Dinner with the Feldmans

DINNER WITH THE FELDMANS
By Arlene Levin (c) 2019

It was 1950's Chicago. My Jewish mother was a good cook. Zelda was an adventurous cook. With few TV cooking shows and of course no the internet, my mother solved her quest for culinary excitement by traveling to ethnic neighborhoods to shop. She would go into an Asian food store and ask, “What is this?” she said picking up a strange looking vegetable or was it a fruit. "Really!" hearing the name "Daikon". Her next question was "How do you prepare it?” Then she and the clerk would struggle over language hurdles for my mother to actually get the recipe. Some experiments were more successful than others. As I recall, the only dish I just couldn’t bring myself to eat was lung. She boiled it. This must have been one of the recipes Mother got wrong. 

My dad, an auto parts salesman, was a frustrated mathematician. World War II took its toll on him. He was never able psychologically or financially to return to school. The war left my dad a short tempered very strict disciplinarian. He was exacting in his requirements which included our good manners, school excellence and his most peculiar rule "You can't go barefoot in the house." He was adamant about this rule. I think it stems from childhood memories and a bit of superstition. In the Jewish religion mourners are barefoot when they sit Shiva for the dead. Maybe he saw "bare feet" as inviting death into our house...or....maybe as a kid, my dad went barefoot, stubbed his toe, broke it and decided he didn't want that to happen to us. The real reason behind his barefoot rule will forever remain a family mystery as no one ever got a satisfactory answer. It was the 1950's and there was a lot of "Because I said so..."

At the time of this story, I was about 13, Phyliss was about 10 and our youngest sister, Judy, was about 3. My mother was 33, my dad 36. We lived in a 2 bedroom apartment in a working class neighborhood. We were a simple gathering of a young family.

Auntie Sandy's Wedding 1957

Most days we ate dinner in the kitchen before my dad got home.  It was a tight fit but us 3 girls and sometimes my mother squeezed around our kitchen table.  When it was pulled out for dinner, the oblong Formica table sat beside the stove, across from the sink and in front of the back door.  Standing in the middle of the room you could almost touch everything without moving.  There we ate, we talked, we argued, we laughed.

The occasional full family dinner was a bit more challenging than our usual kitchen fare. We ate in the dining room. The table was set. Serving platters were presented. We served ourselves and were expected to finish whatever was on our plate. AND we had to at least taste everything. A reminder of the starving children in China was brought up to encourage us to eat, like Brussel Sprouts!. Eat’m up yum!

We were Jewish not Kosher. But sometimes we got our chicken from the Kosher butcher shop near our house. You could get the chicken whole or the butcher would cut it up for you. Fascinated, I watched him expertly divide the chicken into pieces, legs, thighs, breasts and our family's favorite part, the wings. 

This particular day I went with my mother to get chicken. I stood in my usual spot in front of the butcher block and watched. The butcher was once again amused by my attention to his work. He smiled and said, “Would you like this job some day?” I knew he was teasing me as we both knew there were no women butchers! 

As he packed up the chicken he said to my mother, “I have an extra wing. Do you want me to put it in with your order?” At that time buying extra chicken parts was almost unheard of. I thought, “It must have missed being packed into another order. Ha, their loss our gain..”. As we left the butcher shop I said, “This is going to be an interesting dinner. Whose gonna get the extra wing?” My mother just gave me one of her non committal smiles.

That night it was a “formal” dinner in the dining room. My father arrived to a set table and good smells coming from the kitchen. My mother called us to the table and everyone took their seat. Since I was the oldest and sat closest to the kitchen, I helped bring out steaming string beans, sweet smelling garlic mashed potatoes and a colorful green salad with some vegetables I didn't recognize. 

Then my mother brought out the platter of freshly roasted chicken and placed it at the head of the table.  My father, the frustrated mathematician saw numbers in everything.  "Zelda" he said in a very serious tone.  His eyes widened and he raised his voice to almost a shout, "Zelda, there are 3 chicken wings on this platter!"  “Yes, they came that way from the kosher butcher, isn’t that great?” she said with a smile.   Exasperated my dad's shout turned shrill, “Do you mean to tell me we are about to eat “mutant” chicken?” Knowing the story, Phyliss and I began to laugh but in the wake of my dad’s “death stare”, all grew quiet.

My mother explained. My dad listened. He rarely participated in my mother’s culinary adventures. My dad was a straight laced meat and potatoes man. He’d say “If there’s no meat...it isn’t dinner!” My dad didn’t eat chicken that night. I imagine him conjuring up disturbing and unappetizing images of multi winged chickens. We 3 girls enjoyed our special treat...wings enough for us all.

As I said, for a 1950's housewife and mother, Zelda was a very adventurous cook. She might taste “mutant” chicken, but really, I don’t think she’d serve it to her family. On the other hand, my dad, an observer of my mother’s gastronomical experiments, wasn’t so sure!