“It always was a party when we got together,” cookbook author Judy Bart Kancigor says of her family when she was little. Judy grew up in Belle Harbor, a neighborhood just four blocks wide, sandwiched between the bay and the ocean in the Far Rockaways section of New York City. Her grandparents Mama Hinda and Papa Harry lived upstairs in a two story home her grandfather built, and three aunts and one uncle and their families all lived close by. “I like to say I had four mothers,” Judy says referring to her aunts. And her cousins were like siblings. “I had one brother, but lots of siblings,” she adds. 

Judy grew up in a New York City that is nearly lost today. Her grandparents were married in Slonim, a city that today sits in Belarus, in 1905 and came to the United States shortly after. Papa Harry worked in construction building houses. When he couldn’t sell one, his family of seven children would move in. For a time in the 1930’s, he owned a candy store and soda fountain shop selling English-langauge newspapers, even though he couldn’t read them himself.

At home, he and Mama Hinda spoke Yinglish, as Judy calls it, a mix of Yiddish and English, where one wasn’t always sure which language a word came from. When Judy was little, there were trips to the Lower East Side for bolts of fabric aunt Estelle would sew into dresses and meals at Ratner’s, a famed and now shuttered Jewish dairy restaurant. 

When the family gathered, there were always the go-to meals, Judy says. If it was lunchtime, there was deli. If it was Sunday, appetizing or smoked fish and bagels graced the family table. “In those days, in the ‘50s, it wasn’t like now,” Judy explains. Instead of trying out new recipes when one expected company, her aunts, mother, and grandmother, “all had the dish they made when we all got together.” Aunt Irene was known for her sweetbreads and kugel, aunt Estelle was famous for the chocolate chip cookies she sent in tins to family members at summer camp and later in college.

“In those days, in the ‘50s, it wasn’t like now,” Judy explains: “all had the dish they made when we all got together.”

Aunt Sally, who Judy calls the Julia Child of the family in her cookbook Cooking Jewish: 532 Recipes from the Rabinowitz Family, was known for her red, white, and blue cake, among other recipes. Her mother, Lillian laid a beautiful table, often with an elegant vegetable platter.

For a time, if anyone besides her daughter asked for a recipe, Sally would slyly leave out an ingredient so the cook couldn’t copy her work. Judy’s mother Lillian, or Lil, would occasionally sneak into her sister’s kitchen and copy recipes, though she never made them. Later in life, Judy says, Sally softened and shared her recipes with Judy freely. 

In the 1990s, Judy visited her aunt in Florida when she was working on her cookbook, which was initially a personal project that was self-published (it was later picked up by the publisher Workman). Judy would bring up a recipe — even ones Sally hadn’t made in years. She would say, “Let me see…. Nope, this recipe’s no good.” Others, she would give the nod to. Judy adds:  “Without her I would have no cookbook. We wouldn’t be talking to you today.”