It’s like a religious ritual: before each meal at my mother in law’s house, we act out the same scene. We all stand around the table, goggle eyed and groaning at the sight, and Laura worriedly hunches her shoulders and states, “I don’t think there will be enough food.” She’s right: the four different kinds of potato salad, chicken salad, breads and cheeses, stuffed peppers, roasted eggplant, smoked fishes and crisp greens (all of which is merely the first of several courses) might not actually feed a whole army. (I mean, that’s who she’s cooking for, right? No one has ever made this clear.) But close enough. And certainly, it will feed the variable number of people who routinely gather at her table.

As context: I come from a genteel middle class WASP family, where a full meal is composed of a protein, a starch, some veggies and possibly some bread. Dessert if you finish your salad without too much protest (but let’s be honest, WASPs really prefer a helping of self restraint with their coffee). So the overabundance of a Russian Jewish table has taken some adjustment. And it has led me to wonder: is this the whiplash effect of living under communism? And for a people so ardently, nationalistically Jewish, (my brother in law specifies that he is “traditional, not religious”) where on the table is the line between these two cultures? What made a table “Jewish” in Soviet Russia?

Pose these questions of a room full of Ukrainian Jewish émigrés and you’ll prompt a vigorous debate. When I dared to inquire at a family gathering, it took eight rounds and a lot of yelling to finally settle on chicken. Chicken, and the use of chicken fat as a binding agent, is what marked a kitchen as Jewish in Russia. Non Jews used chicken, but not to the same extent. For one thing, chickens were one of the few animals that you could get butchered in a kosher manner. Apparently undercover shochets served Russian Jewish communities for years during the Soviet era. And obviously, chickens are far easier to smuggle in and out of a makeshift slaughterhouse than a dead cow. But frankly, kosher dietary restrictions were far down the list of concerns for your typical cook. And traditional dishes might turn up on holidays (matza on Passover, latkes on Chanuka, etc.), but most Jews simply cooked what they could. Perpetual transience meant that they had no claim to “terroir” as do the French or Italians, whose soil informs their culture and food. Instead, they had ingenuity and a sense of opportunity.

I’ve tried to press Laura into yielding family recipes. But she doesn’t work from lists, and the timing is amorphous and apparently as dependent upon the weather and her mood as it is the quality of ingredients (which is really the least of things to an experienced Russian mother, who could make a tasty meal out of cardboard, animal bits and, of course, the ubiquitous mayonnaise). The fallback recipes are mostly composed of ground or smoked fish/chicken/offal, and root vegetables and/or mushrooms. For variety, they’ll wrap the lot in a dumpling wrapper. It is an earthy, sticky fare that puts one in mind of cold nights in dark forests. In fact, prior to 1917, Jews were not allowed to live in the larger Russian cities, which is why this sturdy peasant food came to typify their diet. Then, once urbanized, most Jews had ready access to the black market, which explained the presence of caviar (treif as it may be) on special occasions. Specialty items began to dot dinner tables, altering the flow of subsistence foods with notes of elegance, the “delicatesses” that became the stuff of American delicatessens.

How does this transfer to the US? This is now a doubly diasporic people, uprooted from Israel, then their adopted eastern European enclaves. In America, they take every opportunity to throw a party. At times, it seems like a compulsion, a mania for staking their claim to abundance, the frantic celebration of today’s gifts. So they pile up the dishes and sidle up to tables heavy with food. Yet, for all of the excesses of the formal meals, none of the leftovers go to waste. Laura’s is the most “sustainable” kitchen I know. Guests leave laden with to-go bags. Try to refuse and her spotty English fails altogether. Somehow, you still leave with a bag full of chicken. All remaining leftovers are repurposed into soup, stew or pickles. The dregs of a carton of buttermilk become homemade cheese. The fridge is an intricate mosaic of foodstuffs, packed with geometric precision and cemented with a Jewish mother’s willpower. It is such a feat of engineering that Isaac, my father in law, will sometimes go without eating for fear that he might not be able to pry anything loose and then replace it without catastrophe. The image is tragicomic: an elderly man oppressed by the weight of his own good fortune, more food than he could ask for, all of it just out of reach.