Jill Porter: At Passover, changing roles
SHE'S 90 NOW, my mother, and she's tired. I can't do it any more, she told the family as talk turned to Passover seder.
SHE'S 90 NOW, my mother, and she's tired.
I can't do it any more, she told the family as talk turned to Passover seder.
She's always been a workhorse, and always prepares the traditional dishes for our holiday meals: the gefilte fish, matzoh ball soup, and, especially, the sweet-and-sour meatballs. The kids in the extended family call her The Meatball Lady.
But this year, she - very reluctantly - gave up her home of 40 years to move into assisted living, where she's being waited on for the first time in her life. And the shopping and cooking, especially the hand-rolling of scores of tiny meatballs, is too much.
Her homemade dishes are more than food, of course. They are a reassuring link to childhood, and to a tradition that gets more fragile every year, an irreplaceable, vanishing wealth.
It's time for the next generation to take over the cooking - myself and Connie, my brother's wife and my lifelong friend. Both of us work, and we typically eschew arduous, old-fashioned cooking for shortcuts, take-out and catering.
But family seders wouldn't be the same without my mother's food. And her verbal instructions won't do, since old-world cooks don't write down recipes. They improvise their way with taste, texture and sight.
My mother will have to show us, in a poignant ritual of passage.
Connie's kitchen counter is strewn with parsnips and turnips, carrots and chickens, and all manner of ingredients.
Sit down, we tell my mother. The idea is for her to provide directions and oversight while we work.
I'm not sitting down, she says in that shut-up-and-listen voice that compensates for her size. She's 4'10" now - if that - diminished by age.
She takes off her shoes, one of which is promptly snatched by Buddy, Connie's shar-pei, prompting a chase through the apartment.
The fresh parsley for the chicken soup is strangely fragrant. Connie smells it, at my urging, and shrieks: "It's coriander!"
We both hate coriander. We almost killed the soup right there. I run to the market for real parsley.
We stand at the kitchen counter and begin: A whole chicken goes into a pot, covered with water, and we peel and cut the vegetables and put those in, too.
Connie and I gentrify some of the recipes and cut corners on others. We insist on minced fresh garlic rather than garlic powder for the meatballs.
We Cuisinart the onion instead of grating it by hand, and later pick out large shards that escaped the blade.
We shriek as my mother tastes the turkey mix, foreseeing impending death from salmonella. She scoffs at us.
We form a meatball assembly line. I scoop the ground turkey and roll it into balls, which turn out too big or too small with irregular edges.
My mother corrects them by resizing them, dipping her hand into water and massaging them into perfectly circular balls. Aha!
Connie puts them in the sauce.
Connie gets hot in the kitchen and shuts off the overhead lights.
We cook in the near-dark, singing the oldies on the radio, side by side by side.
I'm mincing parsley and I look up to see my mother and Connie standing across the kitchen island from me.
I'm struck by the sight of them.
My 90-year-old mother and my sister-in-law of 40 years stand next to each other, hands working, looking at the bowls in front of them, unaware of each other.
How many miles we've all come together.
I'm mesmerized by the vision, nostalgic at the significance of the moment.
But neither of them is sentimental, so I say nothing, just drink in the sight to remember forever.
Hours later, we're finished. We laugh to see that ground turkey is embedded in my belt buckle, smeared across my mother's shirt and spattered across the kitchen.
We leave the meatballs simmering on the stove.
It's time for my mother to go back to her new home. Dinner in the dining room is at 5.
She chokes up a little, as she always does, when I drop her off.
Later in the week, when I'm invited to a friend's house for the second seder, I tell her I'll bring sweet-and-sour meatballs.
I know how to make them now. I'm the new Meatball Lady. *
E-mail porterj@phillynews.com or call 215-854-5850. For recent columns: