POTW: Soup Season: The Syrian-Jewish Edition

Allyson

A black and white photo of an older syrian woman standing in a kitchen in a checkered apron and white tee shirt sipping soup from a large metal spoon. A large soup pot is on the counter in front of her.
The Hidary and Abadi families. Older woman sipping soup at a soup pot in her kitchen. 1999. BJHP_0283z. Brooklyn Jewish History Project, Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History

It's Soup Season! Today's Photo of the Week comes from our Brooklyn Jewish History Project. This is Fritzie Abadi (Hidary) on a Syrian cooking day, testing her recipe. Fritzi (Frieda) was chef Jennifer Abadi's grandmother. Her cookbook-memoir, “A Fistful of Lentils: Syrian-Jewish Recipes from Grandma Fritzie’s Kitchen” (now in its new and revised third edition) is a collection of recipes and stories from her family.

 “I would stand at the doorway of the kitchen and watch the mothers cooking and chatting,” Grandma Fritzie told me. “The sights and aromas of that place have never left me.”

On top of being an excellent cook, Fritzie was also a painter. She had several one woman shows and exhibitions through out the country. She worked in collage, watercolor, etchings, ceramics and stonewear. 

The Brooklyn Jewish History Project was a community scanning and oral history repository, to document the history, lives and experiences of Jewish people in Brooklyn. The collection, largely spanning the twentieth century to the present, is comprised of digitized oral histories, photographs, personal items and documents donated by Brooklyn residents reflecting their life and Jewish identity, as well as related web content. To see more images, ephemera and objects from this project, visit the Brooklyn Jewish History Project collection on our digital collections portal.

This project was made possible through generous funding from the David Berg Foundation.

Interested in seeing more photos from CBH’s collections? Visit our online image gallery, which includes a selection of our images, or the digital collections portal at Brooklyn Public Library. We look forward to inviting you to CBH in the future to research in our entire collection of images, archives, maps, and special collections. In the meantime, please visit our resources page to search our collections. Questions? Our reference staff is available to help with your research! You can reach us at cbhreference@bklynlibrary.org.

 

This blog post reflects the opinions of the author and does not necessarily represent the views of Brooklyn Public Library.

 

Deborah H

This image and Jennifer's memories of her grandmother's cooking are so wonderful. I remember my Great Grandmom Jennie making chicken soup with alphabet pasta when I was young. She was an Ashkenazi Polish-American Jewish woman and loved to make soup for me, and then sit together and watch me eat!
Tue, Feb 7 2023 4:53 pm Permalink

Post a Comment

While BPL encourages an open forum, posts and comments are moderated by library staff. BPL reserves the right, within its sole discretion, not to post and to remove submissions or comments that are unlawful or violate this policy. While comments will not be edited by BPL personnel, a comment may be deleted if it violates our comment policy.

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
CAPTCHA
 eNews Signup

Get the latest updates from BPL and be the first to know about new programs, author talks, exciting events and opportunities to support your local library.

Sign Up