Making More: Food, Survival & The Kitchen as a Creative Space
Author Brooke Randel uncovers her grandmother’s mastery of memory, flavor, and the unspoken language of food.
Editor’s Note: Reading this essay brought to mind my own grandmother, who made the best Hungarian goulash and cholent, and I'd gladly challenge anybody else's grandmother's recipe! The problem is, I couldn't. I once asked her for the recipes, and she scrawled them down on a sheet of paper with only vague directions and measurements. Like author Brooke Randel's bubbie, she never wrote it down. She cooked by feeling and memory.
In this beautifully written excerpt from her upcoming book Also Here: Love, Literacy, and the Legacy of the Holocaust (Tortoise Books), Brooke captures the essence of how food carries history, emotion, and the stories of those who endured and thrived in ways that go beyond words. — Howard Lovy
In one of my grandma’s photo albums, I found a picture of us I hadn’t seen in years. The photo shows me beaming, a kid-sized apron around my neck and waist, while Bubbie’s hands reach for an electric mixer, unable to pause. I didn’t remember this moment, but seeing the photo reminded me of baking with her when I was older, when she took the train to Chicago and unloaded half her luggage straight into our fridge. Right away, she was in our kitchen, setting out ingredients. I remember it well. I was ten years old and knelt on a stool to watch.
Bubbie turned to the fridge and pulled out a ball of dough like a magic trick. I watched as she spread handfuls of flour across the counters my parents worked so hard to keep clean. She flattened the dough with a rolling pin, stretching it on every pass. As she worked, she slowly lost my attention and the flour gained it. I reveled in the mess of it all, the stacks of bowls and baking sheets, the streaks of white on my hands and face. With a finger, I doodled in the silky soft powder, drawing loops and swirls. Bubbie gave me excess dough to play with and I rolled, pinched and squished it like clay. I wanted to eat it and she let me, something my mom definitely would’ve said no to had Bubbie asked. But Bubbie never asked and I always got a few bites of delicious raw pastry dough.
Bubbie was a phenomenal cook. Instinctively, she mixed, kneaded, and baked. She used no recipe books, no precise measurements. Everything she knew was stored in her head and hands. She listened for the sound of sizzling oil and waited for the just-right smell of roasted goodness. She remembered every step, all the timings and temperatures. Memory is critical for the illiterate cook. There is no double-checking, no re-reading the recipe or writing your own notes for next time. You either remember, or you don’t. And Bubbie remembered.
By the time I joined her, she had spent decades mastering her recipes. She held a massive bank of them in her head. She made a mean matzoh ball soup, tender cholent brisket, and mouth- watering chicken, which she served with potatoes, onions and carrots. She let the vegetables bask in the chicken’s fatty juices, getting plump with flavor as they baked together. Her latkes were canon in my family: light, never oily; crisp, never limp; and always perfectly seasoned. The interior, soft and savory, balanced the crunch of the exterior, a rich golden brown, salty and hot.
Bubbie was always the last one to sit and eat, running in and out of the kitchen, prepping one dish, pulling another. Her meals were plentiful, an endless amount of flavor for us to fill ourselves on. For dessert, she made pastries, sweets filled with nuts, cheese, chocolate or cream, and always made in bulk. Though some of her dishes didn’t appeal to my tame American taste buds, most hit me right in the belly. Creamy, fatty flavors, well-salted, buttered up—it was easy to get lost in all the smells coming out of the kitchen. They were from another world.
Once Bubbie had the dough thin enough, there were two possibilities: she could make it into crescent rolls, a sweet and buttery cookie, or a dessert we called creamish. Creamish was a family recipe, in that no other family I knew ever had it. It involved cold custard being neatly sandwiched between two crisp layers of pastry. I watched as Bubbie rolled the dough into a long sheet and lifted it onto a baking tray. With a butter knife, she trimmed its edges to make a perfect rectangle. Creamish then, I thought. We were making creamish.
Bubbie handed me a fork and told me to dot the dough. She explained: the dough would bubble and crack if we didn’t vent it first. This was important. I poked at it gently and she nudged me to keep going. More, more. She took the fork from me and demonstrated, stabbing lines of four holes all over.
The sheets of dough baked and cooled. In the process, more magic: the pastry sheets were now delicate and flaky, brittle enough to snap. Bubbie scooped cold vanilla custard onto one of the sheets and with the back of a spoon, coaxed it into an even layer. She laid the second sheet of pastry on top, careful not to let it crumble. To finish, she filled a metal sifter with powdered sugar. I tapped its side, sprinkling a flurry of white snow over the dish. More, Bubbie said. I added more and she said no, more. More.
More is my grandma’s north star. She’s seen what less looks like—less family, less home, less safety, less hair. War gave her less of everything. What she wanted now was a fridge brimming with more: more soups with more hunks of meat; whole chickens simmering in fat; giant platters of golden pastries; greasy, crisp potato latkes; more cheese-stuffed blintzes; more jars of pickles and horseradish, eaten and emptied to hold more food; loaves of deeply browned challah bread; more matzah balls, fat and round; more cookies packed in gallon-sized plastic bags; and creamish, an avalanche’s worth of powdered sugar on top, glimmering in that brilliant light, on as soon as you opened the refrigerator door.
Was it fear or defiance or pride that caused Bubbie’s waist to expand in the years after World War II? Was it grief or guilt that kept it that way? She went from a twig-like teenager to a buxom young woman, and from a buxom woman to an overweight one. Food became a haven for her, a distraction from everything else. The latkes, she found, never held grudges. The pans said nothing, and the soup didn’t care. She cooked because she had to, because it was five o’clock, because someone was hungry, because it was easy for her, because so little was easy for her. She cooked because she missed her mom and grandma, because she liked having company over, because it gave her hands something to do, because she craved a sense of control, because fullness is elusive. Was that why she made so much food? Why the concept of portions never reached her ears?
Like Bubbie, I couldn’t stand throwing food away. Leaving something uneaten on my plate felt wasteful, sliding it into the trash even worse. When I went to the grocery store, I only bought food for a few meals. I rarely bought enough. As she was piling more onto her plate, I was piling less. To me, food was too precious to waste. I loved it, the layers of flavor, the rising smells, the sauces and spices, but I only needed so much. In my apartment in Philly, my fridge was often half- bare. I didn’t have Bubbie’s capacity to hold onto food, to endlessly make more, to cook and cook and cook and cook.
In the years after the war, Bubbie turned a simple need into a fierce love. She cooked with that love, sampled from it, and served it to others. Food was the center of my family’s universe, the point around which we all revolved. It was how we greeted one another, how we said congrats and I love you. Whenever my brother Scott and I visited Bubbie in Florida, she always had something ready for us to eat. “Come,” she said, “Sit, sit!” She emerged from the kitchen with a warm meal made especially for us. She told us to eat and like good grandchildren, we did. If a bite was left sitting on a plate, she told us to have it. If three or four bites were left, she ate them herself. For larger leftovers, she wrapped the food in plastic and put it in the fridge for the following day. Nothing was ever wasted. A year of starvation would not allow for that.
Once the creamish was ready, we ate. Depending on who was cutting, a slice could be any size. A sliver, if my mom cut it. A square, if it was my dad. Scott always halved the last piece so he wouldn’t have to clean the dish. This time it was Bubbie. She gave me an envelope-sized rectangle of a slice. I slid my fork through it and the custard oozed between my teeth. The taste of powdered sugar clung to the corners of my mouth.
In recalling her creamish, a dessert Bubbie made regularly, I realized I’d never seen the name in print. The letters looked odd to me, as if they were only meant to exist out loud, in the airspace of Bubbie’s kitchen. This never mattered before, but now in writing, I was confronted with how much I didn’t know. I figured creamish was probably not right, but my mom’s suggested spelling of creamage felt even worse. Something so delicious shouldn’t appear so unappetizing in print. I poked around online, trying to find the name, coming up empty again and again. It took months of research until I uncovered the correct spelling. In other places, it’s called napoleon, kremówka, krempita, or cremeschnitte. In my grandma’s corner of the world, it’s krémes, the Hungarian word for creamy. No wonder my queries kept coming up empty. There was no English version of the word. Hungarian custard slice, one site suggested. Honey cream layer cake, another insisted. None felt right. And so, I chose to stick with my original spelling. Creamish: light, playful, wrong, and ours. That was part of what Bubbie liked about cooking, and taught me to like too. There was always room for discovery, for invention, exploration, error, revision. The kitchen was a creative space. We were there to make. Make dough, make mistakes, make better, make more. Creamish was for eating, not spelling.
I laid the photo of the two of us on the coffee table and snapped a picture, so I could look at it later on my phone. I couldn’t wrap my head around how she’d done it, how she’d mastered so many dishes. She learned to flip and turn with a single fork, never bothering with spatulas. She didn’t need them. She perfected the combination of creamy custard, flaky pastry, and an easily distracted granddaughter. She embraced the glory and gluttony of more, its heavy consequences. She made dish after dish, feeding everyone who walked in her door. She brought us all together, everyone gathered around the same dining room table. Everyone hungry and asking for more. I didn’t know how she did it. I only knew food was power, and my grandma liked to make a lot of it.
Brooke Randel is a writer, editor, and associate creative director in Chicago. Her writing has been published in Hippocampus, Hypertext Magazine, Jewish Fiction, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. The granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, she writes on issues of memory, trauma, family and history. Find more of her work on her website.
Five tiny delights
The smell of hot butter and cinnamon
Running to get the phone and catching it on the last ring, then hearing my brother’s voice shout-say my name (never my name, always a nickname)
Extremely large trees
A view of Lake Michigan from just about anywhere, but especially through the windows of a bus going south on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive on a sunny day
Reading in a hammock with my husband and a very gentle breeze (and maybe a croissant)
Five tiny Jewish delights
The inherent care in the phrases "watch your keppe!" or "come here, you've got something on your punim"
Room for questioning and doubt, the general state of being perplexed
The glow of the candles at Hanukkah after you’ve turned off all the lights in the room, and the stillness that provokes
Comedic timing
The force of nature that was my grandma and the relentless kind of love she gave
This brought back so many memories of my own grandmother. I loved watching her in the kitchen. I thought as only a child could that she was the most amazing cook on the planet and she was!
It is interesting how food carries the tradition. In my family, my mother taught me how to make
creeps, now my son is making perfect ones. He invites me over to his house for crepes and it always makes me to remember my mother, his grandmother. Unfortunately, I never use any recipes of Jewish food - all of them seem very complicated and time-consuming. By now, they live in my notebook, but not made in my kitchen. The notebook, however, lives in my kitchen.