Ever since my daughter heard from a friend about Crave restaurant in Jerusalem where they make lamb bacon and use it to create kosher versions of all kinds of very non-kosher sounding dishes she has been clamouring for us to try some.
In general the kids have come across the concept of a full British fry-up breakfast in books and popular culture and it's piqued their curiosity, a style of eating so far removed from our norms. For quite some time now they have been asking to make a kosher version for breakfast, or even better dinner.
I recently found kosher lamb bacon and impressive looking beef sausages from a local butcher who delivers and so tonight was the night, even if I did forget to buy more potatoes.
My daughter and I got to work slicing and dicing, but it was the aroma of the Lamb bacon and beef sausages sizzling in their pans that brought the younger children running in to the kitchen.
"What's that yummy smell? What is it? Is it ready? Can I taste it now?"
Such a simple meal really: baked beans, sunnyside up eggs, grilled tomatoes and mushrooms, and the meat stars of the show, but all together they were quite a spread for an ordinary Thursday night in August, creating a festive party mood.
Previously kvetchy kids cranky at the end of a long summer day of play gathered excitedly round the table, bright eyes devouring the food from afar before it even touched their plates. Something exotic in smell and sight, ratcheting up the curiosity to try something out of the ordinary. The taste didn't disappoint either, as second and third helpings were gobbled up by our keen carnivores.
One the most unhealthy meals I have ever made, but it was fun and different and everyone enjoyed and almost everyone agreed to try almost everything.
So great was my grandparents', especially my Zayde's, aversion to the aroma of lamb that even during the years of rationing during and immediately after the Second World War they initially refused the lamb ration that was their right, much to the shock of the neighbourhood butcher. He was not allowed to substitute beef or chicken for the hated lamb, every family's ration was strictly measured out.
My grandmother would stand outside his shop after picking up her portion, lingering she said like some black market criminal. Except that her objective was perfectly legal, if a tad unusual. She waited to see if anyone looked like they could use a bit extra, a pregnant woman, someone with a sickly child, and then present them with the unwanted package of lamb.
Sometimes another customer would offer to exchange this for chicken. Most people considered lamb far superior to poultry, but not my grandparents.
By the time I was on the scene my Bubbe suffered from arthritis and hammer toes. Walking more than a few steps was agony, the bumpy uneven path and pavements had become almost insurmountable obstacles.
She was too proud to use a wheelchair and for many years would not even use a walking stick. The arm of a family member was her aid to getting from the front door of her home to a waiting car or taxi.
I remember her fingers digging in to my arm and hand as she steadied herself on this trek. Outwardly she held herself straight and dignified, mind over matter, but in her fingers I could feel her fear of falling.
Most of the time the outside world came to her with frequent guests for Shabbat and holiday meals and regular visitors to her famous Sunday afternoon teas with fruit fluden, cinnamon rogelakh and crunchy raisin-cinnamon keikhalekh. If only she'd written down the recipes for me, I can taste and smell them in my mind's sense memory, but years later still haven't managed to reconstruct how to make them.
Bubbe relished her outings beyond her home, but the pain was such that she limited her excursions to doctor's appointments, weddings, bar mitzvas and the occasional special afternoon tea at a friend's house. Most of the time she stayed home and was the queen of her kitchen, cooking and baking up a storm every day.
My mother loved lamb. I never thought to ask her how she developed a taste for her parents' most hated food, but it was a treat she adored.
We would wait for my grandparents to leave together on one of my grandmother's rare but regular days out and then my mother and I would go back inside the house and two minutes later we had all the windows open to avoid stinking out the house while preparing this illicit feast of grilled lamb chops, tomatoes and mushrooms with a pot of baked beans bubbling away on the hob, hash browns in a pan. So good.
Even in my vegetarian years I loved the smell of the grilling lamb, even if ideologically I was opposed to its consumption. It wasn't the recollection of a childhood flavour or the simple pleasure of a delicious smell, rather a pavlovian response that in my mind bound up the aroma of grilling lamb, mushrooms and tomato with these mother-daughter meals enjoying a special something that we two alone in our family shared in the quiet of a big house usually bustling with the wider family and the otherwise ever present chatter of the radio.
That scent meant quiet time together over our unique meal, playing the music we wanted to which didn't usually meet with the approval of the senior generation.
Amazing how much memory can be condensed in to a smell and a taste, Proust was 100% right about the madeleines.
Which coincidentally also take me back to my Mum, she loved them, reminded her of being a student in Paris and reading Proust in the original French. From time to time she'd see imported French madeleines in a local shop and buy them on a nostalgic whim.
We'd share them on a picnic in the park or an outing in the countryside, or every so often with tea at home when she felt like surprising me out of the blue, just because, on a random afternoon when I came home from school.
All this is not to deride the enjoyment we derive from our familiar everyday foods and the comfort of routine. Just that a change is good for the soul too.
