“Sew the necks up on one side. Mix flour, fried onions and chicken fat and stuff the necks.”
This is a line from a notebook in which my grandmother wrote out family recipes for me by hand, a few years before she passed. It contains instructions for dishes that sustained my ancestors in Ukrainian and modern-day Belarusian towns and cities for generations.
The notebook has a burgundy velvet cover and a floral embellishment that was glued on by my grandfather. My mother’s parents bought it while browsing a garage sale, one of their hobbies after we arrived in America as refugees fleeing antisemitism and a crumbling Soviet Union. Garage sales gave them an opportunity to practice English with American neighbors and to marvel at the trinkets they’d never seen in the U.S.S.R. or could not afford: a soap sculpture of a lady in a fancy hat for a quarter, a real silver ring for 50 cents (“Can you believe it!?”), a huge painting of a lake for a dollar.
