Three Things

But really just one

Greetings eaters and readers, and Happy New Year — I hope you all had joyful and meaningful holidays however you celebrate. I write this first newsletter of 2024 with a deeply heavy heart — my father, Ivan Rosenstrach, died on December 25, 2023. His life was rich with family and community and friendship and we spent the last week of the year celebrating him.

I’m sure you were all eager to tune in today for some wholesome New Years Resolution-y type dinners, but for now I was hoping to talk about a few recipes that always have and always will remind me of my father, a food lover of the highest order with a legendary sweet tooth. They are foods that are hard not to love, and I hope that you’re inspired to seek them out or make them for yourself in his honor. I promise next week I will return to regularly scheduled programming, and paying subscribers will find a very thorough Winter Recipe Index (aka the only recipes you’ll need for the next three months) in your inboxes on Friday. Here is last year’s if you can’t wait that long.

If you are interested, here is my father’s official obituary and here is the eulogy I read at his funeral. I hope you’ll find time to read about him, but if you don’t, the summary goes something like this: He was gentle, kind, and the most dependable man I ever knew.

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1. Mallomars, Babka, Anything from Entenmann’s

My father had so many passions and enthusiasms and I’d like to just mention a few, with the warning that an unhealthy percentage of them fall under the dessert category. He loved Russian literature, Russian history, pretty much any book about World War II. The John Keats poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Dr. Zhivago. The movie “Judgment at Nuremberg.” Corduroy pants, cashmere sweaters, turtlenecks, and those fur-lined Cossack hats that made him look like a Russian senator. Mahler’s Ninth. The opera. Simon and Garfunkel. Judy Collins singing “Send in the Clowns.” Joe Dimaggio, Clyde Frazier. The Lou Gehrig retirement speech where Gehrig famously said “today I feel like the luckiest man on earth.” A full tank of gas. A joke at his expense. Walking into town for a cup of coffee. Emptying the dishwasher. Setting the breakfast table before he went to sleep at night. Going to the US Open every year. Summer evenings playing tennis with my mom. A hot dog and a side of potato puffs from Walter’s Hot Dog Stand. Temptee cream cheese on a plain toasted bagel, Manhattan clam chowder at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central, and those green marzipan bars from Lilac in New York. Babka (as long as it was chocolate and not cinnamon; baklava (as long as it was pistachio and not walnut), a box of Mallomars, a freshly baked challah with golden raisins. Anything from Entenmman’s but especially the discontinued Sour Cream and Chocolate Chip Nut Loaf from the 1980s. Dove ice cream bars, Mallomars, and halvah. Dark chocolate, milk chocolate, Cadbury milk and fruit bars, chocolate truffle cake, Mallomars, my mom’s chocolate pudding pie. Mallomars.

When he died, people sent flowers, of course, but it was heartwarming to see so many our friends walk into the shiva holding boxes of Mallomars, marzipan bars, babkas, and even truffles from a special chocolatier that my father’s dear friend Al gave us with the instructions, These were chocolates I always loved to give to Ivan. Don’t let anyone else eat them — they’re only for the family!

If I hadn’t been so overwhelmed last week, I would’ve baked that discontinued Entenmann’s cake for the shiva. Once, on Father’s Day, I recreated it for him, something I recounted in my book How to Celebrate Everything. Here is that recipe.

Sour Cream And Chocolate Chip Nut Loaf

134KB ∙ PDF file

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2. Challah with Golden Raisins

Dad loved bakeries for their sweet offerings, of course, but he also had a deep appreciation for good bread — French baguettes, crusty boules, and especially challah. Some of my earliest memories are seeing him walk in the house after a long day of work with a challah tucked under his arm. On most nights the challah was of the plain variety, but on special nights it was one that had been studded with golden raisins. I would immediately eat a slice of the still-slightly-warm bread with a schmear of Breakstones whipped butter, but I think that challah — all bread — was more than just deliciousness for him. He used to talk about special trips to the bakery with his father when he was growing up in the Bronx (I wrote about this once in “Bringing Home the Bread”), and I’m sure the act of providing that challah helped him feel connected to his childhood and my grandfather, who I never knew.

My father had a heart condition which meant that for the last year and half of his life he was forced to significantly limit his salt consumption. Thus began the era of me setting aside my baking insecurities in order to regularly deliver him his homemade salt-free raisin challah. (Good-quality salt-free bread is incredibly hard to find!) I have so many photos like the one above, with a freshly baked challah riding in the backseat of the car, one daughter doing her best to protect it. Here is that recipe. With salt.

Challah With Golden Raisins

108KB ∙ PDF file

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3. An Authentic Jewish Deli Sandwich

My twin brother Phil and sister Lynn both read beautiful eulogies at the funeral. Lynn focused on how present Dad was in our lives, in every sense of the word, and how lucky he felt every day to have found my mom and to have built such a full life with her. Phil talked about Dad’s childhood in the Bronx, his regrets, their lunches together when Phil was young, and also how much my Dad loved an authentic Jewish deli sandwich — Corned Beef, Pastrami, Reubens. Sandwiches which, of course, are so legendarily high in salt that they probably deserve a cardiologists asterisk right next to their menu listing. Towards the end, when things became very hard for Dad, when his days were spent either resting or being shuttled from doctor to doctor, my brother became determined to track down ways Dad could experience joy, however brief, however non-doctor-approved. Here is what Phil wrote in the eulogy:

A few months ago I picked him up from the hospital in the city after yet another procedure, and he was worn down by it all but mostly complaining about his imposed low-salt diet rather than any pain or discomfort. I took the opportunity to double-park the car outside of 2nd Avenue Deli and raced in to pick up some sandwiches, then we indulged sloppily on a couple of corned-beef-on-ryes in the car. There was mustard and meat everywhere, on the seat, on the ceiling, everywhere. I had the sense this would be one of the many lasts we would be engaging in together and I soaked it all in the best that I could. I reminded him of our Long Island lunches together from my childhood, and he nodded in acknowledgement despite understandably being fixated on that overly salty sandwich and maximizing what that sublime moment had to offer.

Thank you for reading.

See you next week,

Jenny