A Treasure From My Parents
A year or so ago, in preparation for our Yom Kippur break-fast, I emailed my mom asking for her honey cake recipe; my most vivid Yom Kippur memories involve my sister and I fleeing Neilah service as soon as the shofar was blown and scarfing down pieces of our mom’s honey cake hidden in my tallis bag.
My mom sent me a photo of her recipe, taken from a book called: A Treasure for my Daughter. A Treasure for my Daughter, a cookbook cum how-to guide, was published by the Montreal Hadassah Chapter in 1950 and follows an unnamed mother as she teachers her newly engaged daughter, Hadassah, how to organize and manage a Jewish home. In today's world of graphic photos and food pornography, A Treasure for My Daughter is a throwback of heavy text and exposition.
My first attempt at baking the honey-cake ended an overdone disaster. A Treasure for my Daughter I was not, neither in gender, nor in practice.
When I called my mom to ask what had gone wrong, she reminded me that the bake time was erroneously published. “You don’t know how many cakes I ruined when we first got married,” she replied mournfully.
I could tell that such failure must have gnawed at my mother’s perfectionism, especially in her early years of marriage, when she tried to assume the role of Jewish housewife, or balabusta. My mother is a dutiful cook. I’m sure she would feign embarrassment at being outed as such, but if you got a couple of glasses of wine in her, she would probably concede that cooking was a necessary evil of her gender.
“When I was in college,” She often reminds me, “women had 2 options: nursing or teaching. And even so - those were only stops on the road to raising kids.” Cooking was a trade-off from the shackles of 9-5.
A funny thing happened on the way to the twenty first century: bras burned and my mother found herself a career, thrusting my father into the role of weekday meal-maker. This was a somewhat nontraditional arrangement for an early 1990s Conservative Jewish family, but as we sat around our kitchen table, I was too naive to wonder why other families would ever behave differently.
At the outset of this familial transition we ate a lot take-out; my father had grown up in a household where men weren’t expected to boil water for pasta. My grandfather would come home from his job, he was a foreman in a schemata factory, sit down at the kitchen table and wait for my grandmother to bring him meat and potatoes. My grandmother, who we called Nana, had converted to Judaism and relished her role as a Jewish mother and homemaker. Nana didn’t just haphazardly convert into her chosen name of Ruth, she embodied its cultural expressions too; people still talk about her matzo balls, magically boiled to the size of a Montreal Royal baseball, yet light as a feather.
One night, perhaps in a sodium fueled rage, my father took one final look at the Chinese take-out boxes that littered our kitchen and announced that a new dawn was coming to our Ardmore, our Toronto street that was filled with its matching uniformity of mock tudor homes and upper middle class Jews. Dad was going to learn how to cook.
My mother had culled together a roster of recipes from cookbooks that were popular in Canadian Jewish households in the 80’s and 90’s. These included the aforementioned, A Treasure for my Daughter, but also Noreen Gillitz’s Second Helpings, Please, which Amazon describes as, “a right of passage for new brides.” Although nowhere near as frum as A Treasure, Second Helpings managed to thread that thin line between late twentieth-century suburban Jewish affluence, and cultural kashrut. The result is a cookbook filled with democratic recipes that blended vaguely ethnic dishes like “Chinese Stew with Beef” with a dairy-only lasagna that featured Kraft parmesan cheese.
My father, a sudden participant in the gender revolution, choose to shun epicurean conservatism too. On the first night of his uprising, he showed up for dinner with a glossy cookbook, filled with photos of perfectly styled food, and a grocery bag full of exotic ingredients, I was certain he must have bought at a specialty store. Retrospectively, he bought a box of fusilli and San Marzano tomatoes.
I’m pretty sure that my own love of cooking blossomed shortly thereafter, as if my father’s decision to don an apron a boil a pot of water was his version of drafting A Treasure for my Son.
It is most likely that the good women of Montreal’s Hadassah wouldn’t have expected their cookbook to figure prominently in the kitchen of two Jewish men living together, as more than roommates, in Manhattan of all places. I do, however, like to think my grandmother would be happy to know her grandson is carrying the torch of the religion she so embraced.
When my fiance and I got engaged, I decided to buy a copy of a Treasure for my Daughter, deciding that if anyone was going to become a boylabusta, it might as well be me. And even if a few of its directions are wrong, there’s no cookbook that reminds me of my father’s true love of cooking, my mother’s duty to build a Jewish home, and my grandmother’s abject love of her adopted religion.
Besides, the best recipes, are like the best traditions, modified with practice.
Ingredients:
½ cup oil or shortening
1 cup sugar
1 cup honey
2 ½ cups sifted flour
½ tsp baking soda
1 tsp allspice
1 cup walnuts (optional)
4 eggs
1 cup orange juice
Rind of one orange
½ tsp salt
½ tsp cinnamon
3 tsp baking soda
Instructions:
Sift all dry ingredients together
If adding walnuts, sift then with a a tablespoon of the dry ingredient mixture, and then set aside
In a stand-up mixer, cream oil or shortening and sugar together
Add well-beaten eggs gradually and continue to beat
Add honey, continue to beat
Add orange juice alternating with premixed dry ingredients
Mix until combined well, add orange rind, then nuts
Pour into greased 9x13 pan
Bake for 30 minutes at 350 degrees (recipe calls for 1 hr (!), check at 28 minutes so it doesn’t dry out!