Now, it was time to watch the cooking egg uninterrupted. Psh-sh, the oil began to boil in the cauldron. The egg dived into the oil. It sank to the bottom and began to dance a little in that transparent oil lake, or rather ocean, because the egg had turned into a jellyfish with a yellow eye. Its colorless body was turning white like the train of a wedding gown, bubbles forming on its surface. And the yellow eye could be seen rising to the surface over and over again.
Mama picked up the kafkir – that’s what we called a spatula in our parts – and, holding the cauldron by the handle, began to splash hot oil over the egg, wave by wave.
Boolk-boolk-boolk. One, two, three… That’s how that sound became the name of our favorite dish. It was accompanied by muted dzing… dzing… dzing, the singing of the cauldron when its sides were hit by the spatula. I’m sorry for those who have never heard this wonderful concert.
And what had become of the jellyfish’s yellow eye? It was being covered by a thin whitish layer that resembled a walleye. The layer, at first thin, become thicker and thicker after each wave of oil. The formerly yellow eye bulged, round and bright white.
That was it. The Boolk-boolk was ready. Mama moistened a piece of matzo with water and put it on each plate under the onions. A Boolk-boolk was planted on top of the onions. It was smooth and snowy white, without a single brown spot, definitely not overdone.
Emma was the first to receive one. As you might have guessed, she had long ago shown up and was sitting at the table. She grabbed the plate, casting a triumphant glace at me: you hoped to eat my serving for no reason.
“All right,” I thought. “Are you putting on airs? You’ll get your just reward…”
“Have you washed your hands?” I asked with the most innocent intonation.
Mama would absolutely not allow us to eat with dirty hands. She looked at Emma sternly.
“I… I rinsed them,” Emma began to whine, drying her hands against her dress.
Mama drew her eyebrows together to demonstrate that she was very upset, and my sister, her lower lip stuck out to demonstrate how hurt she was, rushed to the bathroom. Mama grinned and began to cook another Boolk-boolk. Here it was on my plate, and the third one – on Mama’s.
It was a pity to touch such a perfect thing, perhaps because I had seen how it had emerged. I felt I took part in its creation. But I was also very hungry. I picked up a piece of matzo, pierced the top of the glossy white knoll, and yellow lava immediately covered it.
All we could hear for a few minutes was the tapping of forks and the way Emma, covered with egg yolk, munched. At last, she ate the last piece and asked for a second helping. But the little cauldron had already cooled off, and Mama shook her head:
“Have some lavz.” She uncovered a soup bowl and we saw diamond-shaped, extremely tasty pieces of Eastern sweets: bits of nuts cooked in honey with some flour added. “I was treated to it at work yesterday. You kids eat it.”
She didn’t need to ask us twice.
Emma grabbed a piece of lavz with incomprehensible speed. She also managed to single out the largest diamond. Emma had a sweet tooth, but lavz evoked special feelings in her. And Emma’s feelings, particularly the intense ones, were immediately reflected in her little face: her hazel eyes lit up; there was a happy smile on her lips even though she was still chewing; her cheeks grew pink; her fluffy short hair – it might only have seemed to me – became even fluffier. Why? Who knows? Was it possible that her temperature went up from delight, and the fever that enveloped her stood her hair on end?
As for the lavz, it seemed to me to have special gustatory qualities that affected not only children but also adults. I used to watch venerable guests devour it with pleasure at weddings, and I thought that, perhaps, the person who had invented lavz had created it to give adults their childhood back, if only for a moment.
The lavz Mama had been treated to was very good, soft and fragrant. Mama and I also picked up a diamond each. Mama bit tiny pieces off slowly. She leaned back on the chair, with the tea bowl in her right hand. A cloud of steam rose to her calm gentle face. We hardly ever saw Mama relaxing, doing nothing, simply watching her kids feasting on something delicious.
But Mama couldn’t relax for a very long.
“What would you like for dinner?” she asked looking at the chewing Emma.
“Bakhsh!” Emma blurted out as if she had prepared the answer in advance. Fortunately, our tastes were the same. “In a bag,” I specified. “Can you do it, Mama?” “Today is my day off. Why not?” Mama smiled. “All right, let’s sort through the rice.”
Bakhsh is a type of pilaf, to be precise it’s a relative of pilaf whose taste and color differ from other pilafs. It’s also made with rice and meat, though without carrots, and it’s cooked in a cauldron or… I’ll describe the second way of making it as I remember it.
We put away the dishes quickly. I wiped the table. It was smooth and white, and it was a pleasure to sort rice or any other grain on it. Mama brought the can in which we stored the rice and emptied two full bowls of it onto the table. That was enough for two dinners for three of us.
I don’t know if it’s possible to turn any boring occupation into pleasure, but Mama usually managed to do it. As we sat down to sort the rice, we became three players and a competition began: who could sort more. Not only the amount of rice, but also the amount of debris was taken into account. Certainly, Mama was a much stronger player, but Emma and I were given the advantage of competing as a team.
Each of us separated some rice from the pile with one hand, enough to cover a part of the table in front of us with a thin layer. Mama did it amazingly gently and gracefully.
As soon as the white rice was laid out on the white table, all the dark specks stood out clearly: tiny pebbles, bits of dirt, rotten rice grains – all of those we were supposed to hunt.
Emma and I rushed, but our clumsy fingers didn’t always hit the right spot, we didn’t always manage to remove a pebble, husk or something else without taking along a clean grain of rice. We cast jealous glances at Mama who had already removed a lot of debris. How could her fingers move so fast and always to the right spot?
No matter how fast we tried to do it, no matter how slowly Mama tried to do it, we finished our work at the same time. Yes, we finished it at the same time, if one ignored the results.
Mama checked our work very carefully, without hurting us. With laughter and jokes, she removed quite a few specks from the rice we had sorted out and, from the debris, some clean rice that had got there accidentally. Mama hated to waste good things.
At last, all the rice went into a lagancha, a deep metal bowl, and was covered with water. Then Mama cut meat on a cutting board into such thin slices that the knife didn’t seem to move at all but rather to be cutting off the same slice over and over. However, the big piece of meat was getting smaller and smaller until, at last, the pile of slices was salted and moved to the bowl of rice from which Mama had drained the water, which we hadn’t even noticed her do. It seemed to me that Mama was a magician. How had a can of cilantro gotten into her hands? The cilantro was dried, of course. Mama would buy cilantro along with other herbs and other herbs at the bazaar in summer. She would buy a lot of it so that we would have enough throughout the winter. The herbs were dried on the veranda, filling it with their scent. But even now, when Mama opened the can and put dried cilantro over rice and meat, I could smell a delicate, pleasant, exciting aroma that reminded me of summer.