The Who
The first question that might arise when you are looking at the title of this tome is who is Miriam. There is, of course, a famous Hebrew in the Bible named Miriam and since much of the book is devoted to Jewish ritual laws related to cooking as well as other things, it would make sense to assume the title is a reference to the older sister of Moses. But this kitchen is much more literally inspired:
“My mother-in-law Miriam, born in a small village in Jewish Poland, survived the Holocaust. A keeper of rituals and recipes, and of stories, she cooks to recreate a lost world, and to prove that unimaginable loss is not the end of everything. She is motivated by duty to ancestors and descendants, by memory and obligation and an impossible wish to make the world whole.”
Detroit Sweets
One of the coolest things about reading this book is the way that the author manages to find ways to insert references to cooking or food into metaphor, similes, and various other tools of imagery. And what’s more, she manages to do it without it seeming forced. In some cases, the felicity of her construction almost makes this application of her art seem not that difficult. It is that difficult:
“All my life in Detroit I knew black aficionados of Jewish culture and vice versa—Pentecostal grandmothers who would only buy kosher meat, black teenagers who knew the right Yiddish word, countless Jews aspiring to soul music, and later, to nonwhite righteousness. Our neighborhood, a cauldron of instability, produced many a crossover confection.”
There’s Fat in Those Geese
Who knew? Goose fat carried an almost transactional value back in the Old Country. The secret value of a plump goose has been passed down through generations of women in the author’s line of ancestry until she finally spills the beans and lets the secret out. Notice how she fuses cooking and sensory imagery together at the end there:
“The secret, it turned out, was all in the fat…A roasting tableau. Handsome women in aprons, cheeks ruddy from the oven's heat, as cabbage boiled sweet-and-sour on the stovetop and potatoes awaited scalloping with butter and cream. You had to prick the birds all over so the skin crisped and the fat ran out clear. And then you poured, poured, poured off the rendered fat so the fat would not burn…This had a strange, familiar sound to me, something like the distant sizzle of nineteenth-century cutlets and potatoes.”
Eggs
Quite possibly no other single food item appears by word in the text more often than “eggs.” It seems every recipe requires this an essential agency. Naturally, the author takes things beyond the kitchen to apply to eggs a theological dimension to its placement within the hierarchy of ritual food preparation among Jewish cooks:
“Primary among these is the humble, maligned egg. The progress of the egg in our kitchens parallels the evolution of our religion: The grandmothers believed in eggs; the daughters took them for granted; and I enjoy them, but my affection is complicated by science and the times. I eat far fewer than my grandmothers ate, and serve my children eggs less often than their great-grandmothers served theirs.
Maybe science—dare I voice it?—will one day find that eggs are what children need.”
