Being a Jewish grandmother

Every Friday night, when a very young Dawn Lerman would arrive to spend the weekend at her maternal grandparents’ house in Chicago’s West Rogers Park, her grandmother would race down the front porch stairs in a matching lacy nightgown and bathrobe, and scream with excitement, “My little beauty, my little beauty!” Dawn thought when she heard her grandmother say “beauty” over and over again, she was trying to tell Dawn her name. So Beauty is what Dawn called her.

Nevertheless, it was an altogether appropriate moniker given that Beauty was what Dawn saw when she looked at her beloved grandmother. She was Dawn’s lifeline. Beauty not only showered Dawn with love, but also provided her with sustenance in the form of home-cooked, delicious meals. As Beauty would later tell Dawn, “I am a culinary Jew. I honor tradition and those who came before me, and I want to pass the history of food on to you.”

Pass on she did, as Dawn Lerman explains in her new book, “My Fat Dad: A Memoir of Food, Love, and Family, with Recipes” ($16, Berkeley). While she learned to cook at her grandmother’s knee, Dawn’s mother and father had their own issues when it came to eating.

Her father, a gifted Madison Avenue advertising executive, was obsessed with food, or rather lack of it. He never met a diet he didn’t try, so by the time Dawn was 5 years old, she had lived on shakes when her dad was on the liquid Metrecal Diet, broth when he was on the Cabbage Soup Diet and apples for days at a time when he was on the Israeli Army Diet.

Dawn’s mother, meanwhile, never cooked and ate only one meal a day — a can of tuna over the kitchen sink — while talking on the phone. Though caring and outgoing, she was busy carting Dawn’s younger sister to acting auditions and scolding Dawn for spending so much of her free time cooking and cleaning the house. “Whom are you trying to impress?” she would ask.

If this family constellation sounds like something from Planet Dysfunctional, it gets worse. When Dawn was in fourth grade, her father took an ad job with a prestigious firm in New York, which meant the family had to move to Manhattan from Chicago. Dawn would no longer be able to spend weekends with Beauty shopping for groceries, cooking side by side and savoring meals together. 

And though Dawn was devastated, Beauty found a way to continue her granddaughter’s culinary education, mailing her a recipe card every week with a $20 bill. Beauty’s recipes continued to be Dawn’s lifeline as she navigated Manhattan on her own, buying ingredients with the money her grandmother sent her and experimenting in the kitchen with different spices. As she writes: “My grandmother’s boiled meat became lamb curry with the addition of garam masala powder and corriander . . .  Recreating Beauty’s recipes with an ethnic flavor gave me an incredible sense of pride and purpose.” 

Today, Dawn is a nutritionist and food blogger, as well as a mother of two living in New York City. When we spoke by phone recently, she said she is convinced the joy and comfort she finds in teaching people how to prepare healthy meals is the direct result of learning from her grandmother, who passed away six years ago. 

“Food is nourishment for your body and your soul,” Dawn said. “Passing recipes on from one generation to another is a manifestation of love as well as a connector. “When my daughter and I make Beauty’s kugel, we think about her and honor her memory in the dish that we now prepare together. It really is a wonderful thing.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about generational connections and what we pass down in our families probably because I recently became a grandmother. On Feb. 27, at 9:18 p.m., Evelyn Louise Burkett zoomed into the world, or more precisely Room 344 of Missouri Baptist Hospital, a full month before her due date. Clearly, she was eager to embrace the life that awaited her.

Of course she’s too little right now to do anything more than eat, sleep and have her diaper changed. But as I hold her, which has become my new favorite sport, I think about all the adventures we are going to have together and how much I want to share with her. I also think about my own grandmothers and the influence they had on me growing up. 

The two couldn’t have been more different. My father’s mother, Granny Claire, thought I was a princess who could do no wrong. She bought me fancy dresses and always had a box of Barton’s milk chocolate Lollycones waiting for me at her Bronx apartment. 

My mother’s mother, Granny Rose of Lower Flatbush, called me Chana Pessel, which for years I thought was my Hebrew name. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I learned Chana Pessel was a character in Yiddish theater who was always getting in and out of trouble.

Suffice it to say, Granny Rose didn’t think I was any kind of royalty. She could be brutally honest with people, bordering on mean, but she had a huge heart when it came to her two grandchildren, my brother Gary and me. 

As kids, she and my grandfather, Poppy Barney, a podiatrist who was the kindest, smartest person in my universe, would babysit on New Year’s Eve while our parents were out. At midnight, they’d allow us a few sips of Cherry Heering liqueur to ring in the New Year. To this day I’m not sure I ever enjoyed New Year’s Eve as much as I did with Granny and Poppy, scarfing down chips and onion dip while watching Guy Lombardo, making confetti to throw at midnight and anticipating that little taste of Cherry Heering to help sweeten the coming year.

But of all my Granny Rose remembrances, and there are many, the happiest ones were cooking with her, learning to make kasha varnishkes (“don’t be stingy with the onions”), chopped liver, kreplach, and chicken soup with matzah balls using schmaltz, of course. 

My mother — my grandparents’ only child — was not a bad cook, but she didn’t properly season, according to Granny Rose. Regardless, mom was busy with dozens of other things related to my dad and us kids, so cooking was more of a chore for her. When Granny Rose would arrive at our house for the weekend, which she did quite often, she’d commandeer our tiny kitchen. And I was right there, captain to her general, perched on a red vinyl chair ready to watch, learn and assist.

As Dawn and I talked and traded stories of cooking with our respective grandmothers, a flood of memories came back, though it was clear Dawn’s family was far more eccentric than mine. “It was hard to find a voice in my family because everyone was fighting to be a star,” Dawn said. “Cooking was my quiet way of making everyone happy without having to compete. It was also my way of standing up for myself and having some kind of control. 

“I had my grandmother who inspired me,” she continued. “She would say, ‘All it takes is one person to love you to change how you feel and I am that person.’”

Thankfully, my granddaughter has many people to love and hopefully inspire her, including three doting grandmothers. As Evelyn’s only Jewish one, I cannot wait to school her in culinary Judaism, imparting family heritage recipes and becoming the connector between her and the grandmothers before me. 

In the meantime, I’ve been wondering what Evelyn is going to call me. I think I’ll lobby for Beauty.

For a couple of Beauty’s recipes shared by Dawn Lerman, go to stljewishlight.com/newsandschmooze.