FOND MEMORIES
By: Suri Davis
Bubby made perogen and cheese Danish for Shavuos. I was a budding lawyer with a new practice, and so I had time to cook and bake with Bubby.
Erev Shavuos, I would get to her house at 7a.m., and she already had the mashed potatoes with fried onion filling done, she had her lokshen braitel out, the one that Zaidy Chaim made from wood breklach, and she had poured the five pound bag of flour onto the braitel, made a well, and cracked her eggs in the well, and started the perogen wraps.
By 1p.m., I was exhausted, every surface of every room in Bubby’s house was covered with pans of raw perogen, and I fell soundly asleep on her couch, at age 25, exhausted. At age 95, she kept going. My mother inevitably would call and ask Bubby how things were going, and she’d report fine, loll, Bubby never outed me.
The perogen count reached over 800, as we all came to Bubby’s house every yom tov, to get our care packages.
The cheese Danish came next, she made them with yeast, and farmer cheese, eggs, vanilla.
By then Zaidy had passed away, we still had spaghetti with ketchup for lunch. When my Zaidy was alive, we had grand lunches filled with herring, noodles/cottage cheese/cinnamon and sugar, My-T Fine chocolate pudding for dessert. Sometimes Borscht or Schav, but always herring and pumpernickel and butter.
Everyone wanted Bubby’s recipes, but she had none, she would “shit arein/throw in” flour and other ingredients as needed. She didnt have measuring cups, she would use the old yahrtzeit candle glasses or the Breakstone, sour cream glasses with the rubber tops and the flower petal designs.
When we baked and cooked, Zaidy would cross Sage Street and collect the siddurim and sefarim in Shamos, and bring them back to his porch where he would take scotch tape and duct tape, and repair them on his porch and return them to the shul. There used to be many identifiable sefarim from my Zaidy on the shul shelves, now I can barely find a handful.
Memorial Day…the day we thank veterans and their families for giving of themselves, so we live in a country with religious and other freedoms. It was on this Shabbos that the White Shul would start their Hashkamah minyanim and early candle lighting. When the men would switch to their seersucker suits, straw hats and white shoes, and the women switched to their hats, white shoes, and the girls from their black Mary Janes to their white Mary Janes.
I fondly Remember When…
Chag sameach
-Suri