Apple & Honey

Apples and Honey

I

No footnotes.  This is not a research paper.  Kasha varnishkes, tzimmes, arbis; who knows what other names may find their way in here?  Some of them seem to have immigrated into English, but if anyone checks, the names may lack green cards, speak with an accent, invert their phrases.  Just off the boat.  Just the lucky few.  A generation almost all dead.  Gone with grandma and grandpa, daddy and mommy, all the aunts and uncles.  Once, on the streets of New York, billboards were printed in Yiddish, so the literate might understand.  Even transliterated, I cannot make much sense of it.  These simple nouns, we must figure out ourselves.  We begin with food.  We begin by filling our bellies.

II

Another New Year

I invite you to my home for Rosh Hashanah

            and tell you

                        I will bake apple cake

                        I will make tzimmes

                        I will make pot roast

            Clover, tupelo, orange blossom

            I say   

                        Each course will include

                        a secret ingredient

                        like on Iron Chef

                        My secret ingredient: honey

                        of various types

            Sage, eucalyptus, sourwood

I will also invite

                        my children

                                    who may have to work that day

                                    and not come for dinner

                        my sister

                        her children

            Acacia, alfalfa, pumpkin blossom

They will treat you like family

            They will try not to ask

                        too many questions

                        at least not all at once

I will not say

            being happy makes me sad

I will try not to say

            anything about love

            Fireweed, linden, wildflower          

III

This is grandma’s recipe for tzimmes.  Peel the potatoes, the onions, the sweet potatoes, the carrots.  Put them in the pot with some prunes and a bissel water.  How much? Enough. The right amount.  Not too much, so the potatoes poke out a little.  Apples, if you want, and maybe some honey. No butter. What, are you joking?  I’m making brisket.  Pepper, feh. You want everything so it’s just falling apart and a sweet taste. The children like a sweet taste.  Where I learned, my Aunt Lena.  I just watched her. I didn’t ask so many questions.  Keep it on the flame a long time. Don’t turn the burner high.

IV

Honey is antibacterial.  With the increase of antibiotic microbes, there has been a resurgence of interest in honey’s healing properties.  The antimicrobial agent in honey prohibits the growth of bacteria.  One of its enzymes produces hydrogen peroxide.  Honey can be used to cover cuts and abrasions to prevent bacteria from entering the wound and promote healing.

V

My sister got me tickets to see Iron Chef.  Her neighbor in Venice Beach is one of the producers who comes to NY a few times a year to film.  My kids wanted tickets too.  They are big Food Network fans, but they both had to work that day.  So Joan came with me.  We’ve been friends long enough that if I ask her to do something goofy, she will say, Yes.  I played hooky from work.  Our show turned out to be, “Battle Oatmeal.”  Not exactly the ingredient I’d hoped for.  I’d sooner “Battle Swordfish” or “Battle Honey.”  I remember back when oat bran was a big deal.  If we just ate enough we could live forever.  Paul had this running joke about opening a store called Everything Oats.   

“Battle Oatmeal” was a hoot.  We sat on the Iron Chef’s side and had a pretty good view of all of Kitchen Stadium.  On TV, you can’t see the cameras and the many people in the crew.  It amazed me that no one fell over the wires or anything.  The kitchen smelled great even if they didn’t let us taste anything.

VI

Here’s Martha Stuart’s recipe for Tzimmes that I jiggered a little so the result comes out more the way I like it.

Tzimmes

Ingredients

•       3 or 4 large carrots, peeled and chopped

•       3 medium onions, peeled and chopped

•       4 pounds sweet potatoes, peeled and sliced in chunks

•       1 cup (4 ounces) dried apple rings, cut in quarters

•       2 cups (16 ounces) pitted prunes

•       1 cup (4 ounces) dried apricots cut in half if large

•       3 ounces dried apples

•       1 cup packed dark brown sugar

•       2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

•       2 cups orange juice

•       1 cup white wine Directions

Place the carrots, onions, sweet potatoes, dried apples, prunes, dried apricots, and dried cherries in a heavy Dutch oven with a lid.  Stir with a large wooden spoon.  Sprinkle the brown sugar and cinnamon on top. Pour in the orange juice and wine and add just enough water to cover. Cover and cook on a very low flame or in the oven, or until the vegetables are soft, about 3 to 4 hours. Serve hot or at room temperature.

What does it say that even Martha Stewart has a recipe for tzimmes.  I don’t think she’s Jewish, but you never know. She doesn’t use white potatoes. I don’t know what’s up with that.

VII

The Beekeeper

Because the bees are dying,

my neighbor, the engineer, stacks

screened wooden racks

beside the bushes at the back

of his yard.

Bees do not respect boundaries,

or color inside the line.

They visit the neighbors,

their flowers, the privet

next to the patio table.

Take cover. They hover.

Smoke soothes, fools

bees into feeling filled.

The keeper keeps them safe,

dons hood and gloves,

and harvests.

VIII

My synagogue used to hold an annual Rosh Hashanah fundraiser.  For a small donation, a jar of honey could be sent to a loved one, friend or other synagogue member along with a card identifying the donor.  Instead of sending multiple jars to the same person, the card included a list identifying multiple donors when appropriate. Sometimes I participated.  Sometimes I didn’t.  It’s more a matter of remembering than anything.

Honey is generically kosher, like fruit.  It requires no special process before serving, not like meat.  I suppose if you’re Orthodox, you might not consider honey kosher unless the farmer is kosher.  That’s the difference between kosher wine and other wine, but for other branches of Judaism, honey is honey.  The synagogue used to get the honey from Israel.  That probably makes it kosher as well.  But honey is honey.  Some things are that simple. 

I’m not Orthodox.  I belong to a Reconstructionist synagogue.  What’s Reconstructionist?, people often ask.  They’ve heard of Reform and Conservative.  For me, it’s a big question, though likely not for the inquirer.  When people ask big questions, I am never sure what they are really asking, like, What kind of poetry do you write? What’s it like to be widowed?  What do they really want to know?

The standard answer to the Reconstructionist question is to paraphrase Mordechai Kaplan, the founder of the movement that he never expected to become a movement.  Reconstructionism views Judaism as an evolving religious civilization. Three things.  But sometimes people really just want to argue.  Kaplan was very halachically observant.  What that means is he was not like me, or he was just like me, but you’re not.  You’re too open minded.  Sometimes, it’s, But I was raised Conservative/Reform/fill in the blank.  Me too.  I was raised non-observant Orthodox.  That means my parents thought Judaism meant all the Orthodox stuff, but didn’t do any of it, or almost any of it, but lacked any other frame of reference or pedagogy.  I came to Reconstructionism, because I like a lot of the ritual, and Paul, who was not raised at all Jewishly, liked it even more than I did, but the Conservative movement was not then ordaining women.  That was a non-starter. 

I came to Reconstructionism mostly by accident, because the town where we would soon live had a Reconstructionist synagogue that was politically and socially progressive, but ritually traditional, with a woman Rabbi.  That was 40 years ago.  I’m still there.  My daughter is now a Reconstructionist Rabbi. 

IX

Tzimmes

We can argue what goes in the pot,

meat or not, prunes, dried apricots.

Disagreements sweeten what we’ve got

and what, when shopping, we forgot

distracted by the last-minute rush to shop,

clean, cook, do not stop,

do not savor. No wonder it’s a sloppy

honeyed mess. Onions, carrots

sweet potatoes. Another word

for commotion. Another word for fuss.

X

Until I was six my family lived in Brooklyn.  My little brother and I joined our mother or our grandmother on their errands.  We would go to the kosher butcher.  The men there had thick Yiddish accents.  All adults spoke Yiddish in private and often in public.  My parents spoke Yiddish when they did not want us to know what they were talking about.  The floor of the butcher shop was bare pine and covered with sawdust.  Ben and I slid around on it.  Sometimes he played with the feet of the dead chicken lined up on top of the display case.  He’d make the feet dance.  When my mother noticed she’d get annoyed.  But the butchers never complained.  My mother always put the chicken feet and the neck in the soup. Later she’d nibble on the small bits of meat she picked off the bones with her teeth.  That was her favorite.  More than a leg or a breast she liked a chicken neck.  My grandfather said when he was a boy in Russia children loved chicken legs. As a child I loved boiled chicken, especially the skin.

XI

Translating Klezmer

Friday nights Grandpa talks

to God at the kitchen table,

He enters the prayerbook on tiptoe,

steals into the room.

Fingers the pages as if too harsh

a grasp would turn them dust,

as if words read every day are new,

would leap from the paper

without his guarding gaze.

Grandpa closes his eyes,

smiles as he sings slightly nasal songs

a clarinet can almost mimic,

certain God listens to every note.

I never thought to ask,

whether God answers.

Tonight the clarinet hears

my old unspoken question.

Jazz translated klezmer turns

Grandpa’s old faith words

into New Jersey notes,

American notes.

Chanting and moaning cries

captured across oceans,

from charred shtetls

on crumbled maps;

lassoed from pushcarts,

from the air shaft and the A Train

roaring underground, across the river

to me.

The clarinet whispers

my name,  Tzirelleh, Tzirelleh,

on the lips of the candles’ flame.

Tonight the clarinet says Listen-

listen, God answers.

XII

Two weeks ago, I ate the last half of the last Jersey peach of the summer and headed for a flight to Ireland to attend a wedding in Kilkenny. I returned after Labor Day. The vacationers have left the beach, the children have returned to school, and it is the season of apples and honey. The baskets at the farmer’s market brimmed with many varieties of apples. They have appeared from nowhere. The holiday season hA arrived once more; now far from East New York. Time for apple cake, round challah with raisins and remembering.

XIII

On Rosh Hashanah

Grandma, I made kasha varnishkes

to welcome the New Year.  Wolff’s kasha.

No, they’re not in Paterson,

anymore.  But when I opened the box,

there I stood in your kitchen

whisking two eggs in a ceramic bowl.

I added some salt and rendered

the chicken fat, though schmaltz

is not healthy.  Perhaps cholesterol

clogs up memory.  The odor

of buckwheat groats frying with onions,

wrapped the kitchen and me

like your brown winter shawl.

I cleaned your blue dishes,

your cobalt blue glassware,

good china guarded for special

occasions. Like now, when I’m working

alone in the kitchen.  The New Year

brings me a gift of your memory.

I’m glad you visit here

once in a while.

Shanah Tovah, May you have a Sweet New Year!

(I started writing this piece quite a few years ago. A few of the poems in it have appeared in my collections Repairs and Cutting Room and/or in The Paterson Literary Review and The Edison Literary Review. What was I holding on to this for?, I asked myself. For you, for now, is the obvious answer.)

https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/179285/jewish-apple-cake-from-bubbas-recipe-box/