The Side-Effects of Coleslaw
My grandmother, whom I called Geegee (hard G’s), was a terrible cook. She overcooked everything and rarely spotlighted fresh vegetables or light fare. She was also overly fond of her freezer. Much of what she served had that distinct reheated taste and texture.
The origins of her inabilities in the kitchen remain shrouded in mystery, although I believe they stem from a few root causes. For starters, she was part of a generation that came of age during the depression. Having food on the table was something to celebrate regardless of its tastiness. There was no Food Network and celebrity chefs did not roam the airwaves and bookshelves in 1933.
I think she also didn’t enjoy the activity. She cooked for my grandfather, mother, and me because feeding was a sign of love and my grandmother was an epically loving person. Using the kitchen as a creative outlet, however, was not in the cards.
Finally, she was the child of immigrants from Lithuania, where the diet of Jews, even educated ones like my great grandparents, likely consisted of tough cuts of meat and bland vegetables like potatoes and yes, cabbage. Cabbage, that bitter, waxy vegetable with unique abilities to turn off the initiated and uninitiated.
I don’t like cabbage in many of its forms. Stuffed cabbage offends all senses. Shaved raw cabbage ruins a perfectly delightful salad. Sauteed bok choy is something to be picked around in a Chinese dish. By some odd incongruity in the bond between scent and taste, I abhor the smell of sauerkraut but love it on a hotdog along with a good, spicy deli mustard.
Coleslaw is one of those dishes that evolved over millennia. According to Wikipedia, the Romans ate a dish of cabbage, vinegar, eggs, and spices, basically most of the components of coleslaw. The modern version is derived from the Dutch settlers of the New York area who grew cabbage and made a shredded salad out of it called koosla (kool means cabbage and sla is salad).
Geegee was a frequent presence at my house when I was growing up. She always brought something for me to eat. As a picky four-year-old, the few things she could coerce into my mouth were jello (red only), Swedish candied fish (again, red only), and for some quirky wrinkle in the matrix, her coleslaw.
Diners and Jewish delicatessens in the NYC metro area frequently serve a side of coleslaw in little paper cups with their main dishes. Many people don’t touch it…with good reason. It is often terrible, either overly sugared or bereft of any flavoring at all. Geegee’s coleslaw was a standout. It was a perfect balance of mayonnaise, salt, vinegar, lemon juice, and a hint of sugar. It was creamy without being heavy. The acid broke down the cabbage just enough to soften it without robbing it of bite. There was just enough salt and sugar to tickle the tastebuds without either overwhelming anything.
As I got older, I watched Geegee make her one signature dish. She didn’t measure anything. The closest thing to standardization was a small jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise, which she emptied into a pile of shredded cabbage and carrots. Otherwise, she largely went by look, taste, and feel. Then she would let it sit overnight. It always tasted better the next day.
After watching her make the dish, I would scamper to the office/library of her apartment where she kept some toys for me, and whose bookshelves groaned under the weight of thick history books. So many looked daunting to a young child. A two-inch-thick, black hardcover non-fiction book about the Third Reich is not as inviting the Berenstein Bears to a six-year-old. I could not fathom the daunting task of ever reading such tomes. However, I used to flip through the pages of those gargantuan books, particularly those about World War II. My grandfather had served and risen to the rank of major in the army. I found that factoid amazingly cool and the more I read about World War II, the more I wanted to learn. Both of my grandparents were happy to talk to me about what they knew and experienced during the war years. I have loved studying history ever since.
I don’t just read about history now. I write about it. Those thick books that used to intimidate me are now my greatest resources for my novels and I have digested piles of them. None of my novels are set during WWII. Not for lack of interest. There just have been so many novels set in the time period, some wonderful and some bland, that it feels hard to stand out. Many follow a standard formula—often an unlikely hero or heroine acts courageously under harrowing circumstances with the Nazis close at hand and changes the course of the war while finding love. I attempt to make my novels less formulaic. I write about less novelized time periods, work off a general outline that builds the character arcs of the protagonist and antagonist, creates tension between the two, leaves a few cliffhangers, and then resolves matters. Nothing is measured and I don’t always know how I’m going to get from point A to point B. I go by feel and add plot points here and character traits there. It is remarkably like my grandmother making coleslaw.
Memory and trial and error have allowed me to replicate Geegee’s coleslaw. I wish she were around to taste it and read my books. I think she would like both.