Recipes of the past – Lessons for Life
1. SALMON MOUSSE
I made the Salmon Mousse when my daughter was confirmed. I had about sixty people after services. All the food was scarfed because everyone was hungry after services. They had a little Kiddush after services and then everyone came to services at my house. I prepared everything ahead of time. Some of the food I stored at the delicatessen where I always shopped because my refrigerator wasn’t big enough. People loved the dish.
The confirmation was lovely, it was a big confirmation that year. They all gave speeches so it was very nice. She wasn’t bat mitzvah’d but both children stayed for confirmation.
In Europe, the family tradition was that girls were not bat mitzvah’d. She could have been, but she was taking so many things: music lessons, ballet, modern dance, and I forget what else. I was in the car half my life shuttling kids between hebrew school and bar mitzvah preparation and music lessons. They both played in the youth orchestra. It got to a point where it was more than I could handle because I was also working.
It was wonderful to see her confirmed. She talked about the generation gap. At that time there was a big issue in families about how things changed between generations. She felt that largely family tradition still counted but for example, my mother wouldn’t wear a mini skirt and we wear miniskirts. But basically, despite differences, generations could understand each other if they tried. My daughter was and still is quite wise about people’s feelings.
Salmon Mousse
1 lb salmon
1 tbsp gelatin
1 can campbell’s consommé
1 teaspoon worcestershire sauce
1 tbsp instant onion
1 cup mayonnaise
1 tbsp (or less) tarragon vinegar
Juice of one lemon
Dash of soy sauce
Tabasco
Salt & pepper to taste
Drain salmon, remove skin and bones. Soften gelatin in 1/4 of a cup of consommé. Place over hot water until dissolved. Put all ingredients into blender or food processor. Blend until smooth. Pour into mold and let chill. Serve with dill sauce.
Ilse’s Mother
2. CHOCOLATE MOUSSE
This is my mother’s recipe. She was a trained chef which in her youth was not well thought of. A young lady was supposed to stay at home, meet a husband and get married. My mother said it wasn’t for her and she wanted to learn how to cook. My grandmother told her she already knew how to cook, and my mother told her, “not that type of cooking!”
My parents knew a family that had a Kosher
restaurant. The family initially sat my mother behind the cash register but she said, “Oh no, I want an apron in the kitchen!” So she began to learn French Kosher cooking which is quite complicated because if you know Julia Child’s cooking, it’s all butter. She learned how to adjust and this is one of the recipes that she came up with. Normally a mousse has whipped cream in it but this you can use for meat or dairy.
Her first job was in Strasbourg, in Alsace, which was a part of Germany or France at various times. She worked in Strasbourg for the chief rabbi where she had two kitchens, one for meat and one for dairy. It was wonderful, but she said it was the hardest job you could imagine because she never knew whether the rabbi would come home alone, with two students, or six students for lunch. She said that no matter what you fed them, they were never full. Whenever he came home with six students, she was scrounging to have enough food for them. She was there for quite a few years. While there, I don’t know whether my grandfather or her brother died first, but she had to go home. She was then home for quite a while.
Then she went to work in Frankfurt for a family that was very wealthy. They were cousins of the Rothschild family, the famous Jewish bankers. When the cousins came, it was always an impressive meal and it had to be. The meals were served in elegant Crystal serving dishes. My mother had to come up with new dishes, and this was one of the foods she prepared for them. She was there for quite a while, but after my grandfather or her brother died, she had to come home because my grandmother couldn’t handle the business and farm alone.
Chocolate Mousse
6 oz good chocolate (Lindt, Ghirardelli)
4 eggs, separated
3 tbsp of wine or strong coffee
Melt chopped chocolate with wine or coffee over hot water. Stir until very smooth-no lumps. Beat egg yolks. Add cooked chocolate mixture, a little at a time. Beat egg whites until stiff, fold into chocolate mixture. Pour into serving bowl or individual serving dishes and refrigerate over night.
**This is a family favorite holiday dessert.
3. ALMOND TORTE
My mother used to make the almond torte during passover in Germany. There is a seder that I very much remember because of the moon, my brother reading the four questions, and that he finally confessed why he didn’t like the story about the little lamb.
We had a seder and there was an eclipse of the moon that year. I was facing the window over the garden and could see the moon. We went through all the prayers and it got time for dinner. Slowly part of the moon disappeared and there was less and less, all of a sudden it was gone. We all waited for it to come back.
My brother was very little and I had taught him to ask the four questions in Hebrew. When it came time for me to ask the four questions, I said to my brother, you do it. And he really did it, he did it beautifully. We had practiced in secret and my parents were so touched. My mother was crying because a little boy had learned it without his parents teaching him.
We then ate our dinner and started the rest of the Haggadah. When it got towards the end, you have Chad Gadya about the little goat. My brother said he wanted to go to bed and started to cry because we read it in German instead of Hebrew. My mother asked what the matter was, whether he was sick. He said he wanted to go to bed but finally confessed that he didn’t want to hear about someone killing the little goat. After that, we always read it in Hebrew because he started to cry when it was in German. He was too little for Hebrew school at the time, so he didn’t know Hebrew.
Almond Torte (for passover)
1/2 lb ground almonds (2 full cups)
1 cup sugar
1 package (6 oz) chocolate bits
–Add one tbsp of water or wine and melt over hot water and cool
8 separated eggs
Beat egg yolks and sugar until light. Add melted chocolate. Add nuts. Beat egg whites until stiff, fold a little into above mixture, then the rest, combine until no whites show.
Bake in 9” spring form in a preheated 325 degree oven for about one hour. Do not grease pan. Serve with whipped cream.
4. OPULENT CHICKEN (OR VEAL)
I got the recipe from a friend. I’ve never served it without people saying that they like it.
Years ago, my husband and I did a lot of at home entertainment. We lived in Long Island in a neighborhood where we started our own nursery school and hired our own teachers. We were all very friendly with each other so we used to entertain in our homes because you couldn’t always get babysitters. Our next door neighbors and us had an intercom that we used to string through the windows. They’d come over to eat at our house and would run back and forth to check on their children.
One night when they had a dishwasher and we hadn’t gotten one yet, I cleared the table and put the dishes on a tray in the kitchen while I got the dessert and coffee ready. Mel went next store to check on his children. They had a big dog who also watched the children, but they still went home to check up on them. I came out and my dishes were gone.
said, “what happened to the dishes?” He said, “Oh I took them home to put them in our dishwasher. I’ll bring them back clean”. I mean it was this kind of relationship. We had a wonderful group of friends and we used to visit back and forth.
Opulent Chicken (Or Veal)
4 chicken breasts
Paprika, salt & pepper
1/4 lb butter or margarine
1/3 cup sherry
1 1/2 cups chicken broth
1 15 oz can artichoke hearts
1/2 lb sliced mushrooms
Dried tarragon
3 tbsp. flour
Sprinkle split chicken breasts with salt, pepper, paprika. Sauté in butter until golden brown. Place in casserole dish and add split artichokes. Brown mushrooms in remaining butter and sprinkle lightly with tarragon and flour. Add sherry and broth. Simmer for five minutes. Pour over chicken and artichokes. Cover and bake for 30-60 minutes at 350 degrees fahrenheit.
5. BREAD
There were eight Jewish families in my community. Each had one or two people living in the houses, but they were originally big families, around 7 or 8 children. The eight families had all been there for many generations.
All the Jewish families were informed that soldiers were coming and they had to provide housing for them. Of course they were very nervous about it. At that point, my parents were informed that they would receive eight soldiers. When they came, some of them were from Austria, some were from Czechoslovakia and some from other Eastern countries. They came in and there were some beds in the bedroom but not enough. They brought arrived with their own cots and all their equipment and clumped up the stairs. My parents didn’t know what to expect.
Once they went upstairs, my dad said to my mother, “I don’t think we have to worry that much.” She said, “How can you tell, they just walked in and said hello.” And he said, “I saw them carefully wipe their feet on the mat outside. They’re trying to be considerate because they’re not tracking in mud on their boots.”
It turned out that most of them could speak either some German or at least heavily accented German. They would talk to my parents. They had some kind of bread that my dad liked and they would bring him pieces of that bread. My mother baked bread and they loved her bread so she gave them bread. Occasionally they brought some sugar or they tried to bring some coffee if they could get some. They were very nice. Initially I was very worried and they were worried, but my parents wrote to me that they have eight young soldiers and most of them speak some German. To let me know that things were fine, she said that they hear momma and poppa again because the soldiers called them momma and poppa. They were there for a while and then they moved on. My family of course never saw them again. For my parents, it turned out to be not bad at all. They were courteous and there were no problems while in other places and homes the soldiers wrecked homes.
**Recipe is lost.
6. QUICHE
When my daughter’s roommate and her were assigned freshman year, they wrote to each other because they had a double room. At that time it was an emergency double, essentially a large single, and therefore they decided who would bring what so it wouldn’t be overcrowded. In one of the first letters that my daughter received from her roommate and eventual friend, she wrote, “Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you, I’m black.” My daughter said “So, so what?”.
On move in day, Sylvia’s parents came as well. Sylvia’s parents are quite dark whereas Sylvia has red hair with freckles and green eyes. People thought that she was Italian because she looks absolutely White. One of her parents comes from one of the Islands. At some point in her family’s lineage they choose not to remember; most likely there is a Dutch sailor in her ancestry and I guess it skipped generations. When she was at Brown, she had difficulties. She never pretended to not be black. Therefore, the White women didn’t want to be too friendly so she had problems there. The Black women did not like that she lived with a White woman. So, she had problems everywhere. Because of that, my daughter and Sylvia became increasingly close. Through the years, she was at our house very often because when they had time off from college, the trip to her parents house was much farther. So for a long weekend or a week she would stay at our house. During college, she became more and more interested in Judaism. Sylvia started to study more and more about Judaism and eventually married a Jewish man. His family was not happy about it because A. She was not Jewish and B. She was black, although she didn’t look black.
My daughter was at the wedding and her parents were there but it was not a cosy relationship. They weren’t hostile but they weren’t overly friendly. Through the years, they went to different schools and graduate schools. Sylvia became a pediatric psychiatrist, my daughter went on to school in California. They didn’t see each other often but they were always in contact.
One day, my daughter got a call and Sylvia said “I’m converting. You have to come out next weekend because I have to go to the Mikvah and I don’t know what to do about the Mikvah.” She was in Texas somewhere. My daughter said, “What do you mean I have to come out? I don’t know anything about Mikvah’s.” Sylvia said, “Well you have to come.” So my daughter said she hopped on a plane and went out. They prepared for a big party and were up all night making Quiches.
After her conversion, she became prominent in her congregation. The argument she used to have with her husband was that he used to mix up the meat and dairy dishes. As the years went on, she studied more and more. She’s a talented musician and was interested in becoming a cantor. What kept her from it was that she had to go to Israel for a year and she couldn’t afford to take a year off from her work. She is president of her synagogue now and is very active and still studying Judaism.
**Recipe is lost.
7. SOUR CREAM CAKE
When we moved to Connecticut, my family joined a reform synagogue.
The kids called it the Rabbi’s cake because our rabbi loved that cake. My daughter did volunteer work at the library. Between the rabbi and the custodian, they told her she could only volunteer there if she brought that cake every week. She baked and brought the cake one time. The custodian, a Scottsman with the driest sense of humor you could imagine, said, “Look, you cooked a nice cake, but I found a hair in it. That cake was ruined, you have to bake another one.” She came home and said she wasn’t baking another cake, so I called the rabbi and told him to cut that out and I would give the recipe to Sue, his wife, so she could bake the cake.
Sour Cream Cake
1 cup margarine
2 cups sugar
3 eggs
1 pt. sour cream
1 tsp. vanilla
3 cups flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1 cup chopped nuts
1 cup raisins
Cream butter and sugar. Add the eggs, one at a time and beat well. Fold in sour cream. Add dry ingredients by hand. Bake in greased angel food pan for one hour at 350 degrees.
8. LIME SOUR CREAM MOLD
This is an absolute necessity in our family for thanksgiving. I got the recipe from a cousin. For several years I had a cousin in Providence, Rhode Island. They more or less insisted that we drove up from Connecticut to have thanksgiving with them.
Unless I take this away, my granddaughter could eat half of it. My family calls it the green stuff. By now if we have thanksgiving and she can get here early, she makes it.
The children started Kindergarten and First grade in Long Island. There were all the thanksgiving preparations including cutting out of paper turkey’s, so I guess because of the in class festivities we began to make food for thanksgiving. It was an American holiday. It was just nice a nice holiday where families get together so we decided to start.
There were some Jewish neighbors in East Meadow, but but it was a mixed community, just like the community in which I grew up. Most of the teachers were Christian, but it didn’t make any difference. They just taught the normal curriculum. It was completely natural for me to live amongst Christians.
Lime Sour Cream Mold
Mix 2 packages of lime jell-o and 3 cups of boiling water. Mix and cool for one hour. Drain 1 medium size can of crushed pineapple and 1 medium sized can of cherries.
Mix the jell-o mixture and add to it:
1 pt. sour cream
3/4 cup crushed walnuts
Crushed pineapples
Bing cherries
Mix the above together and pour into mold. Place into refrigerator.
9. PASSOVER MERINGUE COOKIES
3 egg whites
1 Tbsp. salt
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup sifted granulated sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp almond extract
1 cup chopped blanched almonds
4 squares unsweetened chocolate, cut upKeep egg whites at room temperature for one hour. Preheat oven at 250 degrees with mineral high speed, beat egg whites, vinegar & salt until moist peaks. Slowly beat in sugar with a spoon, fold in extract and rest of ingredients. Drop by teaspoons 2” apart onto greased cookie sheet. Bake until firm (approximately 30 minutes at 250 degrees). When cool, melt 1/2 a package (3 oz) of chocolate bits and a tsp. of Crisco and dip in edge of cookies. Place on cookie sheet to dry.
