Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (41 page)

I remember the creed, can still say it now. I believe in God Almighty, maker of heaven and earth… and in his only begotten son Jesus Christ, who was born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried… On the third day, he rose again to ascend to heaven where He sits on the right hand of God and will come to judge the quick and the dead.

But how will He judge us, collectively or individually? I remember once when I was only seven or eight years old, our ferocious French teacher finally lost his temper with our chattering and set us the task of writing lines—
Je ne parlerai pas en classe;
I will not talk in class—hundreds and hundreds of times. Three of my classmates were off in the school library working on a project and, returning to the room to find it silently and sullenly engaged in line writing, were forgiven the task because they had not been present for the talking. “I wasn’t talking, either,” I grumbled under my breath as this purgatory dragged on and on, the task unfinished at the end of the hour and taken home to be completed that evening. Does God know who was in the room when they loaded people into cattle cars? If He can be counted on to understand that you and I were not yet born when they fired up the ovens, will He forgive us for standing by as flickering images on the television screen showed us Ethiopia, Bosnia, or Rwanda? I wanted to mend one life, to save one soul.

At Saint-Roch, I walk back down the nave. I pass a small side chapel dedicated to victims of Nazism. It lists each camp by name and reports the numbers who died there—Auschwitz 140,000 martyrs, Buchenwald 150,000 martyrs, Dachau 100,000 martyrs… These seem large numbers, too large to merely represent the French priests and nuns who resisted. Perhaps they measure all the European clergy who
were killed. Or perhaps all the French citizens, including Jews and Christians, believers and atheists, Catholics and Communists, resisters and deportees. What distinction is being made here? Who is being remembered and who not?

The confessional booths stand near the entrance, dark little wooden bipartite houses that are so discreet they almost disappear into the panelling behind them. In a delicate slot at about waist-level, a small white sign bearing the priest’s name has been slid out from behind its wooden cover, indicating that confessions will be heard. I hesitate here.

Forgive me father for I have sinned. It has been five years since my last confession.

But what am I to confess? The sin of patience? of blindness? of having loved too much? The sin of being chaste when I should have been lustful, of lusting when I should have simply loved, of waiting when I should have spoken, of speaking when I should have touched, of betraying when I was betrayed.

You cannot approach the communion rail unless you have made confession, yet sometimes, on a Sunday in Montreal, I still go to mass with my mother. We attend Notre-Damedes-Douleurs, a gracious remanent of the nineteenth century left amongst the modern office blocks on that boulevard my mother persists in calling Dorchester although it was renamed René Lévesque several years ago. I don’t think my mother actually believes in God; she belongs to the hedge-your-bets school of churchgoers. This is the downtown francophone parish my father first brought us to when we moved to Montreal. He rarely bothers to join us any more except at Easter and Christmas, but we have stuck with Notre-Dame
and keep worshipping in his language. Nervously, my mother attends the mass, just in case there is life after death and divine retribution, although on the whole she finds it hard to think there is.

I believe. I eye the bleeding Christ above the altar and make my prayers to God. At least, I must have believed, for on the night of the wedding reception and in the long months afterwards I often found myself speaking to him, invoking his name the same way I still wish on stars.

“First star I see tonight, wish I may, wish I might… Please, God, please…”

Please, do the impossible, make rivers run upstream, turn the world on its head.

But I knew my prayers wouldn’t be answered, for if there is a God, He has surely created two kinds of people, those who love what is different and those who love what is the same. And He will not change the divine scheme of things for a tearful girl in a crumpled pink party dress.

At Saint-Roch, I make my decision. I turn towards the confessional booth and quietly open its little door, preparing myself to tell a story.

S
ARAH
S
EGAL TURNED
from the pot she was stirring on the stove and greeted the sound of Maxime coming through the front door. She called out to him but got no reply, only the thud and scuffle of his running shoes on the stairs and the muffled bang of his bedroom door. A few minutes later, excruciatingly loud rock music sounded through the house.

She waited for a while to see if he would turn the volume down, but nothing happened. After enduring a few minutes, she climbed the stairs with deliberation and knocked quietly on his door. There was no answer. Refusing to be reduced to pounding and yelling, she turned the handle and pushed the door away from her. There was some frantic movement from the corner of the room, and by the time she was inside, Maxime was lying there on his bed with the blankets gathered around his midriff, looking flustered.

She pointed at the stereo. He reached across without shifting his lower body and snapped the music off altogether.

“Did you have a good day?” She spoke to him in French, but he replied in English, as he increasingly tended to do.

“Yeah, fine.”

“You can listen to it, we just do not need to blast the
whole neighbourhood. Why do you not use the headphones your father gave you?”

“Yeah, well, no.”

“Yeah, well, no,” she mimicked his mumbled English, and continued with dignity in her own language. “What does that mean? Is there something wrong with headphones? With a little courtesy for the neighbours, if not for one’s old mother?”

“Sorry, I’ll keep it down,” he replied.

“En français, s’il-te-plaît,”
she spoke sharply, letting her annoyance get the better of her.

“Okay. Je diminuerai la volume.”

Maxime silently willed her to leave, so he could get back to the matter at hand, but his concentration seemed to have the reverse effect, for she walked further into the room, sat down on the end of the bed, and smiled at him as if to begin again on a more amiable note.

Then, noticing the cover of what looked like a book or a magazine poking above the crumbled covers, she reached laughingly towards him: “What have you got under there?”

“Go away and leave me alone.” The words exploded from him in anger and exasperation.

“You’re always bugging me,” he added sulkily as if to justify his tone, yet this addendum only served to further wound his mother. Sarah rose, turned, reminded him over her shoulder that dinner would be at seven, and left the room without looking back.

In the kitchen, moving with delicate dignity as her anger made her acutely aware of her own presence, she started to prepare the evening meal. She had already made a crème caramel for dessert: the small porcelain pots holding the velvet custard drenched in a syrup of burnt sugar had come out of the smaller oven an hour ago and were sitting
cooling on a metal rack on the countertop. She gave the vegetable soup, slowly simmering at the back of the stove, another stir, and turned to the massive refrigerator to take out a dish of whitefish left over from the night before. She skinned and boned the fish, and then began to feed the flesh into the food processor.

Daniel and Maxime both liked dessert—cheesecake, puddings, custards, pastries—but father and son were locked in a permanent debate about whether or not it was worth forgoing meat as their main course and suffering fish, cheese, or vegetables, so that they could eat dairy at the end of the meal.

It was Daniel who had insisted that Sarah keep kosher. In the world she left before her twelfth birthday, the dietary laws had been reduced to a mere heirloom or two—a rich egg bread baked on special occasions, a long-simmered stew served on a winter Saturday—and a reluctance to cook with pork. On Gladstone Avenue, Rachel had taught her the names of these dishes, the challah and the cholent. She had fed her bagels, lox, kugel, and kreplach, and at Passover, both introduced her to the symbolic foods like the matzo and the charoseth and taught her the recipes for the gefilte fish and the chicken soup that would grace their table on the first night, the day after Sam had gleefully paraded through the house with his candle and his feather searching for the last crumbs of leavened bread that would have to be swept away before the holiday could begin.

But it was not until Sarah met Daniel, and entered Clara’s large kitchen, that she first began to understand that cooking was some greater obligation than the preparation of food. Daniel had been raised with a host of prescriptions
and prohibitions, and if he had fallen away from observance during his medical school days, struggling to find anything eatable let alone kosher from the sparse offerings at the hospital cafeterias, on marriage he wanted only to return to the patterns of his childhood. As they began their life together in a small apartment near his office, Sarah had struggled to understand and observe in her tiny kitchen. But once safely installed in the split-level house in North Toronto to which she and Daniel moved as soon as his practice was well enough established, she turned her attention more resolutely to the task.

In the big cupboards that still smelt of sawdust, she carefully stored the two separate sets of dishes that had been their wedding gift from his parents, one the unadorned white porcelain that was the smartest, most modern china any newlywed could wish for, the other a more classic pattern, its ivory surface speckled with delicate flowers and its rim lined in gold. She had separate sections in the big new refrigerator for milk and meat, two sets of tea towels and dishclothes, one blue, the other red, to remind her never to wipe the chicken pot with a cloth that had washed the butter dish, never to rub the pan she used for cheese sauces with the towel that had polished the steak knives.

As Daniel’s practice flourished, as lungs were sounded, blood pressure measured, boils lanced, and babies born, their increasing affluence was reflected in the kitchen. A plumber was brought in to install a second sink and a dishwasher for the meat dishes. A few years later, Daniel decreed the room itself should be enlarged, extending the house out into the backyard. By the time Maxime was a teenager, there were two dishwashers and two sets of double sinks, while the cupboards were carefully categorized as
milchik, flayshig
and
pareveh
, the neutral foods, neither milk nor meat. The rabbis argued that the impenetrable surface of glass was exempt from these distinctions, but Sarah carefully categorized these vessels too, hanging the stemware upside down in a wooden rack suspended from the kitchen ceiling to which she could happily turn to reach a wineglass for a weekend aperitif while placing the tumblers for Maxime’s daily milk in the small cupboard over one sink.

At first, Sarah had dutifully copied the cooking that Rachel taught her, and which reflected Daniel’s tastes: long-stewed meats, heavy soups, pickled vegetables, smoked fish, fruit compotes, latkes, and blintzes. She attempted to improve on these recipes, priding herself on a gefilte fish that was more tender and flavourful than the dry, overly sweet version in which Clara specialized, or carefully reducing the fat in her soups so that the surface did not glisten with the disgusting sheen that made Sam smack his lips and declare, “Good soup.” Soon, she began to experiment, inspired by the Gentile housewives and their recipe swaps, by the richly illustrated cookbooks she found at the library and by the smooth-talking hosts on the television cooking shows who sipped wine while they tossed together such outrageously
trayf
combinations as a chicken Kiev bursting with butter or a meat-sauce lasagna topped with melting cheese.

Somewhere on her tongue, in the centre but towards the back, Sarah retained the memory of a good bloody beefsteak, and as Toronto abandoned the overcooked cuisine of its colonial past and French restaurants sprouted along the uptown avenues, she increasingly recalled the delights of her childhood. Meat quickly seared and doused in wine, endives wrapped in ham and smothered in a cheese sauce, a mullet bought at the fishmonger’s that very morning and
poached to a perfect softness, a sharp goat cheese smeared on crisp bread: these were the dishes that her father had sighed over as they came to his table for a long Sunday lunch. And so it was that Sarah set out to recreate classic French cuisine within the confines of the kosher kitchen.

To some, the project might have seemed counterintuitive—what is the glory of French cooking if not meat served in a cream sauce?—but Sarah did not dwell on the whys but rather the hows of the task. If she were to eliminate the cream and butter, relying instead on a roux made of flour, egg yolks, and fat trimmed from the meat, it was possible to make a
blanquette de veau
that would have brought a smile to the lips of the most demanding bourgeois housekeeper of the Sixteenth Arrondissement. She already knew how to render chicken fat to an intensely flavoured schmaltz. If she were to cook the steak from the kosher butcher and the potatoes in the schmaltz, she could create a
bifteck-frites
as rich as that fried up in butter in the galley of a Paris bistro. The recipe was perfected yet further when, overhearing a conversation between her sisters-in-law, she realized that if she bought a cut she could broil, allowing the juices to run freely as it cooked, she was permitted to eliminate the soaking in salt water, the required
kashering
that, she always suspected, killed all flavour as it drained the blood. She made many experiments developing a vegetable stock, for she had come to realize that if she were to avoid a chicken broth when cooking leaks and potatoes, sorrel, Brussels sprouts, fennel or carrots, it was possible to make soups into which she could stir the thickest cream. On the other hand, if she were to eliminate the cream from the recipes for pâté and venture down to Spadina to pick up some chopped liver and spicy kosher salami, she could put a full plate of charcuterie on her table. If she were to
encourage Mr. Lombardi to stock a few more exotic mushrooms than the bland white buttons on offer at the supermarket, she could, with the addition of some dried specimens that came in expensive little packages, collect enough varieties to fry up a garlic-soaked appetizer that might compensate for the forbidden snails and mussels so lovingly described in the oversized encyclopedia of French cuisine that sat beside the kosher cookbooks on her kitchen shelf.