The Matzah Ball Prophecies

Getty ImagesI come from a line of closeted superstitious cooks, my mother being one. When my sister and I were little, every year around New Year's Eve she'd dust off the pots and pans and show her psychic culinary mettle. She'd pull the recipe card for Grandma Becky's New Year's Eve Dinner, an interfaith meal to reflect our family and holiday guests. My mother would roll up the proverbial sleeves, and make a huge pot of chicken soup, noodle kugel, peas and mashed potatoes. She'd bake a ham and make her famous matzah balls. There was a secret about these matzah balls that only my sister and I knew. And while our mother possessed all the traits of a very normal Jewish mother -- "Do you like the kugel? Why don't you eat more? What's that expression, you don't like my ham? -- we were lost in our thoughts about what had happened previously with the matzah balls.

Molding matzah balls was a coveted job but you had to be on my mother's good side to win it, and so it usually went to my sister. I took the second-tier job -- mixer. My sister, with freshly washed and wet little hands, molded the balls. After, my mother would drop the doughy balls into the salted boiling water. We'd all wait, breathless, for 20 minutes. The ingredients never changed: Matzah meal (ground matzah), baking powder (for fluffiness), stock and seasonings (for taste). And schmaltz (chicken fat). But the outcome was always different. Would they swell? Would they rise? Would they be fluffy? Would they fall apart? Would they sink in the boiling water? And then, what kind of year would we have?

My mother had learned from my grandmother to read the texture and consistency of the matzah balls as one might read tea leaves, the I-Ching, or a Tarot Card. The consistency of the matzah balls determined the success of the year to come for our family. One year the matzah balls never rose. They remained hard little balls that stuck to the spoon. That year my mother was diagnosed with painful fibroid tumors that required surgery. Another year the matzah balls were so light they fell apart in the soup. That year our sump pump in the basement caught on fire and half of the apartment went up in flames. We stood outside shivering in the snow as my mother held onto my arm and fell apart. One year the matzah balls were perfect. They swelled, rose to the surface and held together sturdily. I imagined all the good luck we'd have. That was the year my mother got her real estate license, sold three big houses, and bought us two Lhasa Apso puppies. A perfect matzah ball year.

I reasoned that after a good matzah ball year, there was only one direction to go and that was down. I asked my mother to stop but she didn't. She held on to the only tradition we had. There were more hard matzah ball years, more hard illnesses in the family. There was another fluffy batch followed by another fire. Again, we stood in the street, snow falling. She held onto my arm, and fell apart.

By the time we were teenagers, we stopped talking about the matzah ball prophecies. It was just a string of coincidences, we decided. While my mother dined with friends, we spent New Year's Eve with our boyfriends and their families, eating turkey or pot roast. We had moved into a new apartment. My mother confessed that before she signed the lease for the first apartment, the one we grew up in, while she was with my grandmother measuring one of the rooms, a blackbird crashed into the window, broke its wing, and died. My grandmother had run out, said the place was cursed and not to sign the lease. My mother signed it anyway. After we moved out, there were no more illnesses, or fires, but there were no more matzah balls either.

I have a copy of Grandma Becky's New Year's Eve Dinner recipe card. So does my sister. We come from a long line of superstitious cooks, but we don't want to pass it on to our children. Still, every few years or so, either she or I will make a batch of matzah balls that isn't quite right -- they sink, or disintegrate for no apparent reason. She'll call me and describe the batch or I'll call her. "Give that batch to the birds," we usually decide. And then we read off what we've added to the recipe card: When in doubt, start anew.

Ilie Ruby is the mother of three children from Ethiopia and the author of The Language of Trees, a novel about healing, second chances, and how far we will go to protect the ones we love. Read her blog on Red Room.