Q2 Outside Reading Post 1: Miriam's Kitchen

For this quarters outside reading, I am reading the memoir Miriam's Kitchen by Elizabeth Ehrlich.  In the memoir, Elizabeth is talking about her childhood.  She grew up in New York like any Jewish family.  Went to synagogue, kept a kosher house and had a grandmother who was always cooking.  We learn that Miriam loves to cook.  "They cooked twenty-one meals a week, fifty-two weeks a year, all their adult lives" (17).  This really gives you a good idea on how much Miriam really did cook.  Like most Jewish grandmothers, they are always cooking meals for their family.  Also, every chapter would be named a different type of dish.  Then, in that chapter she would describe the time when Miriam made the food.  "One autumn in Brooklyn as we visited for the holidays, I watched my grandmother in her kitchen day after day... she made a cabbage borsht or soup that season, sweet-and sour" (59).  This chapter was called stuffed cabbage.  As you can see, Elizabeth is describing the setting of where she was when this dish was made.  Then she describes the taste.  By doing this, you really get information about the flavors in the dish.  Once in awhile, there will be a recipe following the chapter.  I think this is a good addition to the book because it makes the book seem real, and you get a better understanding of what the dish is, since a lot of the foods she makes have Yiddish names.  On page 27 there is a recipe for cholent which is a type of meat.  This follows the chapter "Cholent" which is when Elizabeth meets the man she will one day marry.

In the pages, we also learn about Elizabeth's family and their religious views.  They are conservant Jews so they keep a kosher home, where milks and meats don't mix, and go to services often.  There is a chapter about the Jewish Holiday Yom Kippur.  That is when God judges the Jewish people on how they acted the past year and the people reflect on how they acted.  People go to services to pray for the day and also fast.  "The repetitions of prayer and emotion echo and rise in every place of Jewish worship:  We will die, we are sinful, we are not worthy of the privilege of life" (11).  This is what a temple would usually sound like.  People are telling God that they messed up in the past year and didn't act how they should've.