Holy Saturday self-indulgence

Holy Saturday in the kitchen. Right now, it feels to me like this is where I should be. When I was a child, my family cooked for Easter Sunday on Saturday. There was babka -- sweet, yeasty, egg bread -- to make. From as old as I could be of some help, I was dispatched downstairs when we lived in the two-family house, or driven over to grandma's house after we moved, where I woke up early to start baking. Hair put up and back, hands washed over and over, aprons or dish towels tucked into Saturday play pants, and I learned first to sort the soaking the raisens and then stir the yeast into the warm milk -- was it sometimes butter milk? And is that what I am missing from the take of my own babka?

I was not allowed to knead the dough. Ever. When I was very young, I was given some dough of my own to knead. It was play and I remember knowing that very soon. And how did it turn grey so quickly? Probably not enough hand washing and probably the reason to keep me away from the big tub of dough grandma was working on.

When I see Grandma in my mind's eye now, I remember her at my own present age. I am feeling the power of the kitchen these days. Not working out of the home, I have time to look for new foods to eat and I try many new recipes. My are usually from Epicurious.com -- a phenomenon that Grandma never did live to see. And I am/was a cook book collector. She was not. She could read the New York Post, sort of. It has a lot of pictures to give her clues. She did not have a book in her house. Newspapers, but not magazines. She knew what her Grandmother had cook back in the old country.

Those Holy Saturdays that I was allowed to cook with her were wonderful story times for me. She rambled on about her old country and the grandmother who raised her, the mother who died, the father who was a seafaring man whose yearly visits home seemed to her only for the production of another child. When my grandmother's mother died, she was replaced by a second wife who took up the yearly reproductive tasks and who was installed same house, this grandmother's house as the rest of the family. There were at least 7 surviving children of my great-grandfather. I don't know if the grandmother who raised my grandmother was maternal or paternal. I know she was a peasant, midwife, and she owned land. What kind of woman owned land in the Ukraine at the turn of the last century?

I remember my grandmother kneading over a huge bowl of dough. Her forehead perspiring, her greying hair slipping out of its everyday bun. She had strong arms. I can see the bend of her elbows. She was about as old as I am now -- shorter than I am, rounder, but not by as much as I'd like. She wore house dresses, roll down stockings and old lady lace up shoes.

We made eight to twelve loaves of bread in two or three batches. We cut into one for supper or when my father came to pick me up for church -- a trip to bless the Easter breakfast had to include the best looking of the loaves. My grandmother never went to church -- The only times I remember her at church was weddings and baptisms - not even for first Holy Communions. She would say that it was her job to cook for the party. She had no use for those rituals. I can almost say that she never prayed, did not invoke divine help, did not have much of an imagination. At least, not when I knew her. Her younger self, the self of her stories, never included a girl with church tendencies or someone who spent time in reflection. But to me as a child, stories of her Grandmother's farm were far more exciting than hearing about how her girlhood was like mine.

Such was the household ritual around Easter that I remember. It is a ritual that I do not follow. Never had. By the time my mother took over the baking, I was a teenager, and could not stand the over done cleanliness of my mother's kitchen. I was a messy cook. I still am. And I measure and follow directions well, but a bit more or less of anything is part of my style, and never hers.

Today, I had overripe bananas and a head of cabbage that needed to be used. And so, I started with an easy banana bread that David has been longing for, and then went on to cold slaw that will feed us for a few days. The cold slaw is also a memory story, but not for now.

Julia has played alone for a few hours -- drawing and then playing with her dinosaurs. The living room is littered with scenes drawn and set up in a glorious mess. And the sun has come out, so it is time to be outside for another lovely spring day.