Stuffed Cabbage Egg Rolls

Community Voices - an essay by Jess Hooks about their grandmother, growing up in Southern California, and multiculturalism

Happy Sunday, One Potato Community! Today we’re bringing you an essay from our Community Voices - authentic stories relating to families and food, especially highlighting and sharing the diversity in our world - how we can all come together over those shared values, memories, and experiences. Jess Hooks shares their reflections on the connections their grandmother made between cooking Jewish stuffed cabbage and Chinese egg rolls.

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In September and October, Jewish members of our One Potato community celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year; Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement; Sukkot, the harvest festival; and Simchat Torah, the end of the annual Torah reading. Jewish holidays and festivals follow the dates on the Jewish calendar, which is a different length than the Gregorian calendar, the calendar followed by most of the world; that’s why these Jewish holidays, and upcoming Hanukkah, fall on different dates of the Gregorian calendar each year.

During these months of Jewish High Holidays and times of reflection, Jess Hooks shares their grandmother’s way of making connections: showing that we can all be same-same - through food.

Stuffed Cabbage Egg Rolls

By Jess Hooks

My grandmother thought she was Chinese – my Jewish, Romanian, grandmother. She reported that there were Jews in Western China and one of her recent ancestors was descended from them, arriving in Romania near the end of the 19^th century. Apparently, he spoke little Romanian or Yiddish. The clues of her connection started when the stuffed cabbage schluffed off its potato-like shape in favor of something cigar-like. Then the cabbage was replaced with a wonton wrapper and boiled, until that little cigar went into the frying pan - and it no longer resembled its southern European origins.

We are in Southern California, on the borders between LA and Orange County. It is the 1980’s. Most of the kids and families we knew immigrated to the US at some time between the 60s and 80s, leaving no ethnic majority to be found in the community, though Latino and East Asian were the most prevalent. There was a large enough Jewish community to run three synagogues, each with their own Hebrew School, a women’s and men’s club, daily minions, and a competitive market for B’nei Mitzvah’s and weddings. And there were churches of all denominations, temples for more kinds of Buddhism than I knew of at the time, and one mosque. Then there were the girl and boy scouts, cotillions, swimming and baseball teams, and the public schools most of us attended together. We each had our own cultures at home, religious practices in their spaces – but we shared all this, not just on special days at school, but at sports