I’m about as religious as a potted palm, but last Friday night was the first night of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Susan and I cooked dinner for six in my mother’s apartment. The challenges inherent in cooking a major meal in someone else’s kitchen (even, or especially, one’s mother’s) are multi-fold; on the one hand, there’s the spatial issue (it’s hard to go from a large kitchen to a galley apartment kitchen, even in the best of cases). On the other hand, there’s the spice/serving platter/cooking utensil issue: my mother has none of these things.
On Thursday night, she called to inform me that she also didn’t have enough plates.
“Fine,” I said, “I’ll bring extra.”
Then she told me that she didn’t have enough silverware for six.
“I bought you flatware for eight last year,” I told her.
“I lost it,” she said.
How do you lose flatware? I didn’t ask how or where, but she lost it, so I had to bring that, too. And wine glasses. She also may have mentioned something about a tablecloth, but I was growing bleary at that point because I had 9 pounds of brisket in the oven and it was already 12:30 am. By the time I packed up the car the next day with the flatware, the plates, the wine glasses, the roasting pan, a soup pot, the soup, the brisket, the kugel, a box of matzo meal, my clothes, Susan’s clothes, two sets of golf clubs (we went golfing the following day; I told you I wasn’t religious), two pairs of golf shoes, the dog, the dog’s bed, the dog’s food, and Rocky, the dog’s stuffed squirrel, my Subaru looked like something out of The Grapes of Wrath, Volume II: The Joads Go to West End Avenue.
Every year, I promise myself that I’m not going to do anything extreme for the holidays with my mother, and every year, I wind up getting sucked into a crazy, guilt-infused vortex that demands I reach back into my genetic memory and recreate the dishes of my — and her — youth. Who cared if my grandmother’s brisket was tough, or if her goulash was oily? Who cared if her potato kugel had the gunmetal gray tinge of Confederate victory? Who cared if her matzo balls weighed as much as a varsity shot-put? Who cared if I had to come home from work and slave, for hours, in my kitchen to reproduce mediocre food for this woman who brought me into the world, and who wraps the entire contents of her fridge in foil like a Christo installation but refuses to boil water in an aluminum sauce pan? Who cared? No one. Because honestly, this is not what holiday cooking is about, is it.
But somewhere, deep inside the recesses of that lobe of my brain that dictates reason rather than hysteria, a switch got flipped: I decided this year to go easy on myself and make my cousin Roberta’s brisket instead of the labor intensive one that involves intramuscular injections of slivered garlic, a slow and purposeful sear in my enormous French roasting pan set over two burners, and a can of Coca Cola. Roberta once told me, as I gorged on it while on a visit to Ann Arbor, that her brisket was easy. Really, really easy.
Good. Easy was what I wanted. I draw the line at quick ‘n simple and the Sandra Lee-isms that it implies, and the dish, which has to marinate overnight, is far from quick. But easy? I’m all over it.
Don’t get me wrong; Roberta, who is actually my cousin Lauren’s mother-in-law, is a crazy-good cook who will give the proper time and attention needed to virtually anything in the kitchen. And while this recipe (which, she tells me, hails from a cousin of hers in Toledo, Ohio), takes the usual brisket cooking time, it only calls for a base of three ingredients: chili sauce, vinegar, and brown sugar. You can doctor it, which I ultimately did, but beyond that, it’s the most user-friendly brisket I’ve ever made. While it warmed in its sauce, I had ample time to throw together Edda Servi Machlin’s Tagliatelle alla Ebraica, better known as noodle kugel.
The results were astonishingly succulent–so much so that I won’t be waiting for another year to make the stuff. Even my mother and her friends ate gobs of it, which is a good thing because it started out life enormous, even by brisket standards.
The leftovers? Sitting in her fridge.
Wrapped in foil.
Roberta’s Brisket
So tender it fell apart after its pre-slice cooking, this brisket is especially delicious when prepared with what Arthur Schwartz calls the “breast deckle”– the fattier cut that is attached to the “first cut,” which I think is too lean. You can definitely go minimalist here and just use the chili sauce, vinegar, and sugar as both marinade and additional sauce; I added an entire head of garlic cloves (unpeeled), wine, a few carrots, and topped the meat with three sliced onions. I swoon just thinking about it.
Serves 6
1 jar Heinz Chili Sauce (so shoot me)
1/2 cup dark brown sugar
1/4 cup white vinegar
1/4 cup cider vinegar
salt and pepper, to taste
1 5-pound brisket, trimmed
1/2 cup dry red wine
1 head garlic, broken into unpeeled cloves
2 carrots, peeled, sliced into thirds
3 onions, peeled, sliced into rounds
1. Whisk together the sauce, sugar, vinegars, and taste for seasoning. Place the brisket in a 2-gallon zip lock bag, add the sauce, zip closed, and toss to coat the meat. Refrigerate for 24 hours.
2. Preheat oven to 325 degrees F. Remove the meat from the marinade and place in a medium-sized roasting pan, and pour the marinade over and around it (if necessary, make more). Drizzle with wine. Strew the garlic and carrots around the meat, and top with the onion slices. Cover the pan tightly with foil, and braise for 45 minutes per pound, or three and three quarter hours. Remove from oven and refrigerate the brisket in its pan until the meat is completely cool.
3. Once cool, slice the meat against the grain, and return to the roasting pan. Cover again with foil and re-heat until the meat is warmed through, spooning the sauce over everything. Serve warm.
Serve the leftovers on toasted challah, or shredded and turned into soup dumplings, better known as kreplach and worth their weight in gold.
