Is there life after chicken soup?

 

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When I was a child, around 7, we lived next door to a large family in London. I liked to visit neighbours, anything to get away from my own family. There was something different about this family. Even at a young age, I could tell. 

One evening I tottered in and the woman next door was lighting candles with her hand over her eyes. She then started singing in a strange language. 

I rushed home to tell my ma. “It sounds magical,” my mother said. It turned out they were a Jewish family who had escaped to London to avoid the Holocaust. She cautioned against eating too much of their food. “They have been through a terrible time, and need all the food they can get.” 

What she didn’t know was that I was there for exactly what she had cautioned about, the food. Unlike in our frugal house where food was locked away, there was always lots and lots of food: little pies, bowls of soup and chicken in gleaming golden piles. 

“They eat a sort of pink stuff like paper, tastes like fish,” I reported to my mother. It was smoked salmon, which I had never seen before, and the lady had sent some over as well. Soon our whole family was addicted to smoked salmon.

“There is bread like bracelets. She makes them in a big pot of boiling water,” I further reported. I particularly loved those bread bracelets, they were sort of spongy inside and slightly sweet. 

The woman was always in the kitchen (a place my ma hardly visited), hollowing, stuffing, wrapping and rolling food into tiny balls and fingers. 

Once when I was ill in bed the woman brought around a broth which she called Jewish Penicillin. Chicken soup. After that, when one of us was ill, my ma would always say, “What we need is some of that chicken soup.” 

Before, when sick, we had lived on a strict diet of Marmite sandwiches. 

But it was never only about food that I visited the neighbours so often. There was something romantic and even weird, something ancient that I loved. The man wore a funny little round thing on the back of his head. I reported again to my mother, “The man has a hole in his head which he covers with a little hat.” 

As time progressed and I grew older and moved to cities, I began to taste more Jewish food. In London people would say to me, “Aren’t you just dying for pastrami on rye?” I didn’t know what pastrami was. 

For my 30th birthday someone bought me a cheesecake. I had never tasted cheesecake before. 

When I moved to Cape Town in the Seventies and began working on magazines, the delicacy was hot beef on rye. Many of my colleagues were Ashkenazi Jews, whose ancestors came from Eastern Europe, mainly Lithuania and Russia. Others came from Greece, Rhodes in particular, via the Congo and Rhodesia and brought with them Sephardic cuisine with a melange of spices. 

I began to be invited to Shabbos meals.

The French historian Fernand Braudel, in his book The Mediterranean, wrote that there was undoubtedly a Jewish civilisation, but that it was so individual that it was not always recognised as one. To me in those days, it seemed very New York. There was so much zhuz, but what really captivated me was the bread and candles, so elemental. 

However, what should have been ancient simplicity often turned into an overladen gutfes.

The Shabbos table stunned me. It was loaded with cold fried fish. There were large pots of different stews – and even sometimes pudding – all mixed together because they had been made the day before and would have to last until Sunday. No cooking on Saturday. 

There was potato salad, fish balls, lots of vegetables, plates of fried aubergine, plates of knish, small delicious pies, the Jewish samoosa, soup with fish balls (gefilte fish) which I have never got used to, matzo balls, potato pancakes (latkes), kugel, schnecken, Berliner pfannkuchen and apfelstrudel. 

(Photo of apfelstrudel by RitaE from Pixabay)

(Photo of bagel and salmon by Food Photographer David Fedulov on Unsplash)