It’s more than just food: In my family, what we eat anchors and defines us | Canada Voices

I was a bit of a weird little kid, from a palate point of view. While my friends were eating 1970s peanut-butter-and-jam sandwiches and Chef Boyardee pizza from a box, I was devouring beef tongue dipped in sweet-hot mustard and chicken necks boiled until the meat fell off the little bones. I liked oily things and fishy things: shmaltzy grieven made from crispy fried chicken skin, smoky lox that my parents ordered from British Columbia by the side, sardines from a can with a big squeeze of lemon. For something lighter, I ate flaky homemade potato knishes or cheese blintzes, fried to a crispy gold and smothered in sour cream. Best of all were August’s wild blueberry varenikes, boiled and ready to squirt their purple juice into your mouth.

Growing up as the child of immigrants on the Canadian Prairies, food was our constant; not just a comfort, but a signifier of survival. My dad was born in Poland in 1930 and endured the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz-Birkenau, a string of slave labour camps and a series of death marches. His hunger during the Holocaust permanently altered his – and my – relationship with food.

On the other side, my mom’s mother, Baba Sarah, came to Edmonton from Ukraine as a teenager in 1917 and she, also scarred by food insecurity, ate and fed us compulsively. Long widowed by the time I came along, Baba lived in a little apartment on Jasper Avenue, but our kitchen seemed like her real home. For both Dad and Baba, Edmonton was a random dot on the map; a place some European official pointed to when they lined up to leave. They arrived almost 30 years apart, uprooted and untethered, each determined to start again. Food was their anchor, their identity, their bread and butter. They recreated themselves through their cuisine.

I took all this deliciousness for granted until I became old enough to notice those peanut butter-and-jam sandwiches, and the way they othered me. By the time I was a preteen, I realized that even the names of our foods sounded strange. We ate holishkes, not cabbage rolls, and kreplach, not dumplings. Once I saw the truth, I couldn’t unsee it. We ate differently because we were different.

My mother, a first-generation Canadian like me (well, half of me) couldn’t stand old-country food. Unlike her rotund mother, Mom was rail thin and, although she knew her way around the kitchen, she left the chicken soup and kneidlach to Baba, instead preparing higher-end, modern meals such as steak and salad, or maybe a rack of lamb on a Friday night. This kind of cooking was easier and faster, yes, but that wasn’t the only reason. Mom called the briskets and soups she’d eaten as a child “poor people food,” and they brought back unhappy memories of parents who spoke too little English and had too little money. She couldn’t wait to shed that early skin, and it was perhaps from her that I first learned about the duelling identities common among immigrants and their offspring.

Some of this dynamic even played out at our restaurants. My dad was an orphan with two dollars in his pocket when he sailed to Canada in 1948. A couple of years later, at the age of 20, he bought Teddy’s. He kept the cook who came with the business, and at first, Teddy’s continued to serve lunch-counter classics – hot turkey sandwiches, chili con carne, milkshakes and apple pie. By 1955, Dad had picked up two more restaurants and was planning a fourth, called Carousel, a take on the Jewish delis popular in New York and Los Angeles. He created a menu that would become almost-famous: the French Dip, a sandwich of house-made corned beef, served hot, au jus, and the Western Dip, made with hot roast beef instead. Meanwhile, Baba created the desserts: Flapper pie, mile-high lemon meringue, cherry cheesecake and later, a rich chocolate version, as well. Baba’s cheese blintzes made their way into the offering. So did her chopped liver.

But Mom’s fingerprints were all over that menu, too. In addition to the corned and roast beef, we served thick prime steaks. Then Mom decided we should have the newest trend, a salad bar. And swanky cocktails such as Harvey Wallbangers and Golden Cadillacs. And even lobster tails brought to the table with melted butter over a lit candle. Looking back, our eclectic menu reminds me of the Chinese restaurants dotted around town in the seventies, serving “Cantonese and Canadian food,” if your idea of “Canadian food” is flexible enough to encompass steak and lobster.

I hadn’t thought about any of this too deeply until I sat down to start writing my food memoir, How to Share an Egg. I knew that memoirs worked best when readers found themselves in the pages and, still holding onto that old sense of otherness, I worried that my story wasn’t widely relatable. The book is about my background as the child of a Holocaust survivor – a very specific experience. It’s also about my particular relationship with food, from my father’s near starvation in the Lodz Ghetto to his restaurant business start in Canada to my decision to go to chef school at 40 years old – another set of specific circumstances. I still had to learn that the deeper I delved into self-discovery, the broader and more accessible the book’s themes would become. If I am weird, so is everyone else, and in that, we are the same.

With its recent release, the book is coming out in a much more divided time than when I started it, almost five years ago. And yet, I still believe we are more alike than we are different. So much of what I’ve written is common enough to be nearly universal: being born in the shadow of a dark family history; coping with inherited trauma; searching for sources of strength and glimmers of joy; passing stories along to the next generation. As Canadians, we are a society of immigrants and refugees, people who’ve migrated from one place to another, whether by choice or by force. We are children and grandchildren, parents, aunts and uncles. Food stories run through our bloodlines like rivers through forests, always moving forward, flowing toward the future, curving and changing.

My Baba Sarah has been gone for many years, and my mom died during the pandemic, but my hardworking, optimistic, rock of a father turned 94 last month. “I would like to write the government of Canada to say thank you,” he said to me a few nights ago, when I met him for dinner and told him I was writing this essay. Recalling the values of tolerance and respect he discovered when he first arrived, he said, “It’s a different Canada than the one I came to in 1948, but I am grateful, no matter what problems we have.” With the fires in L.A., where I have family, and the book finally published, I felt a rush of emotion, and may have even teared up a little. Dad just patted my hand affectionately, picked up the menu and said, “What’s for dessert?”