By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO — Nancy, my wife and co-publisher, and I both are absolutely certain that the grandmother of our columnist Bruce Kesler made wonderful mandelbread, and that Bruce has been faithful to her recipe. So we imagine that if Nancy accepts Bruce’s challenge to a mandelbread cook-off, anybody who comes for the great tasting will be doubly treated.
We wouldn’t dream of denigrating, in even the slightest way, Bruce’s bubbe, and we wonder therefore why Bruce would think it necessary that in a contest pitting Nancy’s mandelbread against his bubbe’s that his should be tasted last, as he suggested in his recent column. What would be the point of that? Does Bruce feel that people will give some marginal preference to whatever they tasted–and liked–last? Does he really fear that he needs such an advantage?
We think that in order for the mandelbread contest to be fair, an equal number of judges should taste his grandmother’s recipe first or last in a comparison test with the mandelbread that Nancy learned to bake not long before we were married in 1968.
Also, if we are going to put on this taste extravaganza for friends and readers, we’d like to make it an event sponsored by San Diego Jewish World. We’d like to charge some admission, and we’d like the proceeds of the event to be donated to a charity — in this case to the Louis Rose Society for the Preservation of Jewish History, an organization that keeps all its funds in an advised fund of the Jewish Community Foundation.
To determine how much interest there would be in such an event, I invite readers to email me at sdheritage@cox.net whether you’d be interesting in attending such an event assuming that it will be at a date, time, and place that is convenient for you. If there’s sufficient interest, then Nancy will accept Bruce’s challenge, and San Diegans will be in for a gastronomic treat!
Nancy’s recipe didn’t come from her grandmother, but rather from an older cousin–Lil Zucrow–who had moved back to California after her husband, Dr. Maurice J. Zucrow, retired from the engineering faculty at Purdue University, where the jet propulsion laboratories are named for him.
Nancy was attending UC Santa Barbara when, as a bride to be, she would visit the Zucrows in their nearby Santa Barbara home. Lil, who was a tiny and utterly dynamic woman with a jet-propelled intellect to match her husband’s, had an interesting rule: she’d share her mandelbread recipe with anyone in the family, but once it was shared, that relative was off her list for receiving gift packages of her mandelbread.. Something like the proverb, “Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he can feed himself for life.”
I’m so glad that Nancy decided to spend a day with Lil, who has since passed away, to watch her step-by-step as she made the wonderful mandelbread that everyone in my family so craves. It’s sad to even contemplate a world without this treat.
So, hold on Bruce, we’ll allow readers to decide whether the great mandelbread bake off should be a public event. If enough other bakers would like to enter theirs, we could make the contest even bigger!
*
Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com