Breakfast: Bread & Butter, Cheese, Fruit, Coffee
Breakfast
Fresh Fruit
American Cheese
Bread & Butter
Coffee
Dinner
Vegetable Soup
Pot Roast
Potatoes
Bread
Supper
Bologna
Dill Pickles
Stewed Fruit
Bread
Tea
While Boyfriend Brian made the coffee, I carefully got out the dairy dishes and silverware for breakfast. Â I realized that I had begun to like the ritual of choosing the dishes and setting them on the table; there was something very orderly and satisfying about it. Â We dug in to oranges, buttered bread, and hunks of cheddar cheese.
The cheese was more difficult to find than one would expect. Â We spent a solid fifteen minutes in the dairy aisle examing packages of American single slices. Â I don’t actually know what “American Cheese” would entail in 1914; was it the packaged cheese product that we know today? (I think I’ll be expanding this question into a full post on the origins of the grilled cheese sandwich). Â Most American cheese seems to be made with Rennet, an animal enzyme that makes Kraft Singles decidedly not kosher. Â In a fit of frustration, I grabbed a log of McCadam’s Cheddar Cheese and checked the back of the package: Â both Kosher and Hallal, and prominently marked. Â It was a suitable substitution.
Chicken Fricassee: Tastes less beige than it looks.
Lunch was vegetable soup from a can, both Kosher and Parve. Â I heated it and served it with half a bialy while I worked on the meat dish. Â I couldn’t find kosher beef at the store; instead, I had a sectioned chicken. Â To find a good recipe, I decided to turn to one of my standby cookbooks: The Settlement Cookbook: The Way to a Man’s Heart.
The Settlement Cookbook was published by a settlement house in Milwaukee, an organization run by the children and grandchildren of German Jewish immigrants who arrived in the mid-19th century. Â The turn of the century wave of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe struck these now “American” Jews as too foriegn, too orthodox, too strange; as a result, there was a huge movement to “Americanize” them. Â This book, a mix of midwestern American cuisine and traditional German Jewish fare, is one of the by-products.
I looked up the recipe for Chicken Fricasee, an American dinner table staple since sometime in the 18th century:
I didn’t have a red pepper on hand, so I threw a teaspoon of paprika in with the simmering onion, celery stalk and garlic clove. Â I salted and peppered two bone-in chicken breasts, and placed them skin side down in the hot pot. Â I let them brown, then covered the whole thing over with water. Â I added two bay leaves and a large, cubed potato before I covered the pot and let it simmer.
When the potatoes were tender, the chicken was done, too. Â It was really easy to throw together. Â In fact, everything I’ve cooked for lunch has been super simple but flavorful. Â I did *not* make the cream sauce the recipe suggests serving the chicken with.
Both Brian and I wanted juice to drink instead of water; while trying to determine if our carton of Tropicana was kosher, Brian came across OK Kosher Certification, a website that lets you search retail products to see if they have a kosher certification. Â This discovery is going to simplify this entire process.
The day came to an end with rolls of all-beef Hebrew National bologna, dill pickles from The Pickle Guys, and a bowl of hot stewed apples: Gala apples sliced and cooked slowly with water, raw sugar, and cinnamon.
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