It lasts indefinitely.
At Little Poland, with memories of my grandmother's stuffed cabbage
My father’s mother, my grandmother Esther, was not the best cook. But it wasn’t really her fault. I think she was burned by circumstance, in more ways than one. First, she was married to Nathan, a towering man prone to explosiveness, and was hemmed in by his low-salt diet, required because of a condition my grandmother called his “high pressure.”
Also, Esther’s parents came from Russia, not Persia like my maternal grandparents Bibi and Baba. I grew up on the one hand, eating aromatic pots of rice glowing with saffron, bowls of fragrant ghormeh sabzi, bold eggplant bademjan, and pots of khoresht swimming with fresh herbs and preserved lemon at my Bibi’s warm Kew Gardens apartment, and on the other, visiting Grandma in the big house on Avenue M in Flatbush, which was always cold and drafty, to dine on boiled chicken, tongue, stuffed cabbage and kasha. This comparison didn't really set her up for success.
Look, nothing could compare to Bibi’s cooking, so Esther was handicapped in that regard. The story goes that when my father first came to Bibi’s house for dinner, when everyone was seated around the dining room table, impossibly crowded with a feast Bibi prepared to welcome her son-in-law to be, the first words from his mouth were: “Where is the ketchup?” Bibi nearly fell off her chair. “Ketchup? Leslie, you will not be needing ketchup here,” she smiled as she scolded him. “Eat.”
My grandmother Esther was born on Christmas, 1915, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She lived in a small apartment on Havemeyer Street with her brother Manny, her sister Sonya, and her parents, who had immigrated from Shepetivka, Russia.
When she was 15, she was at the movies, “the pictures” as she called them, with Manny and her cousin Essie. As the movie began, she was overcome with a feeling of dread, a terror knotted inside her, and she could not shake it. She returned home to learn her father had dropped dead from a heart attack.
Without her father, there was no money. She would have to go to work during the day and attend high school at night. She and Sonya found work selling coal for home heating. Sonya made sales calls, but Esther’s was an outdoor job; she was responsible for directing truckers. How I wish I’d asked her more about this part of her life.
Working all day, she attended Seward Park High School at night. She was the first female student to graduate from its night program. When we were kids she went back to school, finally earning her degree at Brooklyn College.
While she was in working in coal sales, her boss put a sign in the window. He had a car he wanted to sell. A man came to ask about the car. His name was Nathan Strong. He liked the car, but he liked Esther too. I can’t really blame him; Esther was beautiful. She had long red hair, which she always twisted into a sensible bun, and bright blue eyes; but she was no shrinking violet. She was a driven, strong-willed, deeply-motivated, no-nonsense woman. She gave it to you straight; the thin-skinned did not fare well. But Nathan was undeterred. He did not stop coming around until she agreed to a date.
She eventually married Nathan, and while I would say the marriage was not a happy one, in fact, quite the opposite, they went on to have four children together: Sheila in 1938, Leslie, my father, in 1942, Franklin in 1948, and finally Jimmy in 1953.
With Nathan, who was a chemist, she started Red Cross Exterminators and thrived on pest control plans that promised to “prevent vermin in the first place.” The business was very successful; Esther grew it and supported Nathan while he attended medical school. My grandmother continued to work her entire life; even with the kids, first teaching English at a local elementary school, and then at night at Kingsborough College, running ESL classes for immigrants from Russia.
Clearly she was busy, but she still managed the children, kept the house, and cooked the meals, old recipes her mother taught her, the stalwart staples of Eastern European Jews: chicken soup with kreplach, soft pleated dumplings stuffed with meat; boiled or roasted chicken, neither with any discernible seasoning; and sweet and sour tongue, a dish of cow tongues braised in onions and tomatoes, dotted with plump raisins, that my father loved, but which freaked me out completely. The tongues looked like, well, tongues. Laying limply in the bowl, I could imagine them swishing around in the cow’s mouths. I could not eat them.
But I did love her stuffed cabbage, oblong orbs of ground beef tightly swaddled in cabbage leaves, simmered in her signature tangy sweet and sour tomato sauce. When the table was set with the tongues and the rice that tasted like styrofoam pellets, at least I knew I could have the stuffed cabbage.
She also made fabulous blintzes stuffed with farmer cheese, but her rugelach were legendary: rolled with raisins, jam, shredded coconut, chocolate, chopped nuts, whatever she had lying around. I could eat them for days. Although she always did remind me to stop lest I get too fat.
As she got older, Esther spent less time cooking food and more time freezing it. When I would visit, she would open the yellowed Frigidaire and reach up on her tippy toes to the freezer compartment, which she had transformed into a frozen tundra, an arctic museum of meals past.
There was not an inch of space between the tubs of stuffed cabbage, the pint containers of rice, gallons of soup, and various other unidentifiable cartons, fogged over by ice and freezer burn. When it was time for dinner, she would extract some item from the Jenga puzzle of frozen foods, shuffle it over to her stove, and heat it up in a dented old pot or in the 75-year-old-oven, which we would have to light each time, singing our arm hairs while igniting the pilot.
When I was very pregnant with Eiji, we went over to her house for dinner. She had reheated some stuffed cabbage. But it didn’t look so great; I felt like it might have been past its prime. Way past.
“Grandma, how long has this been in the freezer,” I asked her.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter how long it’s been in there.”
“No?” I asked, eyebrows raised.
“Not at all, Andrea, it lasts indefinitely.”
“Indefinitely?” I repeated.
“Indefinitely,” she responded.
Okey Dokey.
That night, around 4am, I woke with cramps, what I assumed was a tummy ache, the price I was paying for eating the “indefinitely” aged stuffed cabbage. But no. It was my first child. It was labor. My water had broken. Well, at least it wasn’t the stuffed cabbage. That might have been more painful given there would be no epidural.
I was reminded of her stuffed cabbage a few weeks ago, on a cold sunny Sunday in February. The boyfriend woke up with a craving for pierogies. He started lamenting the loss of Odessa, and the other Polish diners of his college days in the East Village.
“I think Little Poland is still there,” he said. “It’s not as good as Odessa, but it’ll do. Have you been?” he asked.
“Um, no?” I answered.
He shook his head with despair, muttering something like “you call yourself a food writer,” and checked his phone. It was still open.
“Let’s go,” he said.
And we did.
Little Poland is one of those old world Polish coffee shops, like the dearly departed Kiev and Odessa, once the bedrock of the East Village, now shuttered. But Little Poland is still standing; it reopened in April 2021 after a year off due to that virus called COVID.
It remains a neighborhood diner, a place for The New York Post and a cup of coffee that will never be hot enough, a nice spot for a blintz and a bowl of borscht on a rainy gray day, or a plate of pierogies and fat sausages scarfed down at a small hour of the morning after lots of booze and bad decisions.
When we strolled in, it felt like we walked through the wardrobe into Narnia. It’s not changed in the three decades it's been there. The sturdy booths are on one side, the counter with swivel stools on the other, still occupied by every sort of New Yorker, other than, perhaps, the tiny-topped-barrel-jeaned-generation; this food doesn’t really give Tik Tok. (Though they did host a bash for David LaChapelle recently, so what do I know?)
But the locals are all there: gray-haireds in the booths, their canes hooked onto their seats; a couple in their 30s with a newborn, a gathering of friends reviewing the previous nights mischief, a middle-aged man in need of a nose hair trim at the counter. Waiters with heavy accents gliding around the room, cheerfully speaking Polish to one another, serving, clearing, topping off coffees and refilling waters. At the register, a handwritten sign reads “Do NOT Sit Here Please.” Instead of a tip jar, a coffee canister is labeled “Fundraiser for Ukraine.”
The boyfriend ordered for us: two cold Żywiec beers and two kinds of pierogies—the meat, and the sauerkraut and mushroom, both fried. A plate of stuffed cabbage, some potato pancakes, keilbasa, and the bigos, a sort of hash made from sauerkraut, white cabbage, meat and sausage, that he said was essential.
“Enough food?” he asked the waiter. The waiter looked down at his pad, assessing. “I think so, but we can add more later if you like,” he said, smiling. I think he assumed others would be joining us.
We settled in, chatting and sipping cold beer, a fine start to a Sunday breakfast. Fairly soon, the food started coming and coming. Some of it was great – the fried pierogies were delicious, fat and overstuffed, jolly and clumsy, like your kind old uncle from the Midwest.
The borscht was different from what I’d remembered borscht to be. This was not a thick puree, it was a much thinner soup; strips of beet, rough cut slices of carrots, slivered onions, and kidney beans sort of meandered around, floating here and there. It wasn’t hearty, but rather watery, but it was tasty. It needed sour cream? Or maybe that’s just me. Everything could use sour cream.
The potato pancakes were the size of saucers, more floppy than crispy; they tasted colorless, bland, and needed seasoning, but I still ate them happily. I did, however, just love the bigos and the blistered kielbasa, such terrific hearty winter brunch fare, particularly with the cold beer. If I run the marathon again, I’m coming here the night before. This is sustenance, people.
The stuffed cabbage was very good, but folks, theirs was not like Grandma’s. The sauce was a gravy, brown and gray, more salty and savory than sweet and tangy like her sunny tomato sauce version.
“This is good, but Grandma’s was better,” I heard myself say out loud, protectively, feeling the memories of those meals bubble up inside me. The boyfriend reached for my hand from across the table.
When we were finally finished, and quite stuffed—more food was not needed—we waited for the check to be added up (by calculator, using a pad and pencil) and chatted with the couple with the baby at the table next to us. They’d just returned from visiting family in Australia. They came to Little Poland straight from the plane. As the baby babbled in the bassinet, the parents fortified themselves with endless cups of coffee and plates of pierogies, bigos, fried eggs, and kielbasa.
Sitting there, overstuffed in this coffee shop, a design exercise in every use of brown, I felt overcome by memories, my own and somehow everyone else’s, too. It feels like the past lives at Little Poland, it wanders around like a curmudgeonly old regular grumbling about the weather, complaining about the squeegee men, going on about his gout. But that’s also what I loved about it. This is a place that’s full of stories—decades and decades of lives lived, of ordinary days lined up like dominos, one after another, in the unrelenting march of time. It made me think of my beautiful, steely grandmother, and her frozen tundra freezer where everything lasted indefinitely. If only.
Great story and well written!
Beautiful prose, as always.