The Human Touch

THYRA SAMTER WINSLOW is a very able writer of short stories. Incidentally she is a Jewess, the almost completely assimilated daughter of Old World rabbis and teachers. I believe that she has been twice intermarried, certainly once. The present husband is the son of a New England clergyman, but even so she hasn’t been too proud. As a way of getting into the theatre without buying the tickets she used to review the New York stage for one of our lesser known Anglo-Jewish weeklies, and for a lady who was receiving high prices from the expensive slick-paper magazines, that was almost an affirmative of her Judaism.

In the current issue of the magazine known as Serenade (one of those Woolworth brain-teasers) Thyra Winslow tells us something of the pleasant problems associated with being intermarried. The problems are chiefly culinary, having to do with the pleasant reconciliation of opposing table tastes. The reconciliation, it appears, has been chiefly a capitulation, but certainly anyone who comes from a part of the world where boiled potatoes and boiled beef are the order of the day, should capitulate to the appetite-teasing sauces and spices which are so pleasant a part of Jewish cooking.

After telling us about the culinary compromises, or surrenders, entered into between a Scotch-Norwegian couple and a Swedish-American couple, and a German-American couple, she tells us something of her own story, of how she slowly began weaning away her husband from his insipid savorless food, teaching him the pleasant itinerary from onions to garlic, which are now rubbed into his chickens and roasts.

She finds her worthy spouse no longer hostile to Armenian dishes-which are, after all, only a slight variation on Russian foods-but she finds him still insensitive to the odors of a well-stocked delicatessen and he knows less than a mouse about the differences in cheeses. Come to think of it, I don’t believe that Mrs. Winslow’s rabbinical ancestors had much to do with cheeses either. Incidentally, the one man I know who knows about cheeses is not a Frenchman or a Swiss man, but an Iowa farm lout who made a great success writing novels.

MEMORIES

“My problem,” concludes Mrs. Winslow, “was simple enough. Of course a man as swell as my husband [heh heh] would succumb to the delights of Southern-German-Jewish cooking if he and the food were given even half a chance.”

But more succulent than the record of Mrs. Winslow’s table temtations to which her husband succumbed is the little sketch of how her grandmother used to season the sauces of her savory dishes:

“Long before dinner was ready… my grandmother would go into the kitchen, tie a huge apron around her waist, and taste and season each dish…

“‘Rub a little more garlic on the duck!’ my grandmother would say. Or ‘Do you think there is enough saffron and bay leaf on the fish?’

“The pungent smells that came from that kitchen! I sniffed and begged for bites until they shooed me out to play. Cinnamon and citron, orange rind and white wine. Or onions and garlic and mushrooms frying in olive oil. Or meats roasting. Or lemon cookies baking. And tastes-sauces flavored with anchovies and spices, gravies made with wine, fish accompaniments of crisp cucumbers flavored sharp and piquant.”

They were giants in those days-if they didn’t have heartburn.

These nostalgic murmurings of Mrs. Winslow’s are very touching indeed, but I doubt whether she realized how savory Jewish cooking was until she had a session of cold boiled potatoes and watery tasting beef. One of the most tasteless dinners I ever had was in the home of an intermarried couple, a home in which the Jewish wife had no tradition of Jewish cooking-her mother is a Christian Scientist-and where the law of the kitchen was laid down by the Gentile (New England variety at its worst) mother-in-law. Mrs. Winslow ought to write a postscript sometime about the intermarried home where dyspeptic tastelessness triumphs.

A RESTAURANT GUIDE

Of course in New York we can have all the Jewish cooking we desire, either of the vegetarian or delicatessen variety. I am a vegetarian until dinner time and become meaty at night. But outside of New York one cannot always find the Jewish cooking of our grandmothers. I recall, in this connection, being stopped one Sunday afternoon while walking up Fifth avenue by an automobileload of travellers going South. The man at the wheel leaned out and asked me: “Say, Mister, can you tell us where there’s a Jewish restaurant around here?” They were out-of-towners.

I was an out-of-towner once too. I was in Oklahoma City for some time and for a period had my meals with an American peasant family that had originally hailed from Arkansas, where the status of schooling and general literacy is pretty low. The faces of my fellow-diners were not too friendly at that table and eating became for me a process to be got through with as quickly as possible. I learned later that one of our fellow-diners was an organizer for the Ku Klux Klan. Even before I learned that he didn’t strike me as being too pleasant.

Well, one day some distant friend of a not-too-close relative who was living in the same town invited me to a Jewish dinner. I learned that even Oklahoma City-and that was in 1921-had a Jewish neighborhood. That meal was a Jewish delight. It savored all the savorless meals I had been having in the boarding house of the Arkansans. Perhaps it was a little too spicy. But I learned that it was possible to eat Jewish even that distance from the Atlantic seaboard.

I believe it can be stated as an axiom that Jewish food has an attraction for the Gentiles. The wide sale of matzoths during the year seems to me to prove that. I recall, years and years ago, that one of my commissions just before the Passover holidays was to deliver to a small group of Gentile friends of an elder brother five-pound packages of matzoths. The Israelites of old ate matzoths as a deprivation; the Gentiles today eat it as a treat.