Missing Ingredient, Gone for Good

YOU have one. Everybody does. The dish that stands out above all others: the most delicious food ever cooked by a beloved person who is no longer here to cook it.

Mine is fried meat kreplach. Nana, my paternal grandmother, who died in 1968, made the most superlative kreplach on the planet. Dipped in applesauce, they were sought after, fought over, and the subject of lengthy family discussions about who ate how many.

When Nana died, my aunt Marcia put some of her mother’s frozen kreplach into her own freezer. I can’t say I was surprised last month to learn they were still in there.

Arthur Schwartz wasn’t surprised, either. The author of six cookbooks, his latest is “Arthur Schwartz’s Jewish Home Cooking: Yiddish Recipes Revisited” (Ten Speed Press). When I called to ask him for a tutorial in kreplach making, he readily agreed, citing numerous examples of “dead people’s food” that he had kept for years in his own refrigerator.

We had one little problem. His idea of kreplach was boiled, filled with shredded pot roast and used in chicken soup. The corners of the dumpling were crimped together to make what he called Jewish tortelloni. My idea of kreplach was triangular, filled with chopped meat and fried.

“Lazy,” he sniffed, when I explained my version over the phone. “Hah!” I replied. “We’ll see about that!”

We met at his Brooklyn home for a kreplach face-off. I told him that Aunt Marcia told Aunt Evelyn, who told me, that Nana mixed the chopped meat with salt, pepper, onion powder and an egg.

Nothing doing, Mr. Schwartz said. He uses only real onions. I watched him cut one — so delicately that I wept for the destruction I have visited on every onion I have ever hacked at — then sauté it until perfectly browned. “Onions don’t taste Jewish until they’re browned,” he said, quite rightly. After adding some shards of garlic to the pan, he browned the meat, sprinkled it with salt and pepper, and turned off the heat.

For the dough, he proposed an egg noodle recipe that was little more than a mound of flour, two eggs and some water, and it took its shape quickly. He wanted to push it through a pasta roller to flatten it into sheets, but I refused. Nana used to roll it out onto an old tablecloth, Evelyn told me, and cut the squares from there.

As if dealing with an irrational child (as if?), he let me roll out the dough on a wooden board. While a tablecloth has its advantages, he said, he didn’t offer one, and the rolling was a lot harder than I had imagined.

The squares I managed to cut were closer to rectangles. Finally, I had a few to work with. I filled and sealed them, though the tips of the triangles seemed awfully thick. “We have a standard now from Italian pasta, so we have to roll it out more,” Mr. Schwartz said. “We didn’t have that then.”

He boiled the kreplach first, to cook the dough, then fried them. We filled a few more with his pot roast filling, and just to experiment he used won ton skins for some others.

The won ton skins were something of a bust, though he only boiled them. One step in, they tasted so Chinese, he knew we were on the wrong track. The kreplach with the pot roast filling tasted much better boiled, clearly meant for soup. When they were fried, the taste of the meat seemed to disappear.

As for my version, the dough was indeed too thick at its points — Nana’s was more uniform — but toward the middle, with that toothsome filling, well, it was mighty tasty. But was it Nana’s?

I’m sorry to say that it was not. Besides the difference in the dough, the chopped meat was a bit too assertive in flavor. Alas. I guess I had hoped that Nana might swoop down to guide my hand, and maybe she did — considering it was my first time, I impressed even myself — but my finished product was decidedly more homage than divine visitation.

Mr. Schwartz tried one. “This is good!” he exclaimed, quite generously, I thought. He acknowledged that his pot roast filling could not withstand the rigors of the frying pan, and perhaps best of all, he beamed as he said, “I love it that you taught me something.” He kept eating. “This means I don’t have to make chicken soup anymore,” he added, appreciatively.

But he could see that I was disappointed, having fallen short of my ideal. So, he told me a story:

There was a man whose wife died, and after a very long time, he remarried. The new wife cooked every night, knocking herself out to make meals as pleasing as his first wife’s, and every night the husband would taste them, shake his head and say, “Not as good.”

One night, the new wife was on the phone, talking to a friend, and the dinner burned. “Who cares,” she thought bleakly. “What does it matter.”

She served the burned food, and her husband was ecstatic. “Finally!” he exulted. “Now it’s as good!”

When I was done laughing, I ate every lumpy corner of fried dough on my plate and thanked my tutor profusely. Yes, I could try again. I could roll the dough longer, reseason the meat. I could make my kreplach better.

But they still wouldn’t be Nana’s. They just couldn’t be.