Tastes, even gross ones, bring us back to our childhoods

Let's take a snapshot of a party luncheon spread, circa early 1970s. One of my mother's buffets would include slimy orange lox, gray chopped liver and some other fish (herring, perhaps?). Breads to spread these offerings upon were either yellow challah or dark sour rye (this was well before bagel shops became commonplace in my hometown.) Wrinkly dates and sweaty figs sat side by side in silver dishes.

In other words, there was nothing for a kid to eat.

"No thank you," my friends said politely, but their faces screamed "What is this stuff?!" I went over to their houses after school to eat marshmallow fluff on white bread, so soft you could mold it into a ball, which we did. This was not Jewish food at all.

For me, growing up Jewish meant we had weird food, unlike other families. Some of it, I figured out later, was due to my parents' not-from-this-country status, but as a child I thought it had everything to do with being Jewish.

There was my dad's cold pink communist soup, borscht, although he was the only one of us who ate it. For dessert, we had grayish-pink, fibrous rhubarb, stewed to mushy translucence, which I did eat. It was sweet and tangy.

Later I discovered stewed rhubarb wasn't a Jewish food at all, but an English one, no doubt taken from my mother's years of living in Britain. My discovery of this fact was a result of an embarrassing mistake. A girl in my freshman college dorm described herself as a culinary Jew. "I eat bagels, latkes ..." she started to explain.

"And rhubarb!" I interjected, trying to jump on the I'm-a-culinary-Jew-too bandwagon. None of the Jews had much knowledge of the odd root, but one British student simply loved the stuff. (I figured out that artichokes weren't a traditionally Jewish delicacy all by myself.)

As we grow up, our tastes mature right along with us, just like my mother said. But sometimes we find ourselves wanting those foods from our childhood, those tastes we associate with warmth and safety, steadfast connections and early happy memories.

It's not chopped liver I long for (I know, made right, it's supposedly wonderful) but my grandma's cheese blintzes, the ones she used to make with my great aunt Ali. I watched them use our entire kitchen table to prepare them by the hundreds. Lucky for me, a portion sat in our freezer to thaw out for random cravings. And I want one now, the sweet soft cheese inside soft dough, slathered with strawberry jam, but they're long gone and so are the Russian women who made them. So I try the closest deli, Noah's Bagels in Montclair.

"What?" The girl behind the counter asks me.

I repeat my request. "Blintzes. They have cream cheese and cottage cheese in them. Maybe ricotta. I'm not quite sure."

"Uh, no."

"Do you ever have them?"

"No, I don't think so."

I doubt she's ever heard the word and I don't explain it to her that it's Ukrainian. I end up with a chocolate chip bagel for my daughter and a blueberry one for me. The sweetness is satisfying, but a bagel is not a blintz.

Later, I call Oakland Kosher. Of course they have blintzes, and it's not even Shavuot, when we're supposed to eat dairy foods. But before I decide to drive all the way down there I think: "What about really recreating this memory correctly?"

I don't have my grandmother's recipe; with some family assistance we might be able to trace some recipe card down the chain, but that will take time. I try to recall the last homemade blintzes I ate. A Jewish mom in my mothers' group always brings them to our annual December cookie-exchange brunch. I plead for the leftovers each year, if there are any, so I ask her for the recipe.

"Trader Joe's," she whispers. "Frozen." I shop and bake that afternoon.

"Too slimy," my daughter says. "Cheese — oh, gross." So I eat them all myself. She doesn't know gross. Then I tell her about chopped liver.




Joanne Catz Hartman lives and writes in Oakland. She can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).