What is your favorite dish? Who makes it best? What is especially delicious about it?
How much interest do you have in cooking? If you cook — even prepare just a recipe or two — who taught or encouraged you?
In “What My Mother’s Cooking Taught Me,” the New York Times food and wine writer and cookbook author Florence Fabricant writes about the woman she claims as an important influence on her career as well as her cooking at home. She writes:
Whenever I slice and sauté onions, I think of my mother.
No, she did not make me cry, but her meticulous handling of a mundane kitchen task left a lasting impression, one that informs my own cooking. Slice the onions and monitor their progress in the skillet so the result is a bronzed, sweetly fragrant tangle. Do not rush: Keep the heat on medium, and stir frequently to guarantee no bitter burned edges.
Born in 1908, my mother, Annette Newman Gertner, was a Jewish American housewife from Manhattan. Before I was born, she was a secretary at an advertising agency, Lord & Thomas, where she had to sign letters using a fake man’s name. (They did not want a woman’s on the correspondence.) But cooking was in her DNA, and now in mine.
She learned from her mother, Fanny Newman, who was born in Russia and died when my mother was 19 — and for whom I was named. But my mother’s cooking went well beyond the chopped liver, stuffed cabbage, kasha varnishkes and chicken soup of her Eastern European background, both in attention to detail and imagination.
She would inspect chicken livers to excise discolored spots, and singe pinfeathers off chicken over a gas flame. Her chicken soup had to be clear gold, strained through a linen napkin, with “small eyes” of fat, as she put it, not globs like floating paddleboards. Before cooking a leg of lamb or shanks, she would peel off the chewy silver skin.
Innovation was her style. She did not throw hamburgers on our backyard grill. Rather, she seared slices of filet mignon for sandwiches and grilled whole beef tenderloins for parties. She loved dining out with my father, Lee Gertner, and would sometimes incorporate what she tasted in her own cooking, like broiling lamb chops medium-rare instead of the leaden well-done of the 1950s.
While I cannot recall her consulting many written recipes, preferring to follow her own instincts, I enjoyed cooking at her side, and saw how she tweaked flavor with a spritz of lemon or another pinch of salt. Now that my children and grandchildren are accomplished cooks, I regret that they were never able to share the kitchen with their Nana. They would have experienced the meaning of patience and generosity.
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