#Best ever lost recipes how to
#Best ever lost recipes full

“After my mother’s passing, I found comfort in making the foods my mother used to make,” she told Hersh. Her mother died relatively young, and since then, Hanau often returns to the food of her childhood-a pickled celery root salad or waffles dusted with confectioner’s sugar. Reni Hanau fled Germany with her family and eventually settled in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood. Hersh asked survivors about aromas they would never forget, or how their mothers prepared for Shabbat or what they ate during Passover. In researching the book, Hersh found that the psychological scars of near-starvation manifested themselves in the kitchens of survivors-in gefilte fish and chopped liver that must be made from scratch, in gut-busting rich stews and fatty kugels, in second and third helpings, in empty freezers. You could see that you were able to bring the survivor to a place that was comforting and nourishing and nurturing, and that was the place that was the happiest.” “It’s that thread that can take you from tragedy to triumph. “But what I found, what I knew to be true, is that food conjures up my most wonderful memories,” Hersh said. When Hersh first approached the museum about exploring the food memories and recording the recipes of Holocaust survivors, they let out a little gasp-after all, starvation claimed the lives of many of Hitler’s victims. Writer June Feiss Hersh interviewed Finer and dozens of other survivors and their families for the book, which comes out in May. By the time Finer landed in America with a new husband and young child, she brought with her only persistent yet elusive memories of her mother’s cooking.Įven at age 84, she can still recall the sizzle of a potato latke hitting a hot pan, the faint scent of almond in the gefilte fish, the comforting pillow-like bulk of those kluskies.Īnd although that world is gone, Finer, like other Holocaust survivors, have found ways to resurrect it, one bite at a time.įiner’s story and her beloved kluskie recipe is part of “Recipes Remembered: A Celebration of Survival,” a cookbook published in conjunction with the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York.

#Best ever lost recipes how to

It was the same year the Nazis took Finer’s parents from their home in the Warsaw ghetto-she never saw them again-and sent her, her sister and an aunt to the Majdanek concentration camp.įiner’s mother never got a chance to teach her daughter how to make the dumplings, a Passover specialty.

#Best ever lost recipes full

In fact, you have our full permission to go ahead and call them your very own family recipes.(RNS) The last time Regina Finer’s mother cooked the soft, dense potato dumplings called kluskies, Regina couldn’t have been more than 12. You'll be serving up a big dish of nostalgia with every bite-just make sure you pass them on to younger generations.

While we might never find those grease-splattered recipes scribbled on yellow legal pad paper, these Southern classics come mighty close. Maybe there was a bit of magic in her fingertips or maybe she just knew the perfect ratio of seasonings, either way, we'll forever work to recreate these iconic recipes that regularly graced Grandma's table. They were simply stated and produced out-of-this-world results. What might have been most remarkable about all of Grandma's most famous recipes is that they didn't call for a bunch of ingredients or hard-to-find spices. Whether she had the South's greatest sweet tooth or just took such pleasure in indulging the ones of those around her, we'll never know. From pies to cakes and more, Grandma's treats aimed to please. The pillowy-soft rolls that she pulled together by memory, the comforting classics that seemed right for just about every occasion, and the desserts. How to politely to send your regrets, how to wrangle 20-plus people for Sunday night dinner without breaking a sweat, the stories (oh, the stories!), and then, in a league all their own, are the recipes. In hindsight, we probably should have followed Grandma around with a little notebook and pen, jotting down notes as she went about her business.