a measuring spoon -- something I used to do. When Lee threw out the glass bottle of vanilla to replace it with a new plastic one, I was angry, because the plastic felt wrong in my hand. The cap was the wrong size. I haven't found the right glass bottle of vanilla yet, even more than a year later.
After all the liquids were mixed together, we added the dry ingredients; but they must always first be sifted. My mother's sifter is old and even then was a scratched and dented from many years of use. We measured the dry ingredients into it and then churned them into the bowl below, the flour falling in tufts like soft snow. We mixed carefully, until just combined or until silky smooth, depending on what kind of batter we were making. The batter got turned into the cake pan and popped into the oven. I got to lick the batters, a special treat, and then we cleaned up and waited. And waited. And waited. First we waited for it it cook. Then we waited for it cool. Then we waited for everyone to come home, for back then we were an eight-person household. The waiting is practically a lifetime for a four-year-old.
As I read Miriam's Kitchen, it is Easter weekend. We're marking the long weekend by eating as much as possible, it seems. An anniversary dinner. A dinner with friends that we have not seen in far too long. Easter Sunday dinner with my in-laws. These are the people in my life I cook for.
Tonight it is our dinner with friends, and our contribution is dessert. I made goodies last night, and I'll bring some of those, but having just finished the chapter on Miriam's cakes, a cake demands to be made. I pull out my weathered and much-beloved Pyrex bowls. The blinds are up, the windows are open. It's unseasonably warm, and I squint into the sunshine as gentle jazz floats into the kitchen from the living room stereo. The yellow bowl matches both the sunshine and my mood. I turn my back on the stand mixer and cream together butter and sugar by hand with a wooden spoon, tilting the bowl just like my mother showed me. Then the egg, cracked in a separate dish before being added to the bowl. The vanilla, measured
