Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South

Mildred Lubritz Covert was born in uptown New Orleans in 1927 and ate a rich mix of eastern European, creole, and African American foods throughout her childhood. She later chronicled this cuisine in food columns in the New Orleans Times-Picayune and the Indianapolis Post and Opinion and in many cookbooks that she coauthored with Sylvia Gerson. Covert and Gerson wrote cookbooks in which, recipe by recipe, they transformed the classic but blatantly treyf dishes of traditional Louisiana cuisine into meals suitable for the observant Jewish household. Thanks to their efforts, kosher creole had arrived in New Orleans.

Mildred Covert’s father, Aaron Lubritz, emigrated from Russia to New Orleans at age sixteen. Trained as a tailor, he worked in the downtown world of Jewish furriers and department store owners with his wife, Sadie Kleinfeldt Lubritz. Because both her parents worked during the day, Mildred and her siblings spent much of their time with her Yiddish-speaking Polish grandmother, Hinde Esther Kleinfeldt. The family attended Beth Israel, an Orthodox synagogue founded in New Orleans in the early 1900s. Although she kept a kosher home, the flavors of New Orleans cuisine found their way into Mrs. Kleinfeldt’s cooking.

The Lubritzes employed Pearl Jones, an African American cook from Hazelhurst, Mississippi, who was “supervised kosher” by Mrs. Kleinfeldt. A teenager when she arrived in New Orleans and was hired by the Lubritzes, Jones worked as a nanny, cook, and housekeeper. Their alliance lasted almost forty years. As African American women like Pearl Jones left the rural South by choice and migrated to New Orleans and other southern cities, they entered domestic service in large numbers. Most found positions as general maids and cooks, although some took more specialized roles as pastry cooks, chambermaids, and seamstresses. Black women typically entered domestic service between the ages of ten and sixteen and worked in white homes for their entire lives.

Pearl Jones and Mrs. Kleinfeldt prepared daily meals that featured tomato gravies, fried plantains, butter beans, squash, eggplant, black-eyed peas, cornbread, biscuits, and fried green tomatoes served on French bread. Fresh vegetables were always available at open-air markets in New Orleans and from the city’s many street vendors. Pearl Jones prepared dishes like red beans and rice in which she substituted corned beef or brisket for ham hock. This classic New Orleans dish was traditionally eaten on “wash day” Mondays when cooks had little time to prepare a complicated meal. Mildred explains, “There was nothing in our religion that said you couldn’t eat red beans and rice on Monday, and that’s what we did.” On the other hand, the Kleinfeldts did not eat quail or dove because they did not consider game “shot out of the sky” kosher.

Traditional Jewish foods were reserved for holidays, when Mrs. Kleinfeldt prepared kreplach, challah, and honey cakes. She made gefilte fish out of trout and redfish that she purchased at the French Market, since the more traditional carp and pike were not available from New Orleans fishmongers. At Passover, there was pain perdu (“lost bread,” or French toast), made with matzoh meal sponge cake instead of French bread. Purim often took place in the Mardi Gras season and was celebrated with costumes and revelry. The Lubritzes enjoyed homemade pralines and hamantaschen at Purim; the latter is a cookie dough pastry made into the shape of Haman’s three-cornered hat and filled with a poppy seed, prune, or fruit filling.

Mrs. Kleinfeldt purchased live holiday chickens from the kosher “chicken-man’s” store near Dryades Street. The ritual of kaparos was conducted on the eve of Yom Kippur. At this time Mildred’s father swung a chicken three times over the children’s head while reciting the Hebrew prayer. This symbolically transferred one’s sins and transgressions to the chicken. On Yom Kippur, the Lubritzes broke their fast with either a light dairy meal or a heavier meat meal, and both options began with ice-cold Coca-Colas. What better way to break your fast in New Orleans, where in September and October the weather at Yom Kippur–time was often hot and humid? The dairy meal included creole cream cheese, Pearl’s cheese grits, pickled herring, and noodle kugel. Meat break-fasts featured Pearl’s fried chicken—the same chickens that had assumed the family’s sins—and a roast brisket served with thinly sliced rye bread. Alongside traditional braided holiday challah was a loaf of French bread. Pearl Jones never served a roast, or any meal for that matter, without French bread.

After Mildred Covert married in 1949, she attempted to prepare red beans and rice for her new husband, Dave. Her mother-in-law, Stella Pincus Covert, did not keep kosher and told her to buy a piece of pickled pork to flavor the dish. When Mildred could not remember pickled, the butcher handed Mildred a small piece of salt pork; she thought, “What kind of meat is this for my husband!” She demanded a larger piece. She was unfamiliar with fatback, having been raised in a kosher home. When the red beans and rice were finished cooking, the dish was so salty that neither Mildred nor her husband could eat it. Instead they ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner that night.

Not long after the salt pork catastrophe, Mildred decided to keep a kosher home for her husband and began to order kosher meat from the Sinai Company in Chicago. Dave Covert’s mother, Stella, was known for her delicious shrimp gumbo, which her son loved. How could Mildred deny her husband his favorite New Orleans dish? She took Stella’s recipe and created a delicious kosher version of her own, substituting Polish beef sausages and chicken for the pork andouille and shrimp in the gumbo. But Mildred did not stop with gumbo. She prepared grillades with kosher veal, stuffed crabs with imitation crab, and her own version of kosher seafood fettuccine for her husband, Dave, and their children, Martin and Susan.

Over the years Mildred Covert created kosher Mardi Gras king cakes, kosher salmon étouffée, kosher cornbread, kosher collard greens, kosher stuffed eggplant, kosher sweet potato latkes, kosher Purim-time pralines, and hundreds of other kosher creole recipes that she published in her cookbooks and food column in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. But there was one food that Mildred and her cookbook partner, Sylvia Gerson, dared not “kosher-ize.” “We didn’t fool with crawfish,” explained Mildred. “We didn’t know anything about them.” Mildred and Sylvia recognized the sacred position of crawfish in Louisiana cuisine.

Through her culinary innovations, Covert introduced the observant Jewish community of New Orleans to a larger world. Her food columns by New Orleans’s Touro Synagogue Sisterhood, Can Do Cookery and Can Do Too Cookery by New Orleans’s Temple Sinai Sisterhood, Cookinanny by Shreveport’s B’nai Zion Sisterhood, and Matzah Ball Gumbo from Baton Rouge’s Liberal Synagogue. In the Can Do Cookery volume from Temple Sinai, recipes made with crabmeat and crawfish far outnumber those made with matzoh meal. The Reform Jews of New Orleans printed regional recipes that expressed both their Jewish affiliation and their deep love for Louisiana and its culinary heritage. In the 1970s Temple Sinai launched a cooking school of creole cooking rather than Jewish cuisine. The most famous Louisiana Jewish cookbooks that were published commercially, rather than by a synagogue, are Mildred Covert and Sylvia Gerson’s trilogy, the Kosher Creole Cookbook, the Kosher Southern-Style Cookbook, and the Kosher Cajun Cookbook. […]

In these cookbooks one sees how French cooking styles, African spices and seasonings, and native produce and seafood, all of which are basic elements of creole and Cajun cuisine, transformed even that most traditional of Jewish foods, the matzoh ball. Jewish women in New Orleans continue even today to make Passover dumplings as they were made during the antebellum period. The creole matzoh ball is made from matzoh crackers—a German tradition—rather than meal. After the crushed crackers are soaked and drained, they are mixed with eggs and chicken fat. The creole influence appears in the seasoning, which includes salt and pepper, green onions, and parsley. Some cooks add ginger and garlic as well. The matzoh balls are either cooked in an Alsatian-style beef-vegetable soup—a “red soup”—or they are sautéed in copious amounts of butter and served as a side dish.

Serving the matzoh balls as a side dish, rather than floating in a soup, “de-ethnicized” the matzoh ball. In the soup bowl the matzoh ball was Jewish, but served on the side it became an American side dish, as innocuous as rice or potatoes. Cathy Samuel Wolf grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in New Orleans, where her family “had no Jewish traditions or experiences.” But she remembers enjoying “Aunt Maud’s matzah balls, swimming in butter, on Wednesday nights when our family ate at my Grandmother Samuel’s, who lived with Aunt Maud.” By serving matzoh balls to their family—even in such a nontraditional fashion—the Samuel women made a statement, albeit discreet, about their family’s New Orleans Jewish ancestry. In a family in which all vestiges of Judaism were absent, the matzoh ball’s survival suggests the power of food and Jewish women’s ability to shape their family’s ethnic identity in the kitchen. […]

Pesach Fried Green Tomatoes

Mildred Lubritz Covert, New Orleans, Louisiana

The inspiration for this recipe came as Covert searched for a new and different Passover side dish. We think she succeeded admirably. “How much more southern can a Jewish hostess get?” she posited. “L’Chaim and Bon Appetite.”

• ½ cup matzoh meal
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• ½ teaspoon cayenne pepper
• ⅛ teaspoon granulated sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 4 to 5 large green tomatoes (about 2 pounds), cored and sliced ½ inch thick, ends discarded
• ½ cup or more vegetable oil for frying

In a pie plate, mix the matzoh meal, salt, cayenne pepper, and sugar.

In another pie plate, with a fork, beat the eggs. One at a time, dip the tomato slices into the beaten eggs, letting the excess drip off, then coat with the matzoh meal, pressing it into the surface. Place the crumbed tomatoes on waxed-paper-lined baking sheets.

In a large heavy skillet (cast iron is ideal), heat half the oil over medium heat. Add a layer of tomatoes and fry, turning once, until browned and crisp, 6 to 8 minutes. Drain on paper towels.

Repeat with the remaining tomato slices, adding additional oil as needed. Serve hot.

Makes 4 to 6 servings.