first tries

All along, I’ve made good soup.

I think the first time I actually, legitimately cooked a meal for people unrelated to me by blood was in college, when I lived in a co-op. Each term, every one of the 55 of us who lived together (our co-op was called the Enchanted Broccoli Forest, after the eponymous Mollie Katzen cookbook) was responsible for designing and executing dinner for the house.

At the tender age of 19 or 20, I had only ever lived at home, or had eaten iceberg lettuce and chewy lasagna from the buffet in the dorm. Now, faced with the monumental task of creating a menu and bringing it into fruition with the help of three other kids in corduroy pants and funny haircuts, I went with the safest of flavors, the flavor most likely to succeed: sweet. I think we had a grated carrot salad with raisins and a creamy dressing, couscous, and squash soup. The meal turned out to be very tasty, uniformly soft, and almost entirely orange. The soup, if I recall, was especially flavorful. I was pleased. My housemates were pleased. No one contracted scurvy that week.

Buoyed by my early, beta-carotene-infused success, I continued over the years to try my hand at soups and stews, experimenting with beans, noodles, and other root vegetables. During that irritating week when I ate only raw food, I blended up a delicious cold avocado gazpacho, which I returned to again and again in order to avoid eating any more kale.

All winter this past year, the sunburst zucchinis, parsley bunches and celery stalks that were just about to cross that limp, squishy threshold towards the great compost heap in the sky would instead get diced up and tossed into the crockpot, gaining a new lease on life as a hearty stew. (Oh, how I love my crockpot! Rest assured, dear reader, the crockpot gets its own entry one of these days.) I impressed myself on more than one occasion with a very quick vegetarian split-pea soup recipe. And I have continued to perfect my squash soup. Even though it is a lengthy and labor-intensive process, the steaming bowls of creamy orange liquid never fail to delight my taste buds and those of my tablemates.

With all of this accumulated soup confidence, I felt ready to step into the uncharted landscape of matzoh ball soup.

I am home with my parents this weekend for Passover, and my mom and I spent much of the day in the kitchen. After a morning trip to the farmer’s market for last-minute supplies (and a few samples of sheep’s milk cheddar), we returned home to prepare what turned out to be quite a feast.

My mom, though she wouldn’t say it herself, is quite the chef. While her upbringing in France was not without its trials, the French and their gastronomic fixations surely bestowed upon my mother a sensitive and sophisticated palate. Without ever really having been taught, she has an innate knack for concocting flavorful, hearty, healthy fare. Her simple red-leaf lettuce salad with homemade balsamic vinaigrette disappears quickly from our old green plastic salad bowl. Her wine-poached white fish is light and sumptuous. I can think of no food more comforting than the rice-peas-chicken-cheese concoction she used to stir up on rainy evenings.

And today, for the first time ever in her storied life, my dear mother made a brisket.

Let me clarify that. She did not just “make a brisket.” Do you know that old fable about Michelangelo, wherein someone asks him how he constructed the masterpiece of David from a formless chunk of marble, and ol’ Mike says “I just cut away everything that was not David”? Well, with the assistance of a decent recipe, a few organic prunes and baby carrots, my mom worked a similar magic on that long, flat hunk of cow meat that she began with. Her brisket melted in our mouths; it was tender; it burst with flavor. Truly, a work of art.

While mom was effecting miracles in the oven, I was over at the stove, tinkering with my humble veggie broth and dropping sticky, doughy balls made of egg and matzoh meal into boiling water. This, too, was a first-time effort. As it turns out, it was very simple – I whipped up the aforementioned dough balls and dropped them in to simmer for 20 minutes. Meanwhile, I used carrots, onions, a cube of bouillon, roasted garlic, salt and pepper to make a very tasty broth. Just before the meal started I added the matzoh balls to the broth.

Dear reader, I kid you not: it was an unqualified success. All three of us happily slurped it up. The matzoh balls were light and fluffy, not too dense; the broth was savory yet not overpowering. How can I say this? It tasted authentic. My soup record remains untarnished.

I also made charoset, the delicious chopped-fruit mixture that’s the integral ingredient in the Hillel sandwich. It’s a mélange of very small pieces of red apple and green pears, plus walnuts, currants, raisins, cinnamon, honey, and a splash of wine. A small dish of it rested resplendently on our seder plate, next to the piece of ginger root that was standing in for the shank bone, and across from the tiny quail egg that we used because we’d run out of chicken eggs. (Somehow, it works. And our seder table was beautiful.)

But that’s not so much news. Charoset is easy, it’s fabulous, I’ve done it before. In fact it has been my signature dish at Passover seders past.

But today I feel like I took the whole enterprise to a new level. I’m in the big leagues now, y’all. With matzoh ball soup under my belt, I’ve truly entered a new phase of training to become a good Jewish grandmother.

Who knows? Maybe next year, my mom will even teach me how to make a brisket.