(by Susan Ostrov Weisser)
When I was a child and no one was around—maybe a babysitting older brother available for dire emergencies but in reality, otherwise engaged—I often played the Can Game in the kitchen, a peculiarly enjoyable kind of pretending about disaster. Sitting cross-legged in front of the low wooden cabinet where the groceries, mostly cans, were kept, I pleasantly imagined that some terrible catastrophe had occurred. All that separated us from starvation and death was this limited supply of food I didn’t much like, and I was in charge of keeping us alive. What to do?
In this fantasy, I was efficient and confident, ready to save myself and my loved ones with cans of sweetened cling peaches or fruit cocktail in heavy syrup, succotash or wilted green beans, and Campbell’s salty tomato soup. After a careful inventory of what we had on hand, it was time get to work: How could I make the best use of these as the number dwindled down? How long could I make the food last? How long could we last?
I planned meals, stretching them out as best I could, as my mother had made do with the one chicken she was allowed to bring home once a week as part of her scant salary, making soup from the bones and fat after we’d eaten the meat. She brought me with her once, probably because there was no one at home to watch me that day, and I can still remember the sharp, sour stink of them, the blood, the heaps and clouds of feathers she and the other workers at the chicken market had plucked. How frightened and sad for her I’d been when she told me that some days, there were only a few bruised apples a day to feed her own little chickens (whether true or one of my mother’s embellishments, I could not say, though my oldest brother confirmed that she often sent him to buy reduced-price cracked eggs at the supermarket).
After my imaginary unnamed cataclysm, there wouldn’t be chicken or apples, but this cupboard, with its colorful variety of round Warhol-like cans, might, with my disciplined frugality, outlast poverty, a holocaust, a nuclear firestorm. We could survive.
We lived in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn then, my birthplace, in a tiny one-bedroom walk-up. My older brothers slept on the pull-out couch in the living room until they were 15 and 12, and I was on my little fold-up cot next to my parents until we moved when I was six. Ironically, Brighton Beach was named for Brighton in England, the nation where both my mom and dad, Betty and Al, had been born and raised. They emigrated to America because of its reputation for opportunities, like so many others, and met in Brighton Beach, where there was a community of immigrant British Jews. My mother, a great reader and storyteller, had been pulled out of school at age 11 to work in her father’s vegetable store, as were her six siblings, and my father, one of four boys in an impoverished family, had to work after eighth grade, although he’d won a prize—a book about American Indians he passed on to me—as an outstanding student. Even worse, they immigrated to America at the start of the Great Depression, and so my father was reduced to going house-to-house offering to rewire lamps and other small jobs. He made little money that way, but he had a strong interest in science and taught himself enough about electricity that he was eventually hired to work on the New York City subway tracks, replacing lightbulbs and repairing electrical problems. My dad loved the outdoors, and hated spending his days underground in the dark, filthy, and dangerous tunnels, but did it every workday for 25 years.
My mom’s life was centered around her children, and that life was not easy. Even when we were finally able to leave the vermin-infested apartment in Brighton Beach for a run-down, semi-attached house in a different area of Brooklyn, she never had the luxury of staying home. My father’s income had to be supplemented, and she took whatever work she could find. Later in life, she had the best job she’d ever had, ordering buttons and other accessories in a clothing company two hours away in New Jersey. Since my father liked dinner at exactly six p.m., she would come home after that exhausting trip—involving a bus to the subway, transfers, and a bus from Port Authority, and then the reverse—drop her purse, and go straight to the stove. There, with her coat still on, she peeled potatoes for boiling at super speed, or cut them efficiently for what she called “chips” (she called French fries “chips” all her life, just as she never lost her strong North English accent). I also remember her eating at the stove while the rest of the family ate dinner at the Formica table in the little kitchen, because there was no room for a fifth chair.
My mother was not a wonderful cook and did not like to cook, but she made dinner every evening because that was what a wife and mother did, working or not. I also do not enjoy cooking, but I can order take-out, or visit the many cafes and restaurants nearby if I don’t feel like preparing food. When we lived in Brighton Beach, there was no money for restaurants. Once my father had steady work and we moved to the house, we ate out exactly once a month, at the same small Chinese restaurant on Flatbush Avenue. All of us chose the exact same items on the menu every time, starting with wonton soup. This was a luxury.
Betty’s cooking was a bad imitation of what she saw as middle-class American food: tough, cheap cuts of beef, low-grade hamburger meat, and overcooked spaghetti with the least expensive canned sauce. But sometimes on the weekends, she made a good Jewish brisket, or chewy matzo balls for homemade chicken or barley soup. She taught me how to tell the right amount of matzo meal mixed into the egg mixture (when you scrape the batter with a fork, it makes visible tracks), and to this day I prefer matzo balls with some heft to them. She also fried a lot of fish filets (very British) in her very old cast-iron frying pan, or salmon cakes, and British-Jewish fried fish cakes, which her British family called “chopped and fried” for short because it was eaten so often (“We’re having chopped and fried tonight”). The salmon cakes and fish cakes had matzo meal as a filler, not breadcrumbs, and before frying, fish filets or chicken cutlets were always coated with matzo meal, an important staple in our house.
We barely celebrated birthdays, and my mother never baked—no cakes, birthday or otherwise, no cookies or pies. But I can still see myself sitting cross-legged in front of the TV in our house, while my mother made “chips” that she brought to me in a cup, fresh out of the basket in the deep fryer, burning hot and doused with apple cider vinegar. I blew on them to cool them, and ate them slowly one by one as I watched my shows, extending the pleasure. I still like vinegar with my French fries rather than ketchup.
Betty didn’t teach me to cook, probably because she didn’t like to do it herself. But when I was a child, she showed me how to make homemade chopped liver, filling the large, shallow wooden bowl and chopper she’d had since the Brighton Beach days with sauteed onions, hard-boiled eggs, and browned chicken livers, dripping with fragrant oil. I got to sprinkle on Kosher salt and chop it all together with the big chopper. Afterwards I scraped the insides of the bowl with the flat chopper, as she did, and spooned some of the warm chopped liver onto a piece of matzo to see if it could use more salt. I still have that bowl and chopper, though I no longer use the bowl, which has had a place on my kitchen or coffee table for many decades, just for nostalgia.
In time, we three children all went to Brooklyn College, then tuition-free, living at home until Mel went to medical school, Eric graduated with a Ph.D. in psychology and a law degree, both from the University of Chicago, and I…married too young. All Betty and Al’s children moved into the comfortable middle class: Mel had a long career as a doctor, Eric was a sought-after expert in forensic psychology, and I became an English professor, after a late start on my ambitions.The last time she visited me in New York City, flying in from Chicago, where she lived in one room in my brother Eric’s basement, she proudly attended my doctoral graduation ceremony at Columbia University. Soon after that visit, she began the descent into Alzheimer’s, but she lived to know we were all “Dr. Ostrov” of one sort or another, which was my mother’s dream.
When I played the Can Game as a child, it wasn’t a stretch to imagine canned dinners, which were very much like our real dinners of meatloaf (cheap) with Minute Rice (easy) and Del Monte peas and carrots (both cheap and easy). It wasn't until I met my upper-middle-class in-laws a decade later that I understood they scorned canned vegetables and only served frozen, and that this was a marker of their social status. Then when I lived in Europe with my husband for a year or so in my early twenties, I ate fresh vegetables and learned how wonderful they could taste. Later, in my forties and thriving in my profession, I visited colleagues' country homes and had fresh-picked tomatoes from their gardens and local strawberries from farmers down the road. Today I eat only fresh produce, and would turn my middle-class nose up at the tasteless frozen French fries my mother-in-law served. You could trace my class ascent by following the path of vegetables across my life.
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Susan Ostrov Weisser is a professor of English at Adelphi University in Garden City, New York, and the author of several books including the recent Loveland: A Memoir of Romance and Fiction. She can be found at www.susanostrov.com.
Betty’s Chopped Liver
1 lb. chicken livers
vegetable oil
3 - 4 hard-boiled eggs
2 yellow onions, chopped
Kosher salt (and pepper, optionally), to taste
Wash the chicken livers and pat dry with paper towel.
Heat a frying pan with oil oil (don’t stint on the oil) and sauté the chicken livers until browned and fully cooked.
Place chicken livers, eggs, and onion in a shallow chopping bowl and drizzle the cooking oil over all of it.
Chop everything together.
Taste for salt and pepper.