First Cut

This year, I’m in charge of the brisket.

This is no small matter.  In our family, briskets are served steaming with a large measure of pride and a pinch of vanity.   

In my house growing up, holidays meant eating in the dining room on the large chairs with rose velvet cushions, and using our fancy china with decorative edges. And despite the fact that my father always bought my mother a gigantic bouquet of flowers on the eve of a holiday, the brisket was the real centerpiece of our dining room table.

My mom is famous for her brisket.  When I was a kid, the sweet smell of simmering meat and onions would settle over our house, days before the holiday even began, shepherding us from our hectic lives into a calmer, transcendent, even spiritual zone in which even my sister and I got along.   At the holiday meal, I filled my dish with traditional holiday foods: sweet potatoes, green beans, some kind of kugel, roasted chicken, and finally, the tender brown slice of saucy meat, its juices running carelessly around my plate, soaking into the other foods. Someone, usually my dad, would take the first bite and announce, “Fantastic! This brisket melts in your mouth!”  

And it did.   The soft pieces of meat would fall off our forks as we lifted them to our mouths. The other foods often benefitted from the succulence of the brisket: if the turkey was dry, the brisket would moisten it up. If the kugel was bland, the meat’s sauce would flavor it. I never understood how my mom did it.  All the other days of the year, she served up much simpler fare: chicken, hamburgers, chicken, spaghetti and meatballs, chicken.  But her brisket was special, reserved for meals in the dining room.  It truly separated this night from all other nights.  I imagined that such a delicious entree was very difficult to make, and required superior culinary skills, which I did not possess. (Did I mention that I got a D in Home Economics  in 7th grade?) Brisket was clearly way out of my league.

For reasons not fully clear to me, my mom handed off the brisket-making to my sister a few years ago.  I don’t know if Amy volunteered or if she was asked, but there was an implicit understanding that she would be the next woman in our family to undertake the job, even though I am two years older.  Her qualifications--being a wife and mother--seemed to make her a better fit for the job.  As a single woman living in a studio apartment, I was still bringing things like salad.

But this year, Amy and her husband flew off to Puerto Rico the weekend before Passover, leaving my parents to babysit for their two boys.  So this year for Passover, the brisket-making fell to me. For the first time, I felt ready to tackle it.

Of course, I had a lot of questions: what type of meat WAS brisket exactly? How much should I buy? What goes into the sauce? How do I get that amazing smell to engulf my entire house? Does this mean I am a grown-up?

The women in my life all gave advice--solicited and not--about the one special ingredient that must go into a good brisket.  Rachel’s mom uses Coca-Cola;  Amy, Heinz chili sauce; and Maggie, grape jelly.  I decided to go with my mom’s tried and true recipe. 

She explained that the important thing is that I buy “first cut” meat.  She must’ve repeated it ten times because as I was listening to her, I doodled “first cut” and underlined it four times on a yellow post-it, lest I forget this most critical directive. I went to the kosher butcher, paid almost $100 for a piece of meat I was sure I would ruin, and lugged home my “first cut” slab of cow.

Finally, the day came to combine ketchup and Italian dressing and apricot preserves and onions on a hunk of meat and whip up the special holiday feeling that would transform my hectic house into a cozy home.  Though I hate to admit it, I asked my mom to come and help.  I figured if she was there for my birth, bat mitzvah, and wedding, she should be here for this rite of passage.

She was running late so she called from her cell phone on her way to my house to get me started.

“Take the meat out of the refrigerator” (thanks) “and season it with pepper, paprika and garlic powder on both sides.  Then cook it for 30 minutes on 450 degrees, turn it over, and then cook it another 30 minutes.  I should be there by the time you are taking it out.” 

OK, easy enough, though six and half pounds felt heavier than I’d thought as I flipped it in the tin tray.  Emmet was 7 and half pounds when he was born, but much cuter.  

She arrived just as I was taking it out of the oven. 

“OK, good, so now cut your onions into thin slices.  Do you have any diet Coke for me?”

I pointed her towards her soda, while I began slicing onions (and just a small sliver of my left middle fingernail.  My special ingredient?)  We could hear Emmet waking up from his nap.  My mom rushed upstairs to see him.   

She yelled down the stairs, “Okay, reduce the heat to 325 and start making the sauce” and she rattled off exact measurements to the ounce of each of the ingredients.  How did she remember that you needed exactly 18 ounces of preserves? 10 ounces of ketchup?  Is this the same woman who sometimes forgets the story she is telling in the midst of telling it? It was perplexing, but very impressive.  In a few minutes, the sauce was poured over the meat, and the onions were placed carefully in the pan.  My brisket was finally in the oven to be checked on for moistness in three hours.  

For those hours while my brisket baked, my mother and my son played peekaboo and puzzles on my family room floor, my dad played ping pong in the basement with my husband, and I sat in the kitchen and breathed in the sweet smell of family.