Waste Not, Want Not: Grandma Jessie's Secret Ingredient

Food and stories: in the case of my old Jewish relatives, it's impossible to separate the two. In the case of my Grandma Jessie, in particular, I wish I'd eaten fewer of her butter-crisp cookies (those childhood fat cells still haunt me) and listened to more stories.

My mother's stories of her mother's New York family always had the feel of Grimm's fairy tales, complete with a wicked witch. In her telling, my Great-Grandma Rubin was a skinny, spiteful old lady who gnawed on pickled chicken feet and poisoned her children’s lives. To this day, the fairy-tale witches of my imagination have wrinkly chicken feet for hands. My oldest brother has a perfectly horrid childhood memory of a scary, chair-bound old lady thrusting a back scratcher at him and demanding that he scratch her bony back. But the wicked witch was once a brave young woman who fled Russian-occupied Lithuania at 19 to start a new life. About 25 years later, she was a widow with four mouths to feed.

Jessie, the wicked witch's eldest daughter, probably deserves much of the credit for keeping food on the table and a roof over their heads. During the Great Depression she worked to support her family, including a brief stint as a model for True Story magazine. The "confessions" rag was full of cautionary tales for young women facing new dangers out in the world. The story Jessie posed for was about an office girl who fell prey to a lothario and then, judging by the shot below, socked him one.

Look how cute they all were, the Rubin children with their starched little outfits and solemn faces. Only Jessie had a hint of a smile.

After marrying my Grandpop Billy, an Annapolis dentist, Jessie constantly felt the tug back to her mother and siblings in the big city. The New Yorkers turned up their noses at the boonies, where my soft-hearted grandpa sometimes accepted payment in chickens. My mother felt that Jessie cared more about her New York family than her own husband and children, but probably it was more complicated than that: Jessie felt torn between two worlds. She had many friends in Annapolis and a lovely home, but she was always looking longingly or anxiously northward.

The funnier stories about Jessie involve her cheerful chutzpah (Yiddish for "audacity"). Back then, tiny Annapolis had manually operated traffic lights. A policeman would stand on the corner and flip a switch to change the light. Jessie once stopped her car at a red light in front of the grocery store, hopped out, smiled at the officer, and said, "Hold the light, officer, I'm just running in to get a loaf of bread."

The chutzpah abided, but the neglectful mother of my mother's childhood was hard to reconcile with the benign grandma of my own. To me and my five siblings, she was the epitome of a kindly, doting grandparent. On visits she brought everything good in her tightly packed suitcases: presents for us kids, tins of cookies, and in one case, an entire cooked turkey. (Economizing space, she'd tucked a nightie and a toothbrush into the corners.) We were all eager to get our hands on those crumbly-rich cookies with the dollop of jam baked into an indentation in the middle. Later, I'd try to replicate the thumb print cookies from her recipe, but mine weren't as good. Maybe I did something wrong, or maybe her original recipe card omits a secret ingredient, some special grandma alchemy.

I do know the secret ingredient of the recipe included here, her stuffed cabbage. Most of the ingredients were variable, depending on what she had on hand: some kind of ground meat, rice, some kind of tomato soup or sauce (or in a nod to Depression days, ketchup and water). Waste not, want not was her mantra, so after sipping a cup of coffee at the kitchen table, she would forage in the fridge and somehow whip up a wonderful dinner from whatever she found there. Her suitcase contained the secret, essential addition to her stuffed cabbage: a few crushed ginger snaps. I think she just really loved ginger snaps, but it definitely takes chutzpah to add them to ground beef.

Snowed in again yesterday, I made Grandma Jessie's stuffed cabbage from a chaotic recipe card that my mother probably scribbled down while they were shouting at each over the phone. Regrettably, I had no ginger snaps, but a little cumin worked nicely for spice. I always omit the sugar because I'm still making up for all those butter crisps.

Looking for a connection back to my ancestors, I searched "Lithuanian cabbage recipe" and found a recipe for Balandeliai. It looks similar—and delicious—but Jessie would've said, "Pfeh! Too fancy. A little of this and a little of that—just use what you have."

Grandma Jessie's Stuffed Cabbage

Ingredients:

• 1 lb. ground meat or veggie crumbles
• 1 can diced tomatoes, tomato sauce, or tomato soup
• 1 cup cooked rice
• 1 egg
• 1 yellow onion, chopped
• 2-3 garlic cloves, minced
• olive oil
• a few crushed ginger snaps if you're feeling audacious
• a little salt

Instructions:

1. Sauté the onion on medium-low heat until transparent. Add garlic and cook for few minutes more.
2. Meanwhile, bring a pot of salted water to boil. Cut the core from the cabbage and place the whole head in the water. Cover and cook for a few minutes.
3. When the outer leaves are soft, carefully pull them off intact. Keep cooking the cabbage until the inner leaves soften enough to remove, layer by layer.
4. Mix together the meat or veggie grounds, rice, egg, onion and garlic, ginger snap crumbs, and salt, plus whatever spices you want to add. Fill each cabbage leaf with the mixture and wrap like a burrito.
5. Place the stuffed cabbage envelopes in a large skillet or Dutch oven. Pour the tomatoes over them and simmer covered on low heat for about 1 hour.