"Sew the necks up on one side. Mix flour, fried onions and chicken fat and stuff the necks."
This is a line from a notebook in which my grandmother wrote out family recipes for me by hand, a few years before she passed. It contains instructions for dishes that sustained my ancestors in Ukrainian and modern-day Belarusian towns and cities for generations.
Sometimes I browse for meal ideas, like her recipe for chopped liver or vareniky (Ukrainian dumplings) or pickled cabbage and cucumbers, a staple of Jewish shtetl life in eastern Europe.
Other times I stare at her teacher's shorthand, seeking comfort in its neatness, or anxiously search for random things--a Yiddish word, for instance, amid the Russian, or the handwritten table of contents with a squiggly 7--just to make sure they're still there.
I keep returning to her recipe for "stuffed chicken necks," a poor man's delicacy that often has no neck in it whatsoever. It's a craft project: Skin the chicken, make a pouch out of the skin, then stuff it with a mixture of fried onions, chicken fat, flour (or farina) and, if you're lucky, giblets.
As a child, I remember watching both my grandmothers stitching up the bumpy translucent chicken skin with a needle.
The notebook also has modern recipes, from the Soviet era, beset with food shortages. There's "Mimosa salad," an appetizer fashioned out of canned fish and boiled egg, masking with its sprightly name the simplicity of the ingredients. And "holiday potato": Boil a potato in beet water till it's pink.
This is how you make bread last longer, explains my grandmother: Separate rye and wheat loaves and wipe the breadbox with vinegar and water at least once a week. This is how you remove mold from pickled cucumbers, instructs the matriarch who nourished four generations living in a two-bedroom Soviet apartment.
Some recipes don't have ingredient quantities. You make do with what you've got.
I check my phone for the latest news out of Ukraine, where the war shows no signs of abating. The stories are eerily identical to those I grew up hearing, except the offensive is now carried out by Russia, and it's 2022, not 1941.
If my grandmother were still alive, how would I explain Russia's war? That her birth country is being bombed by the country she stayed in after World War II and where I was born.
I have no answers. But as I read between the lines of the little recipe book, I see survival tips and immense reserves of strength.
Masha Rumer came to the U.S. with her family when she was 13. Her book "Parenting With an Accent: How Immigrants Honor Their Heritage, Navigate Setbacks and Chart New Paths for Their Children" was published in November.