My Grandmother's Seder - Grandparents.com

There’s only room for Mrs. Cohen in Shirley Cohen’s kitchen. The 85-year-old grandmother of nine, who lives in Albany, N.Y., has made the Passover Seder for her family and friends for nearly 40 years. Although she declines help while she’s cooking, she believes in family tradition and a shared family story. Cohen also believes that her children and grandchildren will find their own kitchens and their own recipes.

Her Seder has been a constant spot of happiness, a mooring in the midst of the joys and sorrows of life, the births, and the deaths. But as constant as both the event and the joy she finds in producing it, her Seders change year to year. Traditions are living things, after all, and like anything alive, they evolve. Certain changes make her hesitate. Today’s families are far-flung, everybody works too hard and most families rotate holidays. Shirley Cohen however, is a member of a generation who couldn’t imagine a traveling Seder.

The daughter of Eastern European Jews who immigrated to New York in the early 1900s, the table was a place to explore identity and possibility and the Passover night is even more so. Cohen’s table becomes a feast: a lesson in Jewish history, an ode to family history and a way to associate a taste with each lesson.

Her own best memories are linked to food, and she is eager to make meals that will remain with her children and grandchildren. When she cooks, she says, she wants to add good feeling as much as good flavor.

Paying homage to his wife during his annual Seder speech, her late husband always praised her cooking, naming each of the family’s favorite recipes: fluffy matzo balls, sublime chicken soup, tender brisket, silken lemon meringue pie with matzo meal crust. But through the years even these recipes have not remained sacrosanct. She continues to fine-tune and tweak each one. Her mother’s gefilte fish morphed into tangy, sweet pickled carp, for instance.

“I never enjoyed gefilte fish,” says Cohen, a vibrant woman with short, wavy gray hair and pensive eyes. She recently incorporated an orange onto the Seder plate, which has become a modern way of protesting the fabled comment by a rabbi that a woman belongs on the podium of a synagogue as an orange belongs on a Seder plate. One year, Cohen also read a feminist-focused Haggadah, the Passover story.

“My Seders always had meaning on a male level, but now also on a female level, another positive step towards freedom in Judaism,” says Cohen who thinks change keeps tradition alive, and vital.

This year, however, will see the biggest change of all because Cohen plans to pass the mantle. She will celebrate Passover at her daughter’s house, where she knows she’ll taste a new generation’s creative versions of her family’s favorites.