A rare photograph of the author’s complete family. Photo: Margaret Moline.
It all started with the split pea soup, I know that for certain. Like many of our family legends, the framing details have passed out of memory, leaving only the central nugget of story, endlessly retold. I must have been about ten when it happened, but I can’t be sure. I asked Mom for at least an approximate date, but she countered by asking if I thought it was before or after my Bar Mitzvah.
It had to be around Hanukkah, whatever year it was. And it was probably a Thursday. It was usually towards the end of the week that she became either more adventurous with her cooking or more desperate to use the ingredients she purchased the previous Sunday, depending on your point of view. This is how we ended up with the ungodly meatloaves, bound by ketchup and corn, that still haunt my dreams, and why snow peas suddenly appeared atop everything she cooked after Wednesday.
Ever the doctor, Mom cooked as an exercise in scientific efficiency, laudable in theory and intent but tragic if you had to eat the food every day. Most meals began with a package, usually of instant rice or pilaf, which she would enliven by incorporating a lean protein and whatever vegetables were closest to oblivion.
So you can understand the surprise my brother and I felt when we were beckoned downstairs for dinner to find a pot of split pea soup waiting for us. She had never made split pea soup for us before, and I don’t think either of us had even heard of it until that moment. We didn’t like the sound of split pea soup at all. Mom was offended that we were both sticking our noses up at a perfectly good meal, but I think in her heart she knew no 10-year-old was going to accept it as dinner. We didn’t even try it.
Like all her culinary failures, the split pea soup was covered in plastic and shoved into the fridge to await the return of my father, coming home late from his office in Manhattan. We could always rely on him to scarf down whatever our mother concocted. I can’t remember what I ended up eating that night instead of the soup; most likely it was microwaved hot dogs, the old standby in case of misadventure.
The next day my brother and I inquired after the evening’s menu, still shaken from our close call with the split peas. She said she was making latkes, which drastically changed our mood, because potato pancakes fried in oil are virtually impossible to botch. We retreated upstairs to watch television and await the tell-tale crackling that meant it was time to eat.
But when we descended the stairs, we found only betrayal. There on the countertop were mounds of what might have passed for a latke, if not for the startlingly distinctive hue. They were green. Or olive, to be precise. She had made latkes, from a box, and replaced one or more ingredients with her split pea soup. To this day I’m unsure if she thought she could fool us, the way she might claim that a turkey breast was actually chicken so my brother would eat it.
Whatever the plan was, the jig was immediately up, and hot dogs it was.
I’m fairly certain my father ate them, and if that isn’t proof he loved my mom, I don’t know what is. Now that he’s gone, I find myself the figurative split pea latke-eater, not that Mom attempted anything remotely close to that fiasco ever again. She learned from her mistake, never make split pea soup again, and over the past few years her increasing reliance on Jewish mainstays has vastly improved her culinary reputation. Her matzoh balls, though seldom anything more than a suggestion of a sphere, are especially outstanding.
The latkes were something more, a manifestation of the bizarre dynamic at work in my family, and part of my inheritance from my father was the responsibility of maintaining that balance. I’d give anything to go back and eat them, if it meant being together again. But you can’t unfry a latke, pea or potato. Instead, when I’m called upon to play the peacemaker, and I’m not sure I can do what my father did, I remember the split peas, how they transformed into abominations, and how my father ate them anyway.
The latkes were tasty.