Meyer Rosen cooked two meals in his lifetime: Scrambled eggs and corned beef with barbeque sauce served with cabbage and noodles. “That was it,” says his grandson Michael Hurwitz, who is the director of New York City’s network of greenmarkets. The corned beef and noodles were always served on Rosh Hashanah when Michael was growing up in Pittsburgh’s heavily Jewish neighborhood Squirrel Hill. No one in the family is quite certain where grandpa Meyer picked up the Irish-leaning recipe, but it was his signature. 

Outside of the kitchen, he was known as the owner of Rosen Drugs, a small chain of pharmacies and soda fountains in Pittsburgh, one of which was still open when Michael was little. “I would go there and sit at the counter and I’d go to the hairdresser with my grandmother,” Michael says. When he was seven, his grandparents moved out of their home to a new place around the corner and Michael and his family moved into the house where his mother was raised. 

Here, she kept up the corned beef and cabbage tradition, serving the dish at holiday meals and for Shabbat dinner to the greater family. “All my cousins — and I have tons of cousins — would ask my mom whenever they were going to [be] over, ‘could you make this for us?’” Michael says. And, as grandpa Meyer grew older he’d do the same, telling his daughter Cathy, who he called Taffy: “Taf, I want the corned beef. I want the corned beef.” 

Over the years, as Michael moved to New York, and his sister and parents relocated to Florida, the recipe traveled with them. Unable to gather together for many of the Jewish holidays, the barbecued corned beef, and the cabbage and noodles became a post-Thanksgiving Shabbat tradition, often served with a broccoli slaw and his sister’s homemade challah. “Our Thanksgiving is lovely and wonderful and delicious, but nothing out of the ordinary,” Michael says. “But every Friday night, this is also our Thanksgiving tradition regardless of where we are.”  

This year, they will be in Florida at a socially distant Thanksgiving meal and Shabbat dinner in his sister’s backyard, with each family at their own table. “We are a family that celebrates with food and grieves with food and talks about food and is constantly planning about food,” Michael says. “When we are together, we like to make sure those traditions are maintained.”