"By Accident: A Memoir of Letting Go" by Joanne Greene is available for pre-order from your online favorite book sellers. Release date June 20,2023
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In this Story....I Share A Brief Family History with Meat
My mother didn’t trust the meat that supermarkets sold. She once said that McDonald’s couldn’t be serving beef because they were only charging fifteen cents per hamburger. She only bought meat from Lipsky’s, the kosher meat market on Beacon Street in Brookline, delivered to our door once a month. The order would include lamb chops and London Broil, hamburger meat for her layered mashed potato meatloaf, a three or four-pound brisket, perhaps some calf’s liver and a container of chicken livers, all of it which would be placed in the freezer, in the basement next to the washing machine and dryer, wrapped in white butcher paper, scotch-taped on the side. My mother’s father had been a kosher butcher who ran one of three kosher butcher shops in Providence, Rhode Island in the early part of the twentieth century. The other two shops were run by my grandfather’s brothers. Back in Russia, they couldn’t all make a living. But in the new world, there was enough demand for kosher meat to support all three Mittleman families.
The meats my mother prepared and lovingly served to us never varied. Brisket was the holiday special – always marinated in a mixture of cider vinegar, ketchup, a packet of Lipton onion soup mix, and brown sugar, slowly roasted for 5 hours at 300 degrees. Did anyone love it? Not really. But it tasted like Rosh Hashanah and Passover and the idea of bucking tradition hadn’t crossed anyone’s mind.
Chopped liver was one of three possible Friday night appetizers, along with jarred gefilte fish and homemade chicken soup. The liver, served with celery sticks, was supposed to be a treat. I’m not sure we ever mentioned that no kid in recorded history has ever liked liver, in any form. Most suppers at our house began with an iceberg lettuce salad, sprinkled with a few pieces of peeled cucumber, carrot, and tomato, drizzled with Wishbone Italian, home-made Thousand Island (mayo mixed with ketchup) or Milani’s 1890 French salad dressing. Chicken, made in numerous ways, depending upon the recipes that her sisters Dora and Faye had recently shared, was a Friday night necessity. I could have sworn it was a commandment: thou shalt eat chicken on Friday nights. Kind of like the way Catholics ate fish on Fridays. Was that why the school lunch on Fridays was always fish sticks with tartar sauce? God must have wanted it that way. Fish for the Catholics; chicken for the Jews.
The chicken Mom made could be drowning in orange juice and canned pineapple pieces or rolled in egg and crushed corn flakes. Generally baked, it would occasionally be broiled, but never fried.
“Who needs the fat and the calories?” she’d say. No one responded. When Mom made chicken soup – with noodles if it wasn’t Passover and kneidlach (matzah balls in Yiddish) if it was – there was always a plastic container of boiled chicken in the frig, which Dad, and only Dad, ate. Have you ever smelled a container of boiled chicken?
What would my parents, much less the grandfather who died before I was born, say if they knew that I’d given up meat altogether? “How can you give up meat when our ancestors worked so hard to be able to buy it?” Of course I’d have answers – about the hormones in meat today, the adverse health effects of a meat-based diet, the impact of the beef industry on climate change and, of course, my attachment to animals of all kinds. But the greater answer might have something to do with my openness to new ideas, my respect for but not total adherence to tradition, and the global nature of today’s world which has opened the door to cuisines of all varieties. Rarely do I repeat a recipe because the NY Times is always showering me with new ones. Foods from faraway lands using ancient ingredients like farro and bulger, beans of all kinds, and the best of what grows right here in California throughout the year. The truth is, Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish cooking, about which I knew nothing growing up, has always had it heads and tails over Ashkenazi food. Wait, did I really just reference heads and tails when talking about food that I like to eat? First, I give up meat. Next, meat idioms.