We receive many different kinds of gifts from our grandparents, whether the ability to identify all the trees in the backyard, or a beribboned stack of letters dating from the early 1900s, or a love of card games, baseball, or building castles on the beach. My family loved to cook and eat. This is certainly my inheritance, and a large part of the reason my family ate little or no ultraprocessed food. To use a product like “Shake ‘n’ Bake” bordered on heresy. I come by my love and celebration of good, real food in the most honest way possible. 

My paternal grandmother, Rosie, was a gifted cook. I heard stories. Every summer my father’s extended family — including cousins, aunts, and uncles who worked all week and joined the family on Friday afternoons — used to vacation together at the ocean. I assumed everyone took turns in the kitchen, but just a few years ago I discovered that each woman had a fixed job: Esther shopped, Rosie cooked, Hudi (Adele) and Mollie oversaw cleanup. Of course Rosie cooked.

I don’t know where Grandma learned her recipes. I know her mother died when she was just twelve. My own mom said Grandma Rosie learned them anywhere and everywhere. After my parents became engaged, my mother joined her future mother-in-law for weekly cooking lessons. She said that whenever Grandma tasted something she liked, she came home and reproduced it. She was able to taste and identify every ingredient. I did not, unfortunately, inherit this skill. But my daughter did! 

Whereas Grandma’s friends fed their children chicken soup, kneidlach, gefilte fish, or bagels and farmer cheese, Grandma had another thing going entirely. My father enjoyed reminiscing about the lunches for which he raced home from school every day. Sometimes Grandma would poach eggs in homemade chunky tomato sauce. When the eggs were ready, she spooned the mixture into the crust of a roll from which she had removed most of the soft dough. My dad would chuckle and wipe his mouth as he described this. 

The spinach-and-potato knish my dad was eating one day made him roll his eyes in pleasure as he described Grandma mashing lightly cooked greens into her potatoes, making sure to include some of the pale green cooking liquid for extra flavor (and nutrition). Grandma never made “plain” mashed potatoes.

Then there was kutschi-mutschi. That phrase, “kutschi-mutschi,” was all you had to say to get my parents howling with laughter. It consisted of a large bowl of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, spinach, bell peppers, and hard-boiled eggs. They actually disagreed about whether the eggs were hard-boiled, but dad always won. It was his mother’s dish, after all. Grandma mixed the salad with some sort of mayonnaise-based dressing. That’s it? That’s all? I asked over and over again. And what was so funny? Based on the look on my father’s face as he described kutschi-mutschi, I am sure that there must have been something else in there — love? — but as many times as I asked, those were the only ingredients he listed. Did she make up the name? Was it a strategy for emptying the refrigerator to make room for a new delivery? No one seemed to know. 

She made cucumbers and sour cream, a simple dish so good I can still taste it, and several different kinds of eggplant salads. You may think that Rosie was a vegetarian, but she just saved the meat for dinner. My great-grandfather (Rosie’s father-in-law), a butcher, had a reputation for keeping the choicest cuts for his eldest grandson, my father. Chicken “cutlets,” spaghetti and meatballs, stuffed cabbage, and flank steak were regular dinnertime fare. The night I brought my fiancé, Eddie, to meet her, Grandma prepared a stuffed veal roast in our honor. Food was her love language.