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Eleanor Widmer Biography

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“After dinner the doors of the apartment were thrown open and everyone, whether invited or not, could partake of the "sweet table": slices of cheesecake, bundt cake, strudel, rugelach, strawberry shortcake prepared with sponge cake, honey cake, macaroons, chocolate cake, Linzer torte, nut cookies, lemon cookies, sugar cookies, hamantaschen, prune Danish and cinnamon twists- mountains of everything.”

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“Gabriel Solomon, our sandy-lashed, red-haired, soon-to-be-surgeon waiter, recited the night's menu: salad, broiled salmon, boiled red potatoes, sliced tomatoes and corn on the cob, all served family style. A vast slab of butter lay on a white plate next to baskets of bread- white Wonder bread and buttermilk biscuits, neither of which had ever touched our lips. There was a bottle of Hershey's chocolate syrup in the center of the table, a novelty for Jews who didn't mix dairy foods with meat. "The milk is from the farm's cows," Gabe explained. "It's pasteurized but it doesn't taste like city milk. If you'd like city milk, it will be delivered to you. But try the farm milk. Some guests love it. The children seem to enjoy it with syrup." Gabe paused. "I forgot to ask you, do you want your salad dressed or undressed?" Jack immediately replied, "Undressed of course," and winked. My mother worried about having fish with rolls and butter. "Fish is dairy," my father pronounced, immediately an expert on Jewish dietary laws. "With meat it's no butter and no milk for the children." Lil kept fidgeting in her straight-backed chair. "What kind of food is this?" she asked softly. "What do they call it?" "American," the two men said in unison. Within minutes Gabe brought us a bowl filled with iceberg lettuce, butter lettuce, red oak lettuce. "These are grown right here, in our own garden. We pick the greens daily. I brought you some oil and vinegar on the side, and a gravy boat of sour cream for the tomatoes. Take a look at these tomatoes." Each one was the size of a small melon, blood red, virtually seedless. Our would-be surgeon sliced them, one-two-three. We had not encountered such tomatoes before. "Beauties, aren't they?" asked Gabe. Jack held to certain eccentricities in his summer food. Without fail he sprinkled sugar over tomatoes, sugared his melons no matter how ripe and spread his corn with mustard- mustard!”

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“For you, Manya, scrambled eggs with cream cheese and lox, our number-one seller. For the young lady a waffle with hot syrup and whipped butter and for Abe a steak sandwich with sautéed onions. Sounds good?" He left us for a moment before seating himself on the fourth chair at our table. He brought a basket with assorted breads, rolls, bagels and bialys that he lathered with butter and shoveled into his mouth. "Taste, taste." True to the sign that read In and Out in 20 Minutes, the food appeared not only quickly but on hot plates. "I learned from you, Manya. Always hot plates." The waffle was a novel experience: crisp, sweet, the butter served in a fluted paper cup, the syrup in a miniature pitcher.”

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“Her reputation as a cook spread without her knowledge- for the soups she brought to the bakery in a lidded tin for her midday meal, for her stews, for the scraps of dough that she turned into what the Russians called pelmeni and the Jews kreplach, dumplings stuffed with chopped meat and onions. She prepared hot borscht with beef in winter, shchi or cold borscht in summer, chicken cooked with prunes or a tsimmes with sweet potatoes, carrots and prunes.”

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“I loved the counter filled with lox, whitefish, sturgeon. Saperstein looked like a sturgeon, long, white, sharp-toothed. I marveled at the way he wielded his razor-sharp knife. Cutting a bit of translucent smoked sturgeon, you expected it to shred if you breathed on it. Manya achieved status as his sturgeon expert. She had grown up with sturgeon, a staple along the Black Sea, and she pronounced a sample too salty, too mealy from being packed in ice, too strong in flavor, or absolutely perfect. Saperstein, a purist, inevitably felt sad that his customers did not truly appreciate his top-of-the-line products. He communed with Bubby over a slice of sturgeon or belly lox as if having a religious moment. Even when bad weather kept customers away from our restaurant and we were low in cash, Bubby invested in a few slices of smoked sturgeon, not for her customers, but for our family. She could ignore lox, smoked whitefish, pickles or fresh herring, but she couldn't do without a weekly treat of sturgeon. To prove that he was a sporting man who approved of her taste, Saperstein created a cone from white paper and dropped in some caviar, which he kept in a tin secreted in a hole under the counter- God forbid during a robbery, the thieves would never discover his hiding place.”

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“Physically, Manya was both appealing and aristocratic in her bearing. It wasn't her copious white hair that attracted men, her flawless white skin, her billowing breasts, but the innate womanliness that emanated from her. Even when she wore her cooking clothes- a mammoth Hoover apron that she slipped on over her head and tied around a baggy dress or her cardigan sweater, a dull brown thing appropriate for shopping- she exuded a sympathetic femininity. Many didn't give much thought to her appearance. More often than not she washed her face and body with the brown kosher soap that contained no fat from forbidden animals, and wrapped her hair in a haphazard bun held together with several large imitation-turquoise hairpins. Her cooking shoes were splattered with chicken and goose fat, bits and oddments of duck, salmon roe, even calves' brains. Because she had been raised on the Black Sea, she loved caviar, so every now and then a glistening bead would fall upon her well-fed shoes. The smell of food on her body made her no less alluring.”

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