Gehakte Leber
(Prometheus, Bound)
At 6 a.m., six days a week, the van from Jay Herman, the Food King, approached Malda Steinman’s Brooklyn townhouse for its pickup.
Three covered vats were waiting for the driver on the doorstep, carried there not by Mrs. Steinman, but by her strong house-husband Manny who had developed a bad back.
Resentment flowed through the Steinman house and rested on top of the omnipresent competing food odors. First, there was the delicious smell of onions being swished around in sizzling schmaltz, then the crispy cracklings created by the rendering of the fat—this was less sweet, and the chicken livers simmering in the deep yellow chicken broth, which could smell sweet or bitter. It depended. A giant cauldron of water for the hard-boiled eggs was ever bubbling without any odor at all until the eggs were peeled and chopped. Three professional food processors were pulsing the mixtures, one at a time, for Malda had to keep careful watch.
She went through four aprons a day and wiped her brow a hundred times and dipped her finger into the mixture to taste again and again so that now her young plumpness had become fat.
She lived with fat. She made fat and now she was fat. Manny was unemployed except for his job bringing home the kosher chickens and eggs, the sacks of onions. His dream was to free Malda from her pots and take her on a Viking River Cruise to someplace distant and cold where there were no odors, no drivers passing by to collect the vats and return them sterilized each day at five.
Both of them occasionally thought of the fate of Malda’s chopped liver, its various destinations. Some of it would go to upper Madison Avenue, to the city’s most expensive butcher, who would pack it in quarter-pound and half-pound containers and sell it for shocking prices. Another batch was slated for two large Third Avenue food emporiums, where it was heaped in mounds in the deli counters behind glass.
The Upper West Side, midtown and downtown delis had other suppliers or made their own. Malda Steinman was queen of the Upper East Side chopped liver business—there were no rivals.
Mrs. Steinman’s recipe was approximated from her grandmother Tillie’s cook Rosie, an illiterate woman with a charitable heart and goldene hent, which of course means golden hands. The sweetness of her chopped liver came from the caramelization of the onions, the quality of the birds, their schmaltz and their eggs. It was never equaled by any cook, including Malda Steinman, though she came close.
“Stop now!” Manny would say to Malda many times during the day. Malda knew her quota and was condemned to meet it. The success of the household rested on her. What was she supposed to do, stop and eat a salad?
When Manny brought in the sterilized cauldrons every evening and placed them on the newly scrubbed long wooden table Malda would look at them with hatred.
Her friends and helpers, Selda and Frieda, would be at the door ready to help transfer her liver to the pots and do the cleanup. They were sisters and gossips and their talk both cheered her and gnawed away at her soul.
When Manny lost his job as an office manager, Malda had called her cousin who was in the food business. For years, he had been urging her to “commercialize” her liver, Her recipe had starred at every single holiday dinner—to the point that the guests would often eat little else but her liver. They could not stop themselves. They raved and raved and took containers home. Her cousin sent her and her liver to Jay Herman, the Food King.
Even before they became her paid helpers, Selda and Frieda went to these holiday dinners and were treated as more than friends, family almost. They had been after her recipe for years, but in a friendly way and that is why Malda let them into the house only when she was finished cooking.
The sisters, little birdlike women both, had many guesses about Malda’s chopped liver. Was the secret in the proportions? In a special spice like cumin or even cinnamon? And if so, how much? They pecked away at Malda to find out.
“Have a drink, have some liver on a cracker? Some gribenes? Relax, relax,” Malda would say, pushing back her headscarf with a tired arm.
“You could always stop,” Frieda said one evening when, as usual, the air was pungent with assorted chicken smells.
“Mr. Herman needs me, I’m obliged.’
“You mean obligated.” They both had suspicions about this Mr. Herman.
“Whatever. I owe him for setting me up—paying the rent here, all this” and she spread out a dampish wobbly arm to indicate her kitchen with its large stoves, the most modern of appliances, and long counters of something like marble.
“It is beautiful here, we are privileged to be here,” said Selda, crunching on her gribenes as she cast her sister a look.
And they kept coming every day at five though Malda paid them only a token. When they appeared, Manny melted back inside the house. He only emerged when they left around six. He felt the sisters had some kind of hold on Malda, otherwise why were they there? He could have cleaned up the kitchen himself.
Somehow he had never offered.
Despite his bad back, Manny was an exceptionally strong man. From the time he was a child, he had done labors all around the neighborhood. He was a problem solver and to some, a real hero.
“Stop now!” he said to his wife and he put his big arms around her to where they no longer met at her waist. “We have to escape from this.”
“Oof, my Hercules here. Don’t squeeze so hard…”
In his mind was ever the river cruise with its “iconic landmarks, cultural treasures” and all the delicious tref they would be eating across the table from silver-haired, little-nosed gentiles with their cocktails. Goyim cocktails like martinis and goyim pate on toasts and no sisters coming through the door with their gossip and their wet pleading eyes. No smells in the clean river breezes.
What would they have to say to such people?
Manny was full of stories from the streets which might prove entertaining to such people and Malda could put her feet up and diet a bit.
First he would have to free her from the Food King and then get money, a real job to make a living so that they could live on their own. He would start by frightening off the sisters, but not in such a way that Malda would be offended.
They were such little women, barely coming up to his shoulder. Often, he had thought of crushing them together into a marzipan.
Marzipan!
That was it. He would give the sisters the liver recipe and they would go away and make the gehakte leber for Mr. Herman. No more chickens, no more onions. No more vats. Nothing brown.
Malda now would cook something refined, she would make marzipan or macaroons—pretty colored cookies like those French things from Madison Avenue that Jay Herman sent them for Hanukkah. Malda’s Macaroons or macarons he was not sure of the difference.
He thought of all the pretty colors—peach and pistachio and lavender and lime like Don Johnson’s Florida suits in his favorite TV program, the old Miami Vice. Pale pastel and goyish colors like Palm Beach, not really Miami.
Raspberry, rose petal, orange blossom, salted caramel. They, actually he, had eaten the whole box quickly and now Malda kept her trinkets in there.
He could see her piping out the cookies.
He would carry the big trays to the ovens, grind the almonds, crack the coconuts or whatever, and make the deliveries to elegant stores.
The little birds would be gone for good.
They could get real helpers and there would be lovely colors in his house and sugar smells.
Best of all, Malda did not like sweets. She preferred salty crunchy things, crackers and chips, matzohs, pretzels even—so she would not be tasting away and getting larger.
It was six now, the sisters were leaving, bustling off, still talking their last. He could hardly wait to tell Malda his plan.
Across the East River, the shores of Manhattan waited for them like European strangers just before the River Cruise docks.
Zeus, to punish Prometheus, had him chained to a crag in Hades where, every day, birds ate out his liver, which then grew back so the birds returned. Zeus sent Hercules to shoot the birds that tortured Prometheus and break the chains that bound him.