Mimi Sheraton gives a detailed account of her family's life in Midwood in her memoir/cookbook From My Mother's Kitchen: Recipes and Reminiscences.Sheraton was a recently married housewife and NYU student in 1946 but family life in Midwood would have been little changed in the 1940s.
Miriam Solomon as she was then known, was the daughter of Joseph and Beatrice Solomon. Both of her parents had been raised in homes in Williamsburg in which Yiddish had been spoken. They spoke to each other in Yiddish on those occasions when they did not want Mimi or her brother to know what they were saying. On Sundays, as she was cooking the mid-day meal, Beatrice would sometimes listen to one of the Yiddish language radio programs to hear Jewish religious programming, or the cantor Liebele Waldman or renditions of popular music in Yiddish. You can find the popular crooner Seymour Rexiete singing "Surrey with the Fringe on Top" in Yiddish here.
Joseph Solomon's father Kalman Solomon was a well-respected rabbi who had been born in western Poland. Joseph's mother, who died when he was a small child, was from Germany. Joseph was born in London where the family lived in the basement of a synagogue in Whitechapel. After Joseph's mother death, Kalman remarried and moved his family to Brooklyn. Kalman moved up in the world and out of Williamsburg to a neighborhood near Prospect Park where he led two congregations and was the official mohel at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital. Many a Brooklyn Jewish boy lost his foreskin to Kalman Solomon. Mimi's family was not close to Kalman and his Hungarian third wife but they visited them on major holidays and special occasions.
Beatrice Solomon's family, the Breits, were from Galicia, an economically backward province of the Austro-Hungarian empire, inhabited largely by Poles, Ukrainians and Jews. It was a Hasidic stronghold. Despite the poverty, lack of educational opportunities and restrictions on Jewish social advancement, many of the Jews of the province were upwardly mobile, forming a disproportionate share of province's university graduates, doctors and lawyers. But most Jews lived in small villages and had little education beyond the yeshiva. The Breits lived in Midwood a few blocks away from Mimi's family. It was a large, close-knit extended family. Mrs. Breit had nine children. Most of them lived in or near the neighborhood and those who had moved away came home frequently for visits. Mimi's grandparents seldom came to their ritually unclean house for dinner and then only if a dairy meal was served on paper plates with disposable utensils.
Beatrice was an accomplished cook who loved to entertain. Sheraton writes that her mother prepared food for card parties, ladies luncheons, dinner and supper parties as well as family meals with her thin, dented and warped aluminum pots and a cast iron skillet, no fancy cookware for most New York cooks back then. Beatrice's only cookbook was a baking book that had been distributed as a premium by the Royal Baking Powder Company. Much of her what she cooked was traditional Jewish and Central European foods whose recipes she had learned from her mother, but she also tore recipes from the back of boxes, newspapers and magazines for popular dishes of the time like lobster newburg, shrimp creole, chicken a la king and chow mein. Sheraton writes that these recipes could be frustrating at times; assuming a basic knowledge of American cooking techniques. They often followed a long list of ingredients with the direction "combine as usual." Beatrice served non-Kosher meat cuts like leg of lamb and sirloin steak, as well as kosher cuts like rib, shoulder and skirt steak. She liked buying her fish in Sheepshead Bay fresh off the boat. Her chickens were kosher, preferably from a live poultry mart.
Almost every meal included an appetizer of some sort, even if it was only tinned sardines on bread or the cracklings left from the rendering of chicken fat. Beatrice's cooking provided Mimi Sheraton with an entire cookbook of recipes but she had her limitations as well. Like most American housewives of the time, she overcooked the vegetables, which her husband usually refused to eat even though he was a produce grocer. As was the American custom, she served a salad with most meals but it was usually iceberg lettuce with sliced or quartered tomatoes and Russian dressing or no dressing at all. The salad came out meal after meal even though, as was also the American custom, it was usually left largely uneaten. Unlike Grandma Breit, she did not bake much. She also had a habit of setting her kitchen on fire with her cigarettes that she would sometimes put down on top of a pile of newspapers while she was cooking. The family would have to rescue the canary they kept in the kitchen before calling the fire department.
When Beatrice entertained in the dining room with its heavily carved, fumed-oak furniture, she put out her heavy silver bowls and baskets and the “good' silver flatware that she stored in dark red flannel rolls that were kept in a wine-velvet-lined cabinet. This was also the hiding place for the candy she liked to put out for company in a cut glass bowl. Members of her family had a habit of “dropping by” when they “were in the neighborhood” on a Sunday afternoon. The cabinet was locked but the key was kept in the lock and Beatrice's husband and kids frequently raided the stash. As a child, Mimi did her homework at the kitchen table. Like many girls in the neighborhood, she took piano lessons, but she did not play very well. As a young girl on hot summer nights she piled into her father's black 1928 Buick with a cousin or two for an expedition to nearby Coney Island where she rode the roller coaster, Ferris wheel and merry-go-round, strolled the boardwalk and ate hot dogs from the Nathan's stand, steaming corn on the cob slathered with butter, and cotton candy. Sometimes instead they went down to Sheepshead Bay to watch the boats and eat clams from the outdoor stand at Lundy's, the family's favorite seafood place.
Like most of the city's Eastern European Jews of the time the Solomons leaned left politically. By 1946 Brooklyn was solidly Democrat, although it had been a GOP stronghold a quarter century earlier. Mimi was taught never to cross a picket line. She gathered tin foil wrappings from chewing gum and cigarette packs to make bullets for the Loyalists in Spain. Henry Wallace was a hero in the household, partly because when he was serving as secretary of agriculture he had invited Joseph Solomon to Washington to discuss the books and articles Solomon, a wholesale produce grocer, had written on food distribution. The Jews of Midwood were less inclined to support the Socialists, Communists or American Labor Party than the working class Jews in Brownsville. The Solomon family was scandalized when a neighbor's daughter joined the Communist Party and in many respects were socially conservative. Her mother disapproved not only of Communists but also artists, homosexuals and mixed marriages.
The Solomon's Sundays, Passover traditions and radio show favorites,