Jessica's Cooking and Baking
Cooking for love of family and community
Throughout her life, Jessica took great pleasure in cooking and baking, for her family, for entertaining, and for bringing to other people.
Some of this came from her parents, no doubt. Her father, like so many others, planted a Victory Garden during World War II which provided the family with fresh vegetables. Her mother was an excellent cook, and thus Jessica inherited not only her interest and skill in cooking, but numerous of Belle's recipes, too.
Oct. 1987 dinner party with Frishbergs
Photo by Michael
Jessica and Michael liked to entertain, and thus hosted an uncountable number of dinner parties over the years. Oftentimes these were with friends, old friends and new. Michael was often hosting visitors to the Washington U. Physics Department, people who had been invited to speak at a colloquium or collaborate on research. It was not at all unusual that these people were invited to Alta Dena for a home-cooked meal. Jessica has described how the physicists would discuss all sorts of issues and experiences during dinner, but that after dessert, the conversation would shift to physics topics, as Jessica would excuse herself to the kitchen.
With Jessica's relatives spread around the country, and Michael's scattered all over the world, family visitors to St. Louis were guests for dinner parties, too. The same was true for old friends of theirs, from college and grad school.
Also of note was that from fairly young ages (age 5?), Rachel and David were included at the table during these parties (not fed 2 hours earlier in the kitchen and dismissed). Thus, we were fortunate to able to absorb (and sometimes participate in!) all sorts of fascinating discussions.
For Rachel and David, especially during their respective college years, it was not infrequent that their friends would come over to the house to study, with Jessica's home-baked cookies for study breaks (especially when working on long physics "problem sets").
Sep. 2018: Michael and Natasha Schalick
Photo by Walt Schalick
In what seems like a bygone era, Jessica and Michael regularly used their china, silver, and crystal. This was all utilized for dinner parties, but even for a small family birthday celebration or other events of note. Similarly, even normal just-family dinners were eaten in the dining room with a tablecloth, not at the kitchen table.
Recipes
Of course Jessica had a large shelf of cookbooks, of classic and international cuisines. But she also sought to cook in a more healthy fashion, wearing out at least two copies, for example, of her friend Roberta Leviton's 1978 "The Jewish Low Cholesterol Cookbook" [ Abe Books].
In the course of going through her papers, I (David) have come across organized folders with about 200 printed-out recipes (now all scanned), and timestamps on these documents show she was doing Internet recipe searches as early as 2001. She would print something out, and then mark it up with her changes and alterations as to how she had adapted the recipe, often with summary "Excellent!" or "Divine!" words.
In addition, she had, over the years, typed up on the Mac many of her own recipes. Before her children's weddings, she presented Rachel and Neil (in 1988) and David and Sheryl (in 1995) with three-ring binders of her recipes (each in a sheet protector to avoid stains in the kitchen!). She continued to add to her library of recipes for many years beyond then.
Some shared recipes of hers (typed by her circa 1995-1999):
- Birthday Marble Cake
- Cinnamon Yeast Cake
- Mandelbrot
- Meringues with Chocolate Chips
- Pesach Brownies
- Aunt Minnie Sour Cream Coffee Cake
"Aunt Minnie" was Jessica's aunt, the oldest sister of her father (by 16 years). (Click here for photos.)
Cooking for large crowds
May 1988: pre-wedding dinner for
Rachel and Neil (Ceci and Stan,
Neil's sister and brother-in-law shown)
When Jessica was planning for much bigger meals, she prepared what she called a "battle plan." These documents detailed what to do when in the days leading up to the event, and even had specific layouts of what food to place where on the dining room table or credenza. She would oftentimes spend the 6-8 weeks preceding the event cooking and freezing large quantities of food (since she was fortunate to have a full-size freezer and an extra fridge in the basement). This was true whether for Thanksgiving, Passover, graduations, or life cycle events (bar mitzvah, engagement or pre-wedding dinners). She basically never called a caterer!
And when the events were done, the family would enjoy G.L.O.s ("glorious leftovers") for days to come, because inevitably there was too much food. (Wouldn't want to run out!)
Foods from scratch
Over many decades, she made a large variety of foods from scratch. It was almost a frontier ethic! And for many of these, they were ongoing efforts, not one-time "prove she could do it" experiments. These included:
- Herbs and spices. She grew her own thyme, rosemary, oregano, basil, and mint (almost a weed!). In warmer months, she would walk out to her garden to freshly pick whatever she needed for that meal. And at the end of the growing season, she would "harvest" the spices, dry them, and store them in plastic bags in the freezer.
- Bread and rolls. For most of my memory, she made (and thus very rarely bought) bread: Jewish-Italian bread, rolls, challah, and more.
- Applesauce made with a Foley Food Mill (which we now have). Rachel and I would help with the circular grinding motion. Since there were several years when our family went across the river to pick Apples at Eckart's Orchards in Illinois (and more than once picked 100 pounds of apples!), we often had apples and applesauce for months through the winter.
- Strawberry jam. She did not do a great deal of this, but for several years she made her own strawberry jam (but not other fruit preserves, as I recall).
- Orange marmalade. A decade or more before her citrus allergy made this impossible, she would have a large stock pot boiling on the stove, as she cooked down the orange peels to make marmalade.
- Mayonnaise. I recall her carefully pouring the oil into the small opening of her spinning blender. (Too liquid for a food processor) She did this for at least, I'd say, 5-10 years, until health concerns about the fact that commercial mayonnaise was pasturized and hers was not led her to stop.
- Salad dressing, at least oil and vinegar types (with spices!).
- Baking of all kinds (see below): cakes, cookies, pies, pancakes & waffles, and more.
Baking
Jessica took special pride and pleasure in baking, so often sharing it with others. For Rosh Hashanah each year, she would bake a dozen or two honey cakes, to be given to her staff at the Temple Israel Nursery School or to friends and neighbors. She also would regularly bring a loaf of home-made bread and a box of salt to new neighbors. At Halloween, she would make home-made cookies and put them in a sandwich bag along with an index card with her name and address (so parents would know they were safe and trustworthy).
Over multiple generations, she taught friends how to bake and braid challah(September 2001 document), and even wrote up detailed instructions. (This linked version was updated for Noah and Mary Nora in September 2022.)
August 2005: Jessica baking with
children at Zelda Epstein DCC.
Photo by Michael
She regularly did cooking lessons with her preschoolers as well.
I have also put together an entire gallery of baking photos [link opens in new tab], with images from 1971 and then lots of images in the 2000s, up until August 2022 (with Rafael, the last baking in the house before she moved)