Teaching your children

I remember a funeral that I did where the woman who died was known to have been a horrible cook. One day, before she died, her daughter-in-law brought coq au vin to the woman and her husband. Her husband — now her widower — couldn’t stop eating it. When his wife said, “But you hate coq au vin,” he replied, “I never knew it tasted like this.”

I grew up in a home that was glatt kosher, and I ate what was put on my plate without knowing the quality of the cuisine.

It was rare that we went out unless it was to a glatt kosher deli. There were Ratner’s and Rappaports (both milchig) and on rare occasions we went to Lou G. Siegel or Gluckstern’s for a nice piece of veal or some other fleishig dish.

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Ms. Mandel’s matzah balls.

My mom wasn’t the greatest cook in the world, but she made a bunch of things that were outstanding: French roast, chopped liver, the best latkes in creation. Her Thanksgiving turkey was beyond amazing, as was the mushroom gravy she made with it, and her matzah ball soup, to die for.

Thanksgiving was very much like our seders on Pesach, and my parents made sure that most of our relatives would be at our home for  to celebrate.

I can’t remember a Thanksgiving dinner with fewer than 30 people, and we lived in a four-and-one-half room apartment. (I still haven’t figured out which the half room was.)

At 97, Ms. Mandel cooks for Thanksgiving.

Just like at our seders, on Thanksgiving all the furniture in the living room was either pushed to the side or moved into my parents’ bedroom, and we lined tables up end to end all the way into the den. Each table was not only a different shape and size but also a different height. The trick was not to put a place setting near where the tables came together; placing wine glasses  was even trickier.

Well, our son, Wayne, kept asking my mother to teach him how she made Thanksgiving dinner. So she taught him how to clean out the turkey, and what she used for seasoning, with all four of their hands rubbing the inside and the outer skin of the turkey together. She taught him how to make her gravy, and her famous matzah ball soup — and she did all this as she stood in his kitchen for four and a half hours.

After the meal, my mother sat on the couch with her two youngest great-grandsons and read “Goodnight Moon” to them. (The baby was 2 years old and his brother was 4 1/2 — now they’re 14 and 16 1/2).

Ms. Mandel reads to her youngest great-grandsons.

In my mind, in a visual that will never leave me, this is v’shinantem l’vanecha — the biblical mandate that you should teach it to your children — of the highest order.

The pictures that I’ve included tell it all, but what they don’t say is that it was 2012, and mom was 97 ½ years young.

Cantor/Rabbi Lenny Mandel, who left the wilds of Manhattan almost 50 years ago and lives in West Orange, has been the chazan at Congregation B’nai Israel in Emerson for the past quarter century.