KADDISHEL
A Life Reborn
was enough fat to render into shmaltz , a particular delicacy made of chicken fat with fried onions. There were two types of oil, the regular quality and a better qual- ity filtered oil favored by the well-to-do. Our family used baimel , a pure, highly-filtered poppyseed oil. We also had sunflower and cot - tonseed oil, but not olive oil, as olives did not grow in our climate. The farmers brought their seeds to my father’s mill to be pressed into oil. Massive machinery pushed the seeds into the system and then crushed and squeezed them. Prime, fresh oil would pour out of the spigot into buckets. The seeds were squeezed under tremen- dous pressure, so after the oil was drawn off, a hard, rocklike rect - angular cake was left. This was called makecha and was valued as cattle feed. In our backyard, we raised about a dozen geese at a time in cag- es in a little shed. Because fat was so prized, something only rich people could afford, we made a special effort to fatten up the geese we raised. We fed them well for four to six weeks. Part of my fa- ther’s mill was a granary where flour — mostly wheat and rye — was ground for the farmers in the area; we also ground buck-wheat into kasha (buckwheat groats). A machine separated the raw wheat kernel from the chaff. Since we owned the granary, we were able to feed the geese a higher quality of grain than many people could afford to eat themselves. Our maid cooked potatoes for the geese and force-fed them, stuffing the potatoes directly into their mouths; they also ate the grain. When it came time to slaughter them, the geese were so heavy from their thick layer of fat that they could hardly walk. Removing the fat and making goose shmaltz was a big project. When the fat was rendered, the crisp skin became the greivenes (cracklings). We stored the fat and greivenes in big ceramic pots where it would last for the whole year. I had a special fondness for greivenes, so my mother would scrape the bottom of the pan, where the greivenes and some fried onions had settled, into a
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