What's on my needles

Lots of stuff, including 2 mystery projects that just resurfaced.

Here's the first mystery- a sock.  There it was, hanging out in a project bag that turned out to be pretty dopey.  The bag, not the sock.  I have the chart, so I'll make a second one.  I have no idea when I made this, but it was in the last couple of years.

And the second mystery - a shawl.  I totally forgot about this baby.  I have the chart but no written instructions.  However, I'm pretty sure I can figure out what I did. I don't know where I was going with the pattern, but that's the fun part of knitting; I can design whatever strikes me at the moment.

The Elsa Shawl, named for The Mommie.  The Mommie's given name was Elza.  An uncle of hers (Hillel Bacsi - pronounded as bachee - aka Uncle Hillel) called her Esti (her Hebrew name was Esther).  Her aunt (Cili Neni - aunt Celia) called her Estelle.  My father called her Elsie.  In her later years, I would call her Elzele (little Elza), just for the fun of it.  She'd give me "the look" when I did that.

This is all finished, and I'm writing it up, but here's the same shawl in a different colorway.  I'm reknitting it to make sure that my instructions and charts are accurate.

And finally, here's another sock that I'm knitting for Elder DD, she who got smart this year while slogging throught the Sandy mess in Manhattan, and discovered that my woolly socks kept her feet mighty warm.  Yes!  A convert!

I love knitting patterns like this, the kind that wave right and wave left.

So that's keeping me occupied, along with all the quilty projects, a crochet scarf, and general stuff.

Thinking about language - Very long post which no one will read, but I need to write it.

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I am thinking as usual about my parents' families. My mom's mom came here in the '20s, became a citizen and then sent for her 3 kids who were back home in Romania (the Hungarian part of the country.)  My grandfather died of TB when Grandma was pregnant with her youngest (Mom was the middle child).  Much of the family left behind in Transylvania, managed to survive the Holocaust, but only because Righteous Gentiles in their town sheltered them.

My dad's family, on the other hand, was decimated.  His immediate family (all of whom lived in Vienna), siblings and their spouses, and his parents all got out, some very much under the wire.  Uncle Alfred went to Palestine, then came to the US and built a life.  He was very musical and wanted to be a conductor, but the Austrians had a different idea.  At any rate, he got out under barbed wire. 

Tante Grete and Uncle Longy (called Longy because he was tall) applied for visas to the UK.  The Nazis arrested my uncle and were about to deport him to Bergen Belsen, when his visa arrived.  My aunt made it to the railroad station in time, and somehow my uncle was let go, and they went to the UK.  Uncle Longy served in the British air force; he was told to change his name just in case he was ever capture by the Nazis, and so he did.  Fortunately, he came out of the war unharmed.  Tante Lotte, who later married Uncle Alfred, also made it to the UK.

My dad, who was the sole support for his elderly parents (in those days, elderly meant early 60's!) took one look at the Anschluss, and immediately applied for a visa to the US.  My father was a very smart man!  He knew when to get out, and he was very very lucky.

The rest of the family:  a few escaped, some to China and then to Australia, some to Costa Rica, some to Argentina.  The rest, and my dad's family was large, all perished.

OK, so that's the basics on the Mommie and Dad.  Their native languages were Hungarian (The Mommie was the Short Hungarian Lady), and German with a Viennese accent.  My father's folks originally lived in Hungary, but many of them moved to Vienna sometime in the 1800's.

So what does this all have to do with my thinking about language.  Well, I grew up in a multilingual family.  They all spoke English perfectly.  Went to night school, high school, and learned proper English.  No grammatical mistakes, no slang, simply perfect English.  So perfect in fact that kids in school used to ask me where I came from because my English was so good. (I grew up in a city where everyone came from somewhere else, and everyone's parents had accents.)  English was the language spoken at home.  When they didn't want us to know what they were talking about, they spoke in German.  So of course, my sister and I quickly figured that out.  Then they switched to Hungarian.  I managed to figure out important words such as "nagy" , which referred to big (aka me, the older kid) and I could count to ten (which made my mother giggle since my pronunciation was not great).

The truth was that I knew my parents had accents, but so did every one else's parents.  Within my family, we had the German speakers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, so they all sounded a bit different.  It just was the way it was.

My dad passed away a little over 40 years ago, and I totally forgot his accent.  My sister had managed to tape him speaking, but I never heard that tape.  Then, at some point, she found the tape and we all listened to it.  OMG!  OMG doubled!  My father sounded like a German, like a Nazi, like the people who wanted my people dead.  That kind of German!  Whoever knew he sounded like that?  Not me; he was my father with some goofy Viennese expressions.  But did he sound German?  Of course not.  How could he?  The amazing thing was that all the relatives and friends on that side of the family sounded like Germans or Austrians or Swiss.  Did this ever sink into my little brain?  Nah; they just sounded normal. 

But how could my beloved father who got out of Vienna right after the Anschluss, who knew first hand how rotten those Austrian Nazis could be,  how could he have a German accent?

It made me think, and I'm still thinking more than 40 years later.  When I was a kid, I was surrounded by people with German accents, so I just took it for granted.  I knew my Holocaust history very well, but somehow the German accent just never bothered me.  Then I grew up, met people whose folks were native born and had no accents, married one of those folks.  The only time I heard a German accent was either with my family or watching some World War II movie.  Oh, that German accent.  That horrible accent.  The accent of war, of hate, of concentration camps, of slaughter.  If I never heard it again, it would be too soon.  If I were on the subway, and heard a couple of women speaking English with a German accent, I assumed that they were German.  And after hearing that tape, I knew now that my father and his brother and sister, all had German accents.  They sounded exactly like The Enemy.

So maybe those women in the subway were not in fact Nazis?  Maybe the embroidery teacher I had, the one who came from Argentina, the one with the German accent who said she originally came from Switzerland, maybe she wasn't a Nazi either.  Well, I think her parents were, but then again, I had relatives who emigrated to Argentina, and they had German accents.  Or what about the Danish lady who really sounds German (might be all those gutterals?), was she from Germany?  It makes your head spin.

So maybe an accent doesn't tell you anything at all?  I loved my parents' accents; I loved that they came from somewhere else.  I love hearing accents.  One of the things that I most like about going into New York City, is hearing accents, and then trying to figure out where the people are from.  But do the accents really tell you everything? Could there be stories we know nothing about?  I don't know.  But I will say this:  We are all so fortunate to live in a country of immigrants.  And when you live in the New York metro area, you are doubly blessed.  There are so many people from so many different places that they have to get along. 

Hungarian Milk Bread

Tejes Kolacs

A Hungarian family recipe from the 1800's!

Both my grandmas made this sweet bread, so I know that it dates from the late 1800's.  They probably got it from their own mothers.  They served it for Shabbat (the sabbath) and for other holidays during the year (excepting, of course, Passover, with its food restrictions).

When Tante Grete, my dad's sister, came here from the UK (where she and Uncle Longy lived as soon as they could get out of Austria),  she took over the baking from my grandma.  I remember that hers was always a bit dry and over-baked.  Then my mother started making it after Tante Grete could no longer do so.  Mom's bread was good, but she was never comfortable baking bread.  Me, I love baking bread, so I grabbed the recipe from Mommy and took off with it.  She immediately gave up baking it.  

On my mother's side, Zinn Grandma baked it too.  In her later years, she also had to watch her fat and cholesterol intake, so she modified the recipe, too.  I never had her recipe, but I do remember that it was just as tasty as the full-fat one.

 I only make it for Rosh Hashanah and for fast-breaking from Yom Kippur.  I've modified it for the way we eat now.  The original recipe called for lots of butter, whole milk, sour cream, and all those other lovely, cholesterol-laden goodies.   Here is my recipe, adapted for the bread machine, 'cause it kneads better than I ever can.

Note:  this is not totally exact.  I bake it the way the family did, a bit on the free-form side, but you can easily fix it up if you are so inclined.

• 1 large egg, beaten
• 1 heaping TB low-fat sour cream.  (don't use the non-fat one; it's awful)
• 1 scant tsp kosher salt (kosher salt has less sodium than regular table salt and tastes better)
• 1/2 cup water - I put the egg and the sour cream into my measuring cup and then add enough water to make it to 1 cup.
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 3 cups all purpose flour (more or less, depending on humidity, too much liquid, etc, etc)
• 3 TB dark brown sugar.  You can use regular sugar but I like this taste better.
• 3 TB non-fat dry milk.
• 1 tsp sweet butter, cut up into little pieces.
• 1.5 tsp yeast.  I usually use only 1 tsp, but this takes forever to rise, so the extra half gives it a bit more oomph
• 1 tsp butter, melted.
• 6 oz mini chocolate chips 

1. Beat your egg, put it into your measuring cup.  Add the sour cream and enough water to make one cup liquid.
2. Dump into the bread machine.
3. Add the kosher salt, and the vanilla extract.
4.  Measure in 3 cups of all purpose flour.
5. Add the brown sugar, the milk powder and the sweet butter
6.  Make a little indentation in the top and put in your yeast.

• Put your bread machine on the "knead" cycle.  Don't even think of baking this in the machine.  Ever. 
• Watch it as it kneads.  If it's too wet, add little bits of flour until the dough cleans the sides of the machine.  I do this by sprinkling flour onto the soggy dough while it kneads.  You want it just to clear the sides, not too soggy but also not too dry.  As it's kneading, it should become as smooth and soft as a baby's bottom.  That's the egg at work here.  Yeah, egg!
• Let it rise to the top of the pan.  This will take considerably longer than when the machine dings.  All that sweetening gives it a long, long rise.  It's OK.  If you have to run out to do other things, you can always deflate the dough, and let it rise again.
• When it's risen, deflate it and place onto a floured dough board, kitchen counter, whatever you use to roll out either pie crusts or bread.

1. Spray a Bundt pan with cooking spray or grease it with butter.  Make sure you get into all the nooks and crannies; otherwise you'll have to scrub all that out.  Yech.
2. Roll out your dough.  If it resists, let it rest a little bit.  Because you are using all-purpose flour rather than bread flour, the dough will roll out so much easier.  
3. Spread that 1 tsp of melted butter all over it.  Yep, just that little bit of butter makes a big difference.
4. Spread the chocolate chips all over the dough.
5. Roll up tightly, if you can.  I never get it tight enough.
6. Press the ends together so that it looks like a giant doughnut.
7. Place gently into the Bundt pan, cover with a clean kitchen towel, and let rise for 30 min.
8. At the end of the 30 minutes, begin heating the oven to 450 degrees F.
9. After 15 minutes, the oven should be hot enough.
10. Place the pan into the oven, shut the door, and lower the heat to 400 degrees.
11. Bake for approx 30 minutes.  
12. Check to see if the bread is done.  I use the "knock on the loaf to hear that hollow sound" method.
13. Remove bread from pan and onto a wire rack.  Cool off.
14. Enjoy.

You can see from my pics that the dough split.  I always manage to do this, but the taste is fine, and you get to eat any chocolate chips that escape as the bread cools.  MMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmm!