EATING OUR FEELINGS
“I have felt like an exile in Portland since day one,” says Schroeder. “The Jewish popu- lation is so small many people have never met or hung out with a Jew before me.” Schroeder moved to Portland for a man. (Don’t worry; it worked out: they’re still married and now raising grandkids.) So when she’s in an East Coast deli, what does she order? “Kishka and gravy. From a Jewish per- spective, that’s something that would really take me back.” Kishka is a style of sausage in which meat is mixed with meal (such as buckwheat groats or barley). In the case of Jewish kishka, we’re talking about mat- zah meal mixed with chicken fat. Historically, Sephardic Jews put pine nuts in their kishka, Syri- an Jews added green peppers, and more affluent Jews may have added solid pieces of meat. But, at its core, the kishka that’s been passed down to today is as peasant as a food gets: cooked flour bound with schmaltz, packed into a casing, custom- arily, of beef intestine (though some modern producers use a synthetic). Kishka, says Schroeder, “makes me feel so at home. I feel closer to my mother and father, both of whom were Jewish and [are] long gone. And I feel with my people.” It’s not that Schroeder is lack- ing in home-cooked food. For 25 years, she has run her restaurant around the principle of scratch- made, slow cooking. She came up with the idea, in 1993, work- ing for Weight Watchers as a products and licensing man- ager, “getting people to buy
Making kishka is an intense process, which is why we’re glad many Jewish grocers sell it frozen. Good gravy to smother it in? That just takes a bit of patience.
products they didn’t need,” she recalls. “At my thirteenth hour at my job, I was trying to figure out what I’m gonna do for din- ner. I can get Thai and Mexi- can and Chinese. But if I just wanted ‘mother food’ — slow cooked, things that take hours to prepare, a really good beef stew from scratch, a beef bourguignon or a good soup made from real whole chicken — there was no place.” So she decided to create one. Mother’s Bistro hosts multiple special menus. A monthly MOM menu (Moth- er of the Month) highlights a friend of the restaurant (or their mother), featuring her recipes. As anyone who has ever adapt- ed family recipes knows, this
is often a patience-straining process sometimes requiring that you get someone to de- scribe the size of the peanut butter jar lid they used forty years ago to measure ingredi- ents for their signature dish. From Wednesday to Friday during the day, the restaurant features Bubbie’s Deli Board. Conceived to bring in business on slow days, it allows Mother’s to make deli meats, which take too much time and space to go on the daily menu. The limited quantity makes these humble foods exclusive. But, even as a chef and restaurant owner who goes out of her way to produce slow-cooked, Jewish comfort food, Schroeder finds the pro- duction of kishka a bridge too far.
56 SPRING 2026
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