Published: 2 February 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
IN MATTERS OF CULTURE my late mother, Claire, took her lead from the great Times columnist Bernard Levin and described herself as a “pantry Jew”. She understood herself not through religious faith because, like me, she had none, but through the crumbly chopped liver she sometimes made. She liked to cook gefilte fish, both boiled and fried, following her grandmother’s recipe. The boiled, I hated. Once cooled, the fishy jelly had the texture of phlegm and the mixture of white fish, matzo meal and a little sugar tasted of carelessness.
But the deep-fried, an idiosyncrasy of the Anglo-Jewish community, was entirely different. I loved the outer crunch and the fluffy interior, and knew that it would be even more delicious if I were allowed to eat it hot, straight from the bubbling oil, but I was not. Claire insisted it had to be eaten cold and could not explain why, other than to say it was “better that way”.
I did not get an answer until 1997 when Claudia Roden’s Book of Jewish Food was first published in the UK. In the introduction to the fish section, Roden explains that “because it was always cooked in advance for the Sabbath, fish was usually eaten cold”. I read this to my godless mother. I pointed out that her insistence I should eat it cold was therefore a vestigial stump of childhood religious observance. She was delightfully livid.
FULL STORY A taste of home: Claudia Roden’s majestic Book of Jewish Food (Observer/Guardian)
