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.
