A Tribute to Gilda on Her 70th Birthday

Half a century. Fifty years ago Gilda and I started our relationship. Actually, she started it by asking me to escort her to a Christmas get-together at the home of one of her political science teachers. That was the one and only time I ever was in a Brooklyn Heights brownstone. 

Gilda is 11 days my junior. She turned 70 Sunday. 

I thought I would tell you how accomplished she is. But I did that a few weeks ago, as far as her professional career, when we celebrated our 46th wedding anniversary (https://nosocksneededanymore.blogspot.com/2019/01/my-my-fair-lady-for-46-years.html).

Today, I’ll concentrate on her non professional side. 

Those fortunate to have eaten a meal prepared by Gilda know how good a cook she is. She didn’t start out that way. The first meal she made for me, a lunch before she embarked with friends on a college winter break trip to Montreal, was spaghetti and a chicken pot pie. She served the latter still partially frozen, the spaghetti overcooked and clumped together so firmly it could be picked up in its entirety with one plunge of a fork. 

I love reminding her of her cooking pedigree. She takes it with grace. She is not shy of elaborating to friends how in her first apartment she decided to make beef stroganoff. The recipe called for heavy cream. She had no idea what that meant and, as her apartment lacked a phone because of a telephone worker strike, she was unable to call anyone for advice. So off she trundled to the local grocer where she lifted up containers of different creams. She decided 8 ounces of sour cream weighed more than 8 ounces of any other cream. She apparently had not seen a container marked “heavy cream.” 

The recipe also called for a clove of garlic. She assumed a clove was synonymous with a full head of garlic.  

Gilda remembers the stroganoff didn’t really taste that bad. I couldn’t say. I was up in Syracuse at graduate school.  

Gilda took time off from work as a nurse to spend seven years raising Dan and Ellie. She enjoyed almost all of that time (okay, not when Dan had severe colic) but drew the line at sitting through kiddie films. Thus, I should not have been surprised when as a family we went to see Disney’s animated Oliver and Company and she disappeared midway through the film. I couldn’t leave the kids in a dark movie theater to search for her. She showed up in the lobby later, having ducked into a screening of Working Woman. 

She wouldn’t be normal if she didn’t complain once in a while. Kindness from and to others is her most fervent desire. When it is not proffered or appreciated she is not happy.

Gilda exults in her time outdoors, be it in her garden, in private or public gardens we have walked, or during almost daily constitutionals around our neighborhood. With the aid of fluorescent lights during the winter she turns our basement into a hothouse of geraniums lifted up from her garden before fall’s first frost.

She reads several books at a time, a history or biography along with a novel. She reads three newspapers a day, the online versions of The New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Omaha World Herald, the last two as a way of keeping up with developments where Dan’s and Ellie’s families live. She also reads Internet news sites, especially the US DailyMail.com, a site that she admits has some pretty weird stories but she notes oftentimes has more information on breaking news and current events sooner and in more detail than The Times. 

Family and friends are exceedingly important to her, part of the reason we expanded our home after our children went off to college. A modernized kitchen with a larger dining room and living room meant we could accommodate more guests. For Rosh Hashanah, Passover and Thanksgiving Gilda spends weeks cooking for large groups of friends and family. Many Friday nights she welcomes the Sabbath with friends who get to savor her cooking and her newfound skill, baking challah.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Gilda’s accomplishments is that she is a self-taught success. It is not blasphemy to report that her parents did not provide effective role models. Her father Irving travelled frequently and was not a dominant presence in the family. He died suddenly when she was nine. Her mother Rose offered little by way of comfort or example. She could not cook, so Gilda never learned. She did not welcome any of Gilda’s friends into their household. Rose was a simple woman with little curiosity, gumption or industriousness. She convinced Gilda’s sister to work in an office rather than attend college. She would have liked Gilda to do the same, but Gilda chose her own path. 

Naturally, she would not pay for Gilda’s college education. So Gilda enrolled in Brooklyn College, a commuter school that at the time cost about $100 per semester for tuition and books. Gilda worked to pay her own school costs as well as buying her own clothing and other living expenses. One could say I am indebted to Rose’s penny-pinching ways for enabling Gilda and me to find one another. Fifty years ago. 

A Breakfast Tradition of Challah French Toast

I cooked challah French toast Saturday morning during a quick weekend trip with Gilda to see Dan, Allison and the grandchildren. The paterfamilias cooking weekend breakfast is a Forseter tradition dating back at least 60 years. I don’t know if my grandfather back in Ottynia, Poland (now part of Ukraine), delighted his five children with French toast but my father treated his three young offspring to a delectable breakfast on many a weekend morning.

Dad rarely ventured into the kitchen of our Brooklyn row house. At least not to cook. To be truthful, my mom didn’t cook too often when we were young, either, as she worked in the office of my father’s lingerie factory. They came home too late for her to start making meals, so our dinners Monday through Friday were prepared by a succession of housekeepers, the most memorable and long-lasting being Bertha, then Virginia. They were good cooks. Bertha was an especially proficient baker. Her pound cake was to die for. I’ve never tasted its equal.

Lest you get the wrong impression, my mother was a good, very good, cook, though she tended to overcook vegetables. She produced extraordinary multi-course holiday fare, all the more remarkable because of the small kitchen and limited appliances she had at her command. Among her specialties, and my favorites, were sautéed sweetbreads, sweet and sour lambs’ tongues, crown roasts, breaded veal cutlets, matzo ball soup, gefilte fish, and kreplach. It’s making me too hungry to expand the list further. But to get back to the matzo ball soup, that became one of Dan’s favorites, as well. He still enjoys it, thanks to Gilda’s culinary talents. Sadly, Finley and Dagny have yet to cultivate a taste for soup.

Dan and Ellie also knew intuitively when my parents would be coming for a visit. Miraculously, it seemed, cake would grace our kitchen table. They quickly realized cake was a signal grandparents were soon to be guests requiring sweets with their coffee. My telltale signs of pending grandparent arrival are Fuji apples, Diet Coke and a can of whipped cream.

Anyway, to return to my father, his cooking usually was accompanied by loud commentary as he coaxed my brother, sister and me to set the table, get out the Log Cabin syrup and prepare ourselves for breakfast. 

Breakfast wasn’t always French toast. Sometimes he would cook what he called “army eggs,” fried eggs surrounding thin circles of fried salami. He did serve about a year in the stateside army during World War II, but I have no way of knowing if army eggs were standard fare in the military back then.

It is not unusual to remember a mother through the meals she prepared. I do, but I also recall my father and his food habits. He required every dinner to begin either with a half grapefruit or a slice of melon (if the melon tasted “like a potato” he would complain that our fruit and vegetable man was stealing our money). He drank one beer with dinner, usually a Schlitz. He’d leave the dregs at the bottom of the bottle for us kids to swig. Dessert would be some canned Del Monte fruit cocktail or Bartlett pears. About an hour later, after a nap, he’d have coffee and cake, or chocolate pudding topped with whipped cream. Or a scoop of ice cream. When we’d go to the delicatessen he’d more often than not order “specials” and beans. Specials were wide frankfurters, usually boiled. In restaurants, especially at Seniors on Nostrand Avenue near Avenue Y, he’d eat broiled fish. With me, he never ate in an Italian restaurant, and didn’t eat Chinese unless it was in a kosher eatery. Why he insisted on it being kosher I can’t tell you, as he didn’t require it for any other meal outside his home. 

I ate thousands of meals with my father, but the ones that resonated the most with me were our weekend breakfasts of challah French toast or army eggs. I guess that’s why I eagerly and happily continue the tradition.

French Toast from Generation to Generation

Of all the comfort foods in the world, French toast has to rank among the best. Not so much for its taste, though I do like it, but because it's a food often made on weekends by dads and granddads.

A last minute visit by Dan, Allison, Finley and Dagny gave me the opportunity to exhibit the culinary skill passed down by my father. He rarely made an appearance in my mother’s kitchen in Brooklyn. He never cleaned the dishes or the pots and pans, though he did don jeans instead of his usual dress pants to lie on the floor to fix the dishwasher when it went on the fritz.

Other than French toast, his cooking—better to call it, food preparation—was confined to peeling an apple or slicing a pear for his three children. But he did make good French toast. Challah French toast, made from leftover Friday night sectional challah.

Cooking French toast has made its way down to another generation. Dan cooks it for his family, and after seeing his dad and grandpa do it I hope we are planting the seed of continuity inside Finley.

Finley already has experience with generational continuity. Gilda and I saved many of our children's toys including lots of Legos and construction trucks, one of which is a giant crane. For more than a year we made it a point to show Finley a picture hanging on our family room wall, a picture of young Dan playing with the crane just as Finley now does. Soon, Gilda will hang next to it a picture of Finley playing with the crane.

The Legos, of course, are as much fun for Dan to play with again as they are for Finley to explore. But it's the books we kept that really choke Gilda and me up. Seeing and hearing Dan read to Finley books he loved, like “There's No Such Thing as a Dragon” or “Sylvester and the Magic Pebble,” is beyond priceless.

To assure there will be enough bread for French toast on Saturday or Sunday morning I always buy two challahs when I know the kids are staying the weekend. I can't say I include any secret ingredient in the batter. Just eggs, milk and vanilla extract. My dad didn't include vanilla extract and neither did I until Ellie made it that way during a recent family get-together at Dan’s house.

Finley and Dagny like to dip their French toast pieces into maple syrup sitting in a monkey dish. I drip sugar-free syrup onto my slices. Dan only uses real maple syrup.