Fearless Mom: A Passover Backstory

This week's news: my article about how to make a Passover maror with plenty of kick and punch was published in Unpacked this week, and you can read it here.

What I don't share in the article is the backstory about that maror, a.k.a. horseradish sauce, which sits on seder plates throughout the world as Passover begins.

This story starts with my mom (and my dad a little bit, too). I grew up watching them make maror every spring, a few days before the holiday in the basement of our home. I think they were in the basement because they could open the patio door and not disturb the main floor of our house with too many fumes.

My father reported that he could barely stand it, but my mom would have said no such thing. First, an explanation of what maror is and does. It is supposed to symbolize the bitterness of slavery and the tears shed by captive Jews as they toiled involuntarily for their "masters" in Egypt. And yes, maror literally means bitter herbs.

You make maror with horseradish root and today, we typically use a food processor. My mother and father used a food grinder, and I have no idea how they survived. Most online sources tell you that even with a food processor you should turn your face away when opening the lid, and make sure to open lots of windows or doors while making this dish. Many people wear goggles. 

But not my mom. When it came to maror, she was fearless. I think in fact she was maror, and maror was her. She was unwavering, larger than life, and no bitter herb was ever going to get the better of her. When she brought her maror to her brother's house for our yearly seder, my cousin Stewie couldn't get enough. The only maror he would eat was my mother's, and I think she made it stronger every year just to please him.

As strong as it was, I have to say, it was still delicious, though you had to be sure to eat it with as big of a helping as you could find of fish, brisket or whatever you had available. Mostly, the horseradish is eaten with something called gefilte fish, which my husband won't touch but which is a staple at Passover. It is made up of poachaed, ground fish such as carp, whitefish or pike and since it is fairly bland, it seems to pair well with maror. 

I think Passover allowed my mother to come into her own in ways that didn't happen the rest of the year. She wore bright red lipstick (every day) and red was her favorite color. I think she made her maror with beets because of it.

Mom wasn't someone you would get by easily if you told her a lie (she always knew it, anyway). She could be incredibly supportive and insightful, and she loved Broadway shows, which sowed the seeds for me as an actor and playwright. But if you crossed her, God help you. 

At the same time, I miss how smart she was about people and life and how determined she was about going after what she wanted. She taught me that persistence, and I'm so grateful she did.

That's why the recipe in this article is dedicated to you, Mom. I hope you get to celebrate Passover wherever you are. I hope they let you make maror -- and the malachim (angels) line up for a taste because everyone at your table is raving about it.

Maror Photo via Unpacked from Wikipedia Commons

Mom photo from Zark family collection

Pushcart City

Food trucks, pushcarts, whatever you call them,  are a lot more popular now than before the pandemic hit. But my remembrance of them was long before we had gourmet foods to choose from on street corners. And December carries my earliest memories of push carts.

As I child, I knew one thing about the city of Manhattan: it was unmistakably itself. The first thing I noticed once my parents parked their car and we all got out was the smell. Chestnuts, hot dogs, pretzels--these were the foods that entered my nostrils immediately. These three treats seemed to be on every street corner, and you couldn't get away from them. 

I almost always begged for one of them, and typically we got pretzels because my mom thought hot dogs weren't good for us. When I got older, I pleaded for chestnuts and loved how warm they felt in my hand. Later still, I was fine with coffee and liked walking with it down long avenues in the winter cold.

Today in Manhattan, the food truck food is way more advanced and flavorful. But there's something about those early childhood memories that won't let go and wants to return to the days when hot dogs, chestnuts and pretzels meant New York City to me. 

It may have also been the feeling that my parents, just by virtue of being mine, could help me navigate the vast, cavernous, anonymous streets of New York. That we would be seeing relatives who loved us, friends who would throw open their doors, movies on giant screens and plays that would lure me into wanting to jump on stage alongside the actors. 

New York was my first introduction to the excitement the world could offer. It started with the push cart smells, which quickly gave way to more interesting possibilities: Broadway, the Rainbow Room, comedy clubs, cafes, the Bitter End where Dylan played, the Village Gate, highrise apartments, fancy restaurants, cabarets, singers, the Rockettes, Central Park and Rockefeller Center. 

New York was, and still is, the place where everything is possible.

I'm not there this year, but the next time I go in December I'm going to hunt down some chestnuts and eat them on a street corner. Just for remembrance sake--and for the little girl whose eyes widened every time she stepped out of a car, bus or subway onto a Manhattan street. 

Still wide eyed. Just not showing it.

Push cart vendor: Dan de Luca

Putting the Yo-Yo to Bed: Changing my Approach to Food

I don't know when it started exactly, but I do remember being in third grade. My mother and sister were sitting in front of the TV by the time I got home from school, and they both wanted to watch soap operas. 

Somebody got the bright idea of giving me three large squares of a giant chocolate bar as a snack to keep me quiet, and it worked.

A yo-yo dieter with a wicked sweet tooth was born.

I had always been what my mother described as "skinny." In fact, I had no particular thoughts on food, one way or another.

My mother, on the other hand, was always unhappy about her weight. She went on diets regularly, lost some weight and gained it back. Once we were sitting in her car -- I was in the back seat, she in the the front, facing the road but not driving -- and she said, "Am I a bad person?"

"Not at all," I said.

"Then why did God make me fat?" she asked.

I wish I had said, "You look fine and your family loves you!" But I was four and had no answer. While I am extremely happy to see shows like Shrill changing the way women's bodies are perceived, my mother had no such option. And for most of my life too, the ideal for women has been to look like little boys with breasts - whereas curves everywhere else are frowned upon.

My food issues became internalized pretty early. At eight years old, I began to put on weight, noticeably. Neither my mom or sister exercised, and a year of that with chocolate every day was making my clothes tighter and tighter.

Interestingly, though my mother did not manage to lose weight herself, she was exceptionally sensitive to mine, and cut me off from my chocolate fix as soon as she saw how much weight I was gaining.

That didn't work, though, as I learned to sneak my treats when she wasn't looking. It took at least a year until she figured that out and hid the sweets, but once she did that I lost weight. I didn't lose my taste for sugar, though, and as a tween and teen went up and down the scale like Sisyphus rolling rocks uphill, only to see them fall down again.

Of course you know I have two sets of clothes for those weight cycles. I had to buy a third one in college, when I went through a serious period of anorexia, eating one tiny portion of food a say until I weighed barely anything. I'd wake at night after "nightmares" of eating a million sweets, but continued starving myself daily. I did something similar when going through a divorce.

There were also days I would eat and eat and eat, until I could barely move. A kind friend once said when I told her this, "It must make you feel like you are in control." That's probably because sugar makes your brain light up just as moments of real happiness do. It's also comforting to shut the world off and eat what you love.

One of the things dieting does to the body is skew the dieter's metabolism so that it's harder to lose weight. So up, down, up, down, down, up, down, up, up, up all dieters go. As my friend Irene O'Garden says in Fat Girl, my favorite book on disordered eating, "The punishment for eating is the punishment for fat, and dieting's the punishment for that."

In the past two years, I've managed to stop dieting and edged closer to what I feel is a "good" weight for me. That doesn't mean I don't have bad days, (going up, going down). But for the most part, I have given up sugar and other foods that seem to be inflammatory (like diet sodas). I also stopped eating anything with ingredients I can't pronounce easily. I did this not to lose weight, but to calm an aggressive autoimmune illness that feels like psoriasis on steroids.

I think I finally got to a point where I realized reducing inflammation is much more important than reducing calories. Concentrating on that has freed me in a way diets never could. Eating healthy doesn't mean you can't enjoy stuff. I found chocolate with stevia and an avocado chocolate pudding that is truly sweet. I still have raisins and granola as long as the granola is without sugar. At the same time, I try every day to eat as many vegetables and raw fruits as I can.

This has helped the condition I'm fighting (at least, symptom wise) and given me more control over what I'm eating and feeling than I ever had before.

If my mom was here, I would tell her about it. Because I know how hard it is to keep dieting. I also know how hard it is to live up to society's "ideal" of the perfect (low as possible) weight--and that we need to take that idea off our plates, too.

More on that another time.


Ice cream photo: Eric.Ray