Observer Food Magazine, 11 October 2009
It was when my mother minced the tip of her forefinger into the klops that I realised her cooking owed more to enthusiasm than finesse. No, I’m wrong. It was when she decided not to bother to search for the little piece of alien flesh amidst the beef, but carried on kneading the meat with the onions, that I got a sense of her priorities, at the top of which was Just Getting It Over With. I was nine. The kitchen intrigued me for it seemed some sort of battlefield in which my mother laid about various ingredients until they surrendered and accepted their fate in a long, hot oven. She would never have used the term batterie de cuisine, but she took pride in the more fearsome of its implements, in particular the heavy-duty steel hand mincer, which, after it had been polished to military brilliance, was attached to the kitchen table. All kinds of food went down its helical screw-mouth: translucent cod and haddock fillets on Thursdays for the gefilte fish; unusual extra chicken breasts for fried balls served up sometimes on Sundays, and the mid-week jumbo meatballs, the legendary klops of her strenuous attack. Into the screw were also fed lashings of onion and, if she was in a mood to lighten the fish or chicken, a beaten egg or two. I don’t remember her crying out in pain when she pulled her slightly chewed-up finger out of the mincer, though there was a hearty Yiddish curse or two sent in its direction. Like Basil Fawlty scolding his Mini, she had Warned It Before and now it would just have to take the consequences. Into the sink went her finger; on to the slightly drippy wound went an Elastoplast and on she went with the klops. At nine I could (on select occasions) be a sanctimonious little perisher and knew that I could put a stop to the inexorable grinding by asking her whether the ground fingertip was, in fact, kosher, and if not, would it write off the whole dish – one of my father’s favourites? I also knew that she would brush the objection aside with one of her more devilish laughs and that would be the end of it, other than swearing me to silence as Father and my older sister tucked into the klops.
Later, when she worked as the Field-Marshal of Kosher Meals on Wheels in the Jewish East End, getting up before dawn to travel across London to see all the housebound got their lunches, and relished every minute of it, I realised that it was not the food that was my mother’s foe so much as the domestic kitchen itself. A bundle of animal energy in a pretty little package, she just was not cut out for the middle-class housewife role in which she had got somehow stuck, and all the displaced, ferocious energy, and slightly manic, often comical, action drama just needed a bigger stage to operate on. As far as I could tell, Trudie had always been this way. As a little girl, Chaya Gittel – the name she went by in Whitechapel and Stepney – had the startling looks that made people want to chin-chuck her or (for her), worse, pinch her cushiony cheeks: black curls and cobalt-blue eyes; a killer combo. But when she was made to dress up, and the curls were trained into ringlets, people found out in a hurry she was more spitfire than angel. Her father, my grandfather Mark, the only one of a gang of Lithuanian-Jewish brothers who stopped in Stepney rather than moving north to Liverpool to catch the New York ship, was a butcher. So when Chaya, over furious protest, was forced to dress up in silks and satins imported at great expense from my grandmother’s Vienna relatives for Special Occasions, my mother’s way to make a tomboy statement was to take the butcher’s shears and slash it to ribbons. The thrashing she got made her repent not one bit. She set her jaw firmly and swore she would do it again.
Perhaps it was the butcher-shop childhood that did it, but my mother grew up seldom relishing food; and certainly holding herself apart from the fatty wallowing in the joys of the Jewish table, which she looked on, often, with undisguised contempt – even, or especially, when she was forced to cook it. Food and its relentless preparation was somehow a chore, an enemy of life. During the war she worked for de Havilland aircraft, Girl Friday to test pilots, one of whom used to take her for spins in his roadster, a bottle of Scotch handy in the glove box. She got to like un-Jewish things: Thames Valley pubs and good hard Cheddar with the odd dark vein running to the rind. My mother thought the test pilot an ace and always laughed at the memory of his fine madness. He ended in a ball of flame, but that only made the story perfect as far as she was concerned.
In her girlhood Chaya befriended a turkey whose lame strut – a ritual impurity – had saved it from the slaughterer’s knife. She called it ‘Loomie’ – the Lame One – and taught it to limp up and down the stairs. Girl and bird bonded with terrible intensity and spent much time in each other’s company. Then, inevitably one day, Loomie disappeared, sold by my grandfather to a gentile colleague for a destiny with Christmas. My mother threw one of her majestic tantrums, barricaded herself in her birdless room, emerging only to grab her younger brother and attempt to run away south, dragging her teary-eyed little sibling all the way past London Bridge on the road she hoped ended in Brighton, before being picked up by an amazed but kindly copper. All her life she stayed wary of butchers, and had the Insider’s Knowledge to make their lives miserable should she suspect they were overcharging for poor cuts and stringy quality. Burly men in stained aprons from Stamford Hill to Temple Fortune would hide behind the Wieners or hurry to the cold room when they saw Trudie barrel through the glass door. I sometimes thought the curse of the Lame Turkey hung over her entire treatment of poultry, especially the terminally overcooked Friday-night chicken, whose ghastly pallor was enlivened by a coating of Marmite so that it emerged from the oven looking like a society matron who had been mistreated at a tanning salon. Within its cavity rattled a lonely duet of garlic cloves, an exotic concession to my father’s savoury cravings.
My father belonged to a different Jewish food tradition – Rumanian with a dash of Sefardi ancestry – so that rice, dried fruit, and stuffed vine leaves (with the more Ashkenazi sweet-and-sour cabbage substituting in my mother’s version) were dishes that made him happy and, above all other things, I think, aubergines; still not easy to find in the 1950s. My mother eked out the joy of the aubergine, sometimes making a purée laced with more garlic than she usually found acceptable, and stuffing them with minced beef (without, so far as I know, the addition of human parts) in which the spices of my father’s mother’s kitchen – cinnamon and allspice – played a dangerous, appetising part.
When she felt she was not Under Obligation, Trudie could turn out some good simple things. Her pride and joy, a thick, glutinous lamb-and-barley soup she called ‘Ta’am Gan Eden’ – the Taste of the Garden of Eden – never quite lived up to its billing as far as I was concerned; the muttony pungency of kosher lamb somehow obliterating the stewed vegetables. But she made wonderful egg noodles to go with the chicken soup that preceded the Poulet à la Marmite; and I would help her slice the egg-rolls into quarter-inch strings and lay them out on greaseproof paper. Every so often I would steal one of the yellow ribbons, popping it in my mouth before the high-speed hand of my mother slapped it away. Then there were the fried fish balls: Sefardi Jews’ gift to Britain (for everywhere else in the Jewish world, gefilte fish is poached). Whatever the precise mix of egg, matzo meal, onion and spices that went into the devouring mincer, my mother got it right, and the smell and sound of the discs, going tawny brown in their bath of hot oil, was when I wanted to be in the kitchen. As far as I was concerned, she never made enough, for though they were fried on a Thursday, I would gobble one down for breakfast the next morning and by Saturday, somehow (though my mother complained about their lengthy residence in the fridge), they had taken on some mysteriously enriched flavour that was, for me, heaven to the palate. In synagogue that morning, my hair slicked up into a pompadour hardened with a secret recipe of Brylcreem and Uhu glue, deep in discussion about the fortunes of Spurs and the fabulous Valentine twins up in the gallery whom we ogled from below, I knew that I smelled faintly of haddock beneath the Old Spice. But you know what, dear foodies, I didn’t give a damn.