A mother who edits

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R E C E N T L Y

One big dysfunctional family
By Fiona Morgan
Former cult member can laugh about it now
(03/29/99)

Remembering Carole Sund
By Wendy J. Williams
A community of mothers mourns the death of a woman murdered on a sightseeing trip
(03/26/99)

Tell me the truth
By Sallie Tisdale
Or if you're going to lie, at least do it truthfully.
(03/23/99)

Breed old, die late and leave a beautiful brain
By Michele Y. Pridmore-Brown
The evidence is in: Old mothers live longer and are smarter than the rest of us
(03/24/99)

"Jungle Book" fever
By Peter Matthiessen
How a childhood spent reading Kipling's wondrous tales gave a writer his spots -- India, Siberia, Africa
(03/23/99)

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BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATURE ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

-----Conned by a Jewish mother
-----------I THOUGHT IF I COOKED WITH ENOUGH BUTTER,
-----SALT, SOUR CREAM AND CHICKEN FAT,
---------I COULD LAND MYSELF AND MY FAMILY IN THE WARM,
-------LOVING, SAFE WORLD OF MOLLY GOLDBERG.

BY INDA SCHAENEN | Advice to those who go seeking their roots: Plan on transplanting.

Every year I spend the week before Passover in a one-room cabin in a remote corner of the Ozarks. It is always spring break, and we retire to this place to read, hike, play, sleep and generally recover from the pace of school and work. As I write, I doubt there is another Jew for a hundred miles around.

That fact lends a certain pleasure to any Jewish-related activity we pursue. Last year I sewed the tablecloths for our Seder. This year I planned to evaluate possible recipes for a starchy side dish to go with my ceremonial Passover pot roast. For this reason I made sure to pack my yellowing, near spineless paperback copy of "The Molly Goldberg Jewish Cookbook," originally published in 1955. Years ago I had slipped this relic from my mother's bookcase into my possession as a piece of kitsch, a sample of the kind of thing my mother brought with her into her doomed marriage.

This book, which cost 95 cents at the time of its sixth printing in 1967, features on its cover a color photograph of a Sabbath meal spread on a blue cloth: silver candlesticks, gefilte fish topped with carrot pennies, grapes, challah, a roasted chicken and a kiddush cup full of wine. All of this, given our family, struck a note of pure irony because my mother is and always was tall, glamorous, beautiful and not inclined to slave sweatily over hot stoves for the sake of something to eat. She was not raised to be a behayma, churning through ingredients -- flour, salt, egg, meat, cream -- like they were elements of her body. Her body was Jean Naté and hair dye, razors and eyebrow tweezers. Our kitchen did not reek of the yeasty, buttery, beefy fumes of daily cookery. It smelled clean. As a matter of fact, my divorcée mother worked all day, and a live-in housekeeper prepared dinner according to instructions my mother taped to the side of the refrigerator. We ate frozen string beans and fried steaks, hot dog casserole and lamb chops with mint jelly from a jar.

So what am I trying to pull off here with Molly Goldberg? How and why did my approach to Molly slide from ironic to earnest? It began when I needed to produce and direct various Jewish moments in the life of my own family, the one I started with my husband (who, incidentally, is not Jewish). It began small in scale: I needed to make hammentaschen for Purim. That was the first time I pulled the book out as a resource, not as a gimmick. A few years later I needed a few other recipes, and this year I decided to experiment with several in a matter of days. I relied on Molly Goldberg to communicate to me the way to cook like the genuine article. But strange things happen when you search for the real thing in the pages of a book.

Right from the start of Molly's introduction, I found a voice I knew well from literature, from TV, from "Fiddler on the Roof":

"This is My Cookbook," she writes. "So how did I come to write a cookbook? I had to protect myself, that's how ... When I cook for my family I don't have trouble. But when someone, Mrs. Herman, for an instance, asks me, 'How do you make this or how do you make that?' do I know? Of course I know but can I tell her? Of course I can, but it's easier to show her. So I have to say to her, 'Come into my kitchen and I'll make you up.'"

N E X T_ P A G E: The ultimate Jewish mother