Those of you who have come to pick up orders on the screened porch know the drill. You put your money in the plastic pineapple, make change as required, and leave on the table any items like empty egg cartons that may be re-used. Occasionally I find a surprise out there. This week, it was a plastic bag filled with a fine white substance. No, nobody was trading cocaine for veggies. It was a bag of Marhaba brand Citric Acid (also know as sour salt or lemon salt), with this note on the back: “To keep the memories of our grandmothers alive, Carole.”

I knew exactly what this note referred to. The writer had ordered two bags of sorrel, telling me that she was hoping to re-create her grandmother’s recipe for “schav” a sorrel based sour soup. When I was growing up, my family served schav as a chilled iced drink in a tall glass on hot summer days. I associate it with the long summers I spent at our family’s bungalow colony in the heart of the Catskills borscht belt.

To be honest, it took me some time to develop the taste for schav in part because of its appearance. In the version made with egg, it somewhat resembles a murky swamp – a yellowish liquid with ribbons of what appears to be dark green seaweed swirling through it. However, as I grew older I gained a far greater appreciation for the refreshing jolt a glass of schav provided on a hot afternoon, and saw the beauty in the mix of colors.

I told Carole that back in graduate school I had asked my grandmother to let me watch her make schav and carefully recorded the process, but after a few years I lost the recipe. I tried many different recipes I found on line until I ultimately landed on one which to my mind came closest to the taste of Grandma Sonia’s (below), which I provided to Carole. But I recalled that in place of the lemon juice in that recipe my grandmother used sour salt (citric acid), an item I have had increasing trouble finding in supermarkets as the years have worn on. Hence, Carole’s gift of a bag of sour salt from Kalustian’s, a market in New York City.

With that bag of sour salt and the memory of her schav lives a wealth of other memories of my Grandma Sonia. Last August, I wrote a recollection (“Am I my Grandmother”) of my father’s mother, Grandma Eva — the intellectual, lousy cook and housekeeper, who spent endless hours puttering alone in her garden. My mother’s mother, Grandma Sonia, was her polar opposite, the embodiment of home-making and an excellent cook. As much as I dreaded visiting Grandma Eva, I relished time with Grandma Sonia. (In the pic above, I am flanked at age 13 by Grandma Sonia on the left, Grandma Eva on the right). Grandma Eva thought one should live the life of the mind, expressing her disgust when I quite graduate school to go to law school (dirty commerce). Grandma Sonia, ever the practical one, was in contrast relieved that I might actually make some money. At one point, when I was studying anthropology and my brother Howard was studying geology, she described our endeavors to friends with puzzled disdain in this little rhyme (pardon my mangled Yiddish transliteration, but this is the way I heard it): “Eine ist in steine, die andere ist in beine.” (One is in stones, the other one is in bones).

Virtually all my recollections of Grandma Sonia are food related. One of the earliest, brought to mind whenever I hear the insect choruses of August, was of accompanying her to field near the lake at the bungalow colony, where wild blueberries (she called them “huckyaberries”) grew. She and I went alone, carrying large white enamel cooking pots. It seemed to me we were out there for a couple of hours. I must have been six years old. It was the first time I can remember be conscious of excessive heat. We filled the pots to brimming with the blueberries and dinner that night, as it often did on really hot summer nights, consisted solely of a bowl of blueberries and sour cream.

Born in 18