Beginnings

My early awareness of Jewish cooking was in three courses: Soup, Bagel, and Cheesecake.

Soup: My mother’s chicken soup. This will be unsurprising for anyone brought up knowing that the secret to soothing the soul lies in extensive simmering of a whole chicken, assorted veg and handfuls of herbs. There’s a reason it’s called Jewish penicillin. More unexpected is that it is my non-Jewish mother who should be awarded the Chicken Soup Crown (which as everyone knows is a tiara of white feathers with an egg shaped pearl at its centre). I can’t date my earliest memory of her chicken soup. It’s as if it was there from time immemorial, as if when we all crawled out of the primeval ooze it was, yes, you guessed it, a soupy swamp. I just know that as soon as I was old enough to have appliances, my freezer was always full of trays of said chicken soup, and it’s got me through many a tight spot. My mother (and Tanya Gold who writes about the same effect) was right when she remarked that there’s something truly comforting about walking into a kitchen and seeing all the steam rising from that bubbling saucepan. My mother also says that unlike other things you keep on the back burner in life, it’s something you won’t forget about and will be inevitably nourishing.

Since writing this I’ve spoken to said mother. She is very happy to assume the crown, and told me that when aeons ago she made her soup for glass artist Sam Herman who sadly passed last year, he said to her, ‘I have to say, this is better than my mother’s chicken soup.’

As soon as we can all lawfully meet up in kitchens, I’m going to ask my mother to show me step by step how she makes this deliciousness, and I’ll demonstrate my new found skills at making matzo balls the size and consistency of small meteors.

Beigel/Bagel (but never Beagle): I have clear memories aged 12 onwards of my step-brother turning up most weekends with a brown paper bag of bagels from the Brick Lane Beigel Bake, and I’m fairly sure I hogged (how unkosher of me) all of them. As Lee said when he inspected my bagels yesterday “there’s a reason there are bakeries run by generations of the same family perfecting their bagel recipes.” He’s right of course, I am not going to take the world by storm with my bagels, I could however break a window.

Cheesecake: Aged 16 I was at my friends Tamara and Adam’s house when their mother, a glorious woman, magicked up a cheesecake. In my memory and in the re-telling she bursts into the room saying “don’t worry I’ve got a cheesecake.” My mother has just reminded me that when we were doing races, Adam’s mother used to bring one along and say to him ‘you must eat your cheesecake.’ She couldn’t remember if it was before or after the race.

I’ve never made one, but Claudia Roden has a recipe so I’ll be attempting to follow it for Shavuot on 16 May. I can already see it now as the inverse of those cheesecakes of 24 years ago. It’ll be a sliding, gloopy (and not in the Gwyneth sense) mess of a thing. When I produce it, I’ll say, “do worry, I’ve got a cheesecake.”