Even though her family lived in a cramped Greenwich Village apartment with a small kitchen and her mother had a demanding full-time job, Vera enjoyed good home-cooked meals. There were recipes handed down by her Romanian and Russian grandparents, and her mother’s dinners of pot roast, chicken, and pork chops. Plus, there were bagels from the Lower East Side and fresh vegetables in summers spent in rural New Jersey. She especially loved sweets – cheesecake with her father, fudge sundaes with her grandmother, and the brownies she and her friends raided from the kitchen of their boarding school. She still loves sweets but gave up eating meat long ago.
Read interview with Vera’s daughter, Poppy.
Archaeology of Taste 