“What food do you want for the party?”
“Funeral food,” I said to my parents. I forget who I was originally talking to because they both use speakerphone; we’re essentially always on a three-way call.
The party, a sip and see, was for my first born. We don’t throw baby showers in Jewish families, and we didn’t hold a formal naming ceremony at a synagogue, so to introduce Windsor, my daughter, my parents invited family and friends to their house when she was six weeks old.
Funeral food sounds morbid for a baby’s welcome party, but it’s the food I most closely associate with families and get-togethers.
It’s a mountain of cut bagels, some seeded, some as dark as dirt. Fish comes cured and smoked, sliced thin, flaked, mashed around with mayo and stuffed back into its golden-skinned shell. The garnishes are plenty: tomatoes, sliced red onion, capers, cucumbers, cheeses and schmears.
I think of my oma, my German grandmother, who after 14 years I both forget she’s gone some days but also can’t believe I haven’t talked to her in all this time. She was a part of my immediate family, a third parent, a woman with a ravaged, tortured past in Nazi Germany, who eventually lived the American dream: a husband, three kids, a big suburban house. Cigarettes. Lung cancer. A death before 80.
Windsor is named after her, the W for her last name of Wolff. Every year on the anniversary of her death, I find a place to eat bagels and whitefish salad. It wasn’t her favorite food, just what I ate on the day of our goodbye. This spread makes me stop. Remember. Feel comforted. It’s how I wanted to introduce my daughter. // Find smoked fish platters at Chutzpah Deli: 12214 Fairfax Towne Center, Fairfax; chutzpahdeli.com
See the full Comfort Food feature from the January issue here.
