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Rosie
By R.S. Mann
Rosie renders chicken fat and then uses it to fry the onions that I already diced, and left beside her in a bowl, for the chopped liver.
We are cooking for Rosh Hashanah together in our mother’s kitchen, in the Long Island home where we grew up.
I brown the large, flesh red brisket in a roasting pan on the stovetop, while Rosie mixes together the onions, garlic, tomatoes, and chili sauce in which the meat will braise.
We were born into food. At my bris I was greeted with mounds of bagels and cream cheese, lox and whitefish salad, rugelach and strudel. At my bar mitzvah there was a giant smorgasbord of warm sliced corned beef and turkey, meat-filled wontons, baby lamb chops, and Israeli salads. After my grandfather died, it was all food, all the time, our fridge bursting with fruit and cookie and bagel platters.
My mother can feed armies out of her sizable suburban kitchen. With her giant subzero plus a full-sized freezer in the basement, she is always ready for a crowd. She jokes that she keeps the local kosher butcher in business. I can only imagine the weddings she would like to plan.
Eating is practically our way of life. If only Rosie had been born into a family of raw-food vegetarians.
There’s a photo of us that my Grandma used to have in a frame in her kitchen. I’m about 7, a moppy-headed boy in short shorts standing in Grandpa’s garden on a sunny summer day. I’m still holding onto my youthful chub, which I didn’t shed until my growth spurt at about 14. And there’s Rosie, age 3 and fat. Her cheeks are so wide they hide her ears, and her ruffled pink tank top is pulled taught over her belly. She’s laughing, and her eyes are full of mirth.
Why shouldn’t she have been happy? This was years before the humiliation of phys ed, the struggles to buy clothes, the sniggering superiority of even girls who called themselves friends.
I skim white foaming fat off the top of the simmering soup, while Rosie drops matzah balls one at a time into a pot of boiling salted water.
“Who’s coming again?” I ask. “Do you think we have enough food?” For the first time in our lifetimes, our mother isn’t up to the job of preparing for the holidays. She’s under doctor’s orders to rest and to avoid stress, because of a recently diagnosed heart murmur.
“Grandpa and Mikala were meant to come, but she called to say Grandpa isn’t up to it,” Rosie says. “So it’s just us. But we need leftovers - should we roast some chickens for tomorrow?”
I agree that we should.
I wash and dry a couple of roasters. Rosie drizzles olive oil over them, grinds on some pepper and salt, and sprinkles on a handful of chopped rosemary. I use my hands to spread the seasonings over the birds.
When Dad called a week ago and asked me what prepared foods he should order from the deli for his and Mom’s Rosh Hashanah dinner, I called Rosie and proposed that we cook. We’d have to get Mom off the scene, of course. Watching anyone else in her kitchen, even her own children, would cause her more stress than doing the cooking herself.
Rosie loved the idea. She said, “We’ll send Mom and Dad out on a date, and while they’re gone we’ll make all her classic recipes! They’ll love it. It’ll be awesome.”
She’s been very enthusiastic lately, about everything. “School’s amazing!” she said that day on the phone. “I mean, it’s a lot of work, but then you just get to sit and talk with people about Kafka until 3 in the morning. It’s so much better than high school.”
Even now, watching Rosie move around the kitchen, it occurs to me that she looks, well, rosy. She looks radiant and purposeful, and while no thinner, physically improved in some essential sense.
Rosie whisks together the mustard vinegar vinaigrette with fresh thyme for the lettuce salad. I dip my finger in and taste.
“Perfect,” I declare. And it is—just the right combination of tart and smooth.
Reunions at our old Long Island house have become rare now that I’m in culinary school upstate and Rosie’s in college in Massachusetts. That I’m the one becoming a professional chef is an irony lost on no one. Rosie’s the one with the gift.
She started cooking in junior high school, when a nutritionist recommended that she make her own meals. Soon we were all glad when Mom took the night off and let Rosie feed the family. Rosie can recreate dishes that she’s had only once. She has the acute ability to taste and smell and sense the way that foods are built and blended. And, like an artist who can make something beautiful with paints in three primary colors, she can make even the most basic ingredients sing.
I’m more of a recipe follower myself. Unlike my mother, who cooks from the kishkes, without needing to think. Lucky for us, my mother has written down many of her recipes, if you call her measurement-free instructions recipes: Meatballs: mix meat with egg, a squirt of ketchup, a half handful of matzo meal, a shake of garlic powder, salt and pepper. Bake until done. Freeze until needed. Defrost in sauce.
Mom’s accumulated these documents over the years, keeping a copy whenever she writes down a classic for her friend’s daughters’ bridal showers. I suppose one day, if Rosie gets married, she’ll get the recipe box. Those kind of things tend to go to daughters. But Rosie wouldn’t need it or use it as much as I would.
Still, despite her gift, or perhaps because of it, Rosie can’t become a chef. It would be like an alcoholic tending bar. Rosie had to stop going to the Jewish sleep-away camp where I and all our friends went, because when she was ten she came home after a four-week session fifteen pounds heavier. What is camp but an endless smorgasbord of bug juice, PB&J, and creamsicles? After that Rosie went to fat camp every summer. Last summer she was a counselor. It’s not like she doesn’t try.
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