Ida Assaf’s mother, Widad Amaral, would begin every recipe like this: “Use one cup.”
Buy this photo
This could mean 8 ounces of chickpeas or eggplant or flour. Or it could mean a coffee mug. Or an espresso cup. And then the question was, which espresso cup was her mother using? The flowered one? A bigger one?
“I would guess how many ounces she was getting at,” Assaf remembers. And thanks to visits and calls — and a lot of batches dumped in the garbage — Assaf mastered most of her mother’s recipes by the time Amaral died in 2009.
Except for one favorite: pickled eggplant. And this really bothered Assaf: She was opening Bibi’z Restaurant Lounge in Westwood and wanted to put it on the menu. But no matter how many times she tried, the dish was either not tender enough, or too salty, or too lemony.
Finally, she found a way: Ship in the eggplant from a relative in Michigan, who gets “close enough.”
For so many of us, preserving and re-creating the family recipes we remember as children seems like a great idea.
But then we try to do it. And we realize what a messy process it is — first of all, because often, there are no recipes.
When I got married and was compiling a family cookbook, I asked my grandmother to write down how to make the futomaki sushi that I helped her put together at Christmastime each year.
After expressing disbelief that I actually wanted the recipe — after all, she reminded me, I spent my childhood pushing all the filling out of the sushi roll — she grudgingly gave up a few secrets: seasoning the dried mushroom mixture “until it’s tasty” and adding a little MSG to the dried gourd strips (ah, home cooking).
When Brooklyn writer Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan asked her aunts for a recipe for the flaky pineapple tarts she remembered from her youth in Singapore, “they laughed” at her “the first 10 times.”
But after Tan was laid off from the Wall Street Journal, she decided to go home and finally learn to cook the food that shaped her childhood. Her resulting book, “A Tiger in the Kitchen” (Hyperion, 2011), chronicles her struggles to steam silky coconut jam and shape traditional Teochew mooncake balls in the kitchens of relatives.
Learning from people, not cookbooks, was crucial: “These women have always cooked by instinct, not through recipes, so unless you’re there watching and measuring as you go along, you’re not going to be able to figure out if it’s 10 tablespoons or 10 cups,” says Tan, who is reading at Bookends in Ridgewood next month. She also learned her aunts’ philosophy of “agak-agak,” Malay for “guess-guess” — in other words, follow your instincts while cooking.
That’s what Chris Tarta’s Italian grandmother taught him, too, and this became the basis for his Hillsdale restaurant, Bella Campania. Tarta has a tape recording of his grandfather reciting all of her recipes, and started off trying to imitate them.
But over time, he’s chosen to go in another direction and simply adjust her recipes to his liking. Bella Campania’s linguine with clam sauce, for instance, is a spinoff of her recipe.
You’ll find old family dishes similarly sprinkled throughout North Jersey restaurants. Janice Tinari took a year to perfect her mother’s mozzarella-stuffed potato croquettes, and now runs them as a special at Janice in Ho-Ho-Kus. (She also has a list of customers she has to call each time she makes them.) Pasqualina Bikoff fills the cookie plate at Sorrento in East Rutherford with her southern Italian family’s anisette, lemon and pignoli cookies.
And at Bibi’z, Assaf recalls how her mother, a Jordanian-born immigrant of Lebanese descent, always wanted the two to cook together. Assaf spent her childhood ignoring her — “I was such an ornery girl who wanted to play baseball and go to school and have fun. … I’ve always been interested in eating, but I always thought someone would be there to make it for me.”
Today, she’s grateful for the time she was able to spend in the kitchen with her mother. And guests at Bibi’z can taste not only the pickled eggplant, but also Amaral’s hummus and, occasionally, her baba ghanouj — both of which Assaf found a little easier to get just right.
E-mail: [email protected] Blog: northjersey.com/foodblog Twitter: elisaung
Article source: http://www.northjersey.com/food_dining/122406443_Here_s_to_memoriesand_dishes_just_likeMom_used_to_make.html
