When food writer and professional baker Ellen Gray is baking pies and frying matzo meal-crusted chicken, the memory of Jessie Mae Kirkwood is often with her. “Jessie’s always there,” Ellen says. “She’s always kind of around.”

When Ellen was little, she lived in the Far Rockaway section of Queens in an intergenerational home with her grandmother, parents, siblings, and Jessie, their housekeeper. “Jessie was my safe haven,” Ellen says. She spent afternoons in the kitchen with Jessie, escaping her brothers’ nagging, seeking advice on dealing with the mean girls at school, and watching her cook. Jessie “was another grandmother to me,” explains Ellen. “She was part of our family for 50 years.”

Jessie was born in 1903 and raised by her grandparents in a religious Baptist family in Nacogdoches, Texas, a town near the state’s border with Louisiana. At 17, she moved to New York where she found work baking pies and cooking for several families including the Vanderbilts. And, in 1949, Jessie came to work fulltime for Ellen’s grandparents Minnie and Bert, living with them, helping cook and care for the family as they operated a shoe store with two locations nearby. 

What evolved in the family kitchen was a blend of traditions. “Jessie was a Black woman from the South originally and she prepared the Seder alongside my mother and my grandmother,” explains Ellen. “You had these very diverse cultures and women from very different age groups... putting this amazing meal on the table.” At Seder, there was capon, homemade gefilte fish, matzo ball soup, and charoset — and everything was made entirely from scratch. 

At times, Jessie’s Southern roots made their mark on family meals. Ellen’s father’s birthday often coincided with Passover and Jessie would prepare matzo meal fried chicken with a hot sauce kick. The dish was a blend of a recipe from Minnie, who used matzo meal for Passover, and one from Jessie, who loved hot sauce. “It was a hybrid from these women: this one woman from the South and this one Jewish woman raised in the Lower East Side of New York.” It brought together the family.

Today, Ellen continues to make the fried chicken recipe at Passover, keeping the memory of two grandmothers alive in her kitchen.