A Recipe Is A Story

Some recipes, really only a small handful, even if you find them in a cookbook or online, and you will - will not be my mother's recipe. For that, the concentric circles that have included me, come from long ago and a country I never have known - and yet I know it's soup, I know it's potato kugel, i know it's savory lukshun or noodle kugel, i know it's matza balls and horseradish, it's chopped chicken liver and creamed herring. And i know these things from my mother who was not at all interested in the past. Who spoke only briefly, and with a special kind of gentleness I only heard in her voice on the rare times she talked of her mother. I never knew my mother's mother, my grandmother. And yet somehow I do. She is in the circle within the circle with me too. Sharing a recipe is sharing a soul food.