Revisiting my grandmother’s kitchen

My grandparents were an indelible part of my childhood. Their bungalow in Melbourne’s east was a second home for us, and I grew up around their yiddishisms, their food and their life energy.

We visited them every week, but one particular day in the late 1970s stands out in my memory. Stepping into their usually nondescript bathroom, I got the shock of my life. Swimming happily in their pale yellow bathtub was a large, slimy and utterly alive carp, staring up at me with its googly eyes.

I knew my grandparents loved eating traditional Eastern European Jewish foods, but until then, I had never quite realised the bathtub-to-table process that was involved.

My grandmother would bring home the slippery fish in large swollen plastic bags filled with water from the fishmonger and tip them into the bath to keep them fresh until their moment of reckoning. When the time came, she would  knock them over the head with a hammer and use a sharp knife to scale them, gut them and push them through her grinder so she could turn them into gefilte fish and jellied carp.

Delicacy to some, but as a kid, it was the worst thing I could ever imagine eating.

Luckily she made up for it. Every birthday she would make us multi-layered hazelnut cream cakes filled with raspberry jam and adorned with chocolate cream swirls, while my grandfather shook a bottle of bubbly with a mischievous gleam in his eye before popping the cork to our squeals of delight.

In my memories, my grandmother was never not cooking. She was always chopping vegetables, stirring soups, watching over simmering stews or whipping up something sweet in the kitchen. When she finally needed a rest, she would lie completely flat on the cool tan tiles on her porch, as if in some Polish yoga pose.

My grandmother was practical, unsentimental and stubborn. I never saw her shed a tear, but she was deeply loving too, especially to her grandchildren. My grandfather (who did like a good cry) called her his "Genghis Khan" – and with her dark intense eyes, she really looked like a Mongolian warrior. 

My grandmother was born in 1910 to a religious Jewish family in Warsaw, one of 11 siblings. Leaving home early, she turned her back on her religious upbringing and moved in with my grandfather, much to her family’s chagrin. She worked in textiles and was a communist member of the textile union – she was once caught putting up union posters and spent a night in prison.

On the eve of WW2, my grandparents decided to leave Poland for the Soviet Union, but were caught on route and sent with thousands of other refugees to work at a timber logging camp in the far reaches of Siberia.

A few years later, with the Germans poised to invade the USSR, they received amnesty as Polish citizens and found their way to Uzbekistan. A history of wartime journeys that I am still trying to piece together. They lived in Tashkent near Samarkand until the end of the war, and my mother was born there in 1943. After the war, they returned to Poland to look for their families but found no-one – their entire families, except for one of my grandmother’s brothers had been wiped out.  

As a young girl, their past was a mystery to me, but I remember keenly their zest for life, watching them waltz in their living room before going out "tantzen" – dancing at community ballroom events with other Polish Jewish émigrés looking so glamorous to nine-year-old me.

They hosted card parties, the women never without lipstick, the air heavy with laughter and yiddish jokes and animated political discussions. The tables were laden with platters of herring, sliced onions and buttered rye bread, chopped liver and my grandmother's delectable white cheese blintzes with brandy-soaked raisins, all served with hot black tea, slices of lemon and cubes of sugar.

I had no idea of the darkness they carried, the complete loss they had endured. To me, their resilience and energy knew no bounds. 

When they first arrived in Australia in the 1950s, my grandparents worked long hours in textile factories, learning English with other migrants at night. Melbourne was the haven for so many post-war Polish Jews and they were determined to make a life for themselves and a future for their only daughter, my mum.

In between work and classes, my grandmother found time for her second job, confectionery work, making famous Russian lollipops known as petushok that she learnt to make in Uzbekistan during the war. She boiled down sugar and water and a touch of lemon or vinegar with cherry flavoured essence. When it was bubbling and hot enough, she poured the sticky syrup into rooster moulds with a stick, and as they cooled, she would break open the moulds to reveal the sweet shiny translucent “little red hens” as she called them in Yiddish. 

My mum would accompany my grandfather and act as translator as he peddled the lollipops to the milk bars near her school. They must have been a hit, because eventually my grandparents scrambled together enough money to buy a tumbledown building where they opened their own small family-run chocolate factory, Alpha Chocolates.

My grandmother, creative, determined and a wonderful confectioner, devised recipes such as plum brandy delights – prunes soaked in brandy and enrobed in dark chocolate – and chocolates filled with cherry and hazelnut creams. My grandfather handled the business side and all three, including my mother, would dip and wrap chocolates (often late after midnight) in beautiful gem-coloured foils before being carefully packaged in chocolate boxes.

After the deaths of my grandparents, I carried around the vintage rooster moulds for decades. They reminded me of a vanished world. Apart from the few photos of their life before WW2, I consider them one of my most precious heirlooms. I’ve never even thought of trying to use them, but on the 30th anniversary of my grandmother's death earlier this year, I decided now was the time to dust them off. 

After some digging on the internet, I found a recipe for petushok. My grandparents’ moulds are missing their clamps but I winged it with some thick rubber bands. 

My first attempt tasted burnt and bitter. I slowed down the process, boiled the sugar with a touch of lemon juice and watched the bubbles gain in momentum and colour, before pouring them carefully into the oiled moulds. Too impatient to wait until they hardened, I thrust them in the fridge to speed things up. After a few minutes, I worked a knife into the gap between the metal sides and felt nothing less than elation as the mould sprung open and the little red hens slipped from their casings. 

My 12-year-old daughter got involved too – she added red food colouring and a fragrant rose essence, whisking the sugar mixture before pouring it into the moulds. Watching my daughter, I felt the presence of my grandparents in a way I can’t quite describe. The little red lollipop hens are no longer just a memory of bygone days, they are phoenixes rising again from the ashes.

Something has been resurrected, an inanimate object that my grandparents held in their hands and used every day has come back to life.

The petushok are delicious. And I am right back in my grandmother’s kitchen.