Beloved mother’s signature dish lives on in a gravesite recipe

It’s a Jewish custom that when someone close to you dies, you sit shiva. It’s seven days of mourning, where you literally sit low to the ground, and friends, family and neighbors join you to pray. And eat.

It’s also customary in my culture, as it is in so many, to bring food to the family that’s in mourning. But I did something a little unorthodox when my mother, Roberta Jackson, died in 2019. I cooked.

My mother was exceptional in the kitchen, but that didn’t carry over to me. She cooked from a place of intuition — a feeling, smell or taste that she knew was just right. I, however, need guidance. I’m the person who still uses GPS to drive to the nearest mall a decade after moving here. I need a recipe.

When I moved to Germany for a year after college, I lived and worked among a small Jewish community of former Soviet refugees. I wanted to host a Shabbat dinner, so I called my mom and asked for her recipes. I remember her laughing at my shock to learn she didn’t have any.

You know how parents move mountains for their children? My mom sat at the computer after that phone call and typed up three of her signature dishes. The recipes were long, some of them multiple pages. Whole paragraphs were dedicated to beating an egg and boiling water. In the margins, there was a hand-drawn diagram with a side view of a celery slice, and the three spots where the knife should hit to chop it into tiny squares.

But where her descriptions were over the top in their precision, there were other aspects even she couldn’t explain.

“It is hard to tell you how much water to use,” she wrote about cooking grains. “If you think you don’t have enough oil, then add more,” she wrote in another recipe, underlining it in pen.

Some of these immeasurable directions could only be understood by those who had heard her talk in her thick East Flatbush, Brooklyn, accent and, more important, had tasted her food. In the section on adjusting the amount of seasoning, she wrote, “Is it seasoned OK? Does it taste like mine? It does? Good!”

I’m grateful that I can still answer that question. The flavor memory of her signature kasha varnishkas permanently resides among my taste buds.

For her shiva, I decided I would make that kasha varnishkas to ensure that everyone else mourning her loss wouldn’t forget her cooking, either. The Ashkenazi Jewish side dish is a humble one, one of the stretch foods our ancestors made with what little they had: soft buckwheat grains, bow tie pasta and tons of caramelized onions.

Days after her unexpected death from an unusual virus, I stood in shock over her stove, struggling to work with unfamiliar pots and cooking utensils. The home I had grown up in is kosher, but I hadn’t lived there for almost 20 years. Was the brown pot for meat and the silver one for dairy? Which category was kasha varnishkas anyway? And how was it possible I couldn’t even ask her?

First, I heated the oil — “lots” of it. In went the sliced onions, which I was instructed to watch until “they look done.” I caramelized them for a good 40 minutes, prodding them, wondering how far I could go until the point of no return between deep brown and burnt. I toasted the kasha, and did “the egg thing,” mixing the grains with beaten raw egg so each one stayed separate from its fellow kernels. I boiled the bow ties in a huge pot.

When the components were done, I assembled everything in an aluminum pan as directed, in alternating layers like a parfait. Then I mixed it all together and rained salt and garlic powder over the top. It did taste like hers, and as I assessed all I had lost, I was comforted to know that this exact flavor was still here with me, still coming out of her kitchen.

Another Jewish tradition is to hold an unveiling one year after the person has died. It’s a ceremony when the gravestone is revealed. But six months after Roberta died, we learned the unveiling wasn’t happening. A new virus stopped the timer.

At first, stonecutters stopped working; it’s a profession that can’t be done from home. When they resumed, they were overwhelmed by demand. COVID had taken so many lives, the one I was grieving couldn’t be properly mourned. Rather than contend with a years-long wait list, I found other ways to honor my mother for the first anniversary. My dad and I defrosted a quart container of my mom’s mushroom barley soup. (Funny story: the label said 5/14, which I thought meant she froze it on May 14. But as I warmed it up on the stove and smelled something acrid, I learned the hard way that it had been in the freezer for six years.)

The second and third anniversaries passed, and by the fourth year, COVID was no longer an excuse. I’d waited so long to order her memorial because I didn’t know what the stone should say. The guilt over my having left her on a hillside in New Jersey in an unmarked grave made it feel impossible to act. After all this time, it had to be perfect.

I wanted it to contain everything. That she loved to travel, that she was a pillar of her synagogue, that she gave me all the love she had, leaving too little for herself. And that she cooked. She nourished us every chance she got. How do you say that in a list of “beloveds”?

With a recipe.

When stonecutters chisel each character into stone, there’s only so much you can write. I boiled down her dissertation of a kasha varnishkas recipe into six short lines that are being carved right now, on the fifth anniversary of her death. The recipe is functional, but it still shows you who she was. And it manages to give her one-of-a-kind, heavily accented voice the final word.

Caramelize 2 onions in oil.

Toast 1 c. kasha with egg, add boiling water.

Stir, cover, cook till soft.

Mix 1 lb. cooked bow ties with kasha, onions and oil.

Season with salt and garlic powder.

“Does it taste like mine? It does? Good!”

Note: Sharyn Jackson adapted her mother’s recipe. You’ll find kasha, or buckwheat groats, among the whole grains in the supermarket. If there is a Jewish food section, look for Wolff’s brand.