Free Around the Shabbat Table by Jayne Cohen

with salt and pepper, bearing in mind that if you started with a salted broth, it will get saltier as it cooks down. Place the lid slightly askew and continue cooking over very low heat for 2 1 ⁄ 2 to 3 hours, or until the meat is fork-tender. Let the flanken rest in the broth for about 15 minutes, then take it out and arrange it on a serving platter. Spoon a little of the broth over the meat to keep it moist. (If you need to reheat the flanken, simmer it in enough broth to cover.)
    STRAIN the soup, discarding or reserving the cooked vegetables according to preference (they will be quite soft; I usually discard all but the carrot and sometimes the parsnip and parsley root). Remove as much fat as possible from the broth by refrigerating it thoroughly until the fat solidifies, then just lifting it off. (You can deal with the soup at your leisure, of course, if you are in a hurry to get the flanken on the table.) Reserve 3 tablespoons of the broth for the greens.
    ABOUT 30 minutes before you are ready to serve the flanken, prepare the greens: bring a large pot of well-salted water to a boil. Add the broccoli rabe or other greens, cover, and cook, stirring occasionally, until tender but not mushy, about 4 minutes. Drain thoroughly.
    IN a large heavy skillet, sauté the garlic in the oil over medium-low heat, stirring, for 1 minute, until pale golden (do not let it brown). Add cooked greens, raise the heat to medium, and sauté for about 3 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the reserved flanken broth, the pepper flakes, if using, and salt to taste, and continue cooking for another 3 minutes, lifting and tossing the greens, to meld the flavors.
    SLICE the flanken across the grain. Serve each guest a portion of broccoli rabe topped with slices of flanken. If desired, ladle a little hot broth over the meat to moisten it. Pass the pickles and coarse salt, and for the tradition-bound, horseradish and mustard.
    My grandmother had flanken.
    I don’t mean she consumed prodigious amounts of it, or that she served up her superb version often, though both are true.
    I refer, instead, to her arms.
    Her dark olive skin was perfectly smooth and taut across her elegant face. But the soft flesh from her gently sloping shoulders to her wide, tired feet hung in rounded folds like an old shower curtain.
    When she left the house, every bit of that loose flesh was constrained: in a heavy pink satin brassiere and matching girdle, strong support hose, and then, beautifully tailored clothes with long or three-quarter-length sleeves.
    But not when she was cooking. At her apartment in the Bronx or at our house, preparing the delicacies that marked our holiday feasts, my tiny grandmother permitted herself to wear a sleeveless housedress with extra-large armholes to accommodate her upper arms.
    One such morning, my brother, my sister, and I sat eating the lumpy but delicious farina she had made, our sleepy eyes hypnotically fixed on the huge pleats of flesh flapping rhythmically, the identical color of the boiled beef she was cutting up.
    â€œFlanken,” my brother whispered. “Look at Grandma’s flanken. She has flanken on her arms.”
    But she got the last laugh.
    Now that my sister and I are in our fifties, we know just how hard it is to keep arms free of flanken.

    COFFEE-SPICED POT ROAST WITH KASHA KREPLACH AND TOASTED GARLIC CHALLAH CRUMBS
    yield: ABOUT 8 SERVINGS
    Growing up in a large, traditional Jewish family, my father never cooked anything until he met my mother. He learned by watching her prepare latkes and lasagne, bistecca alla pizzaiola and brisket in the kitchen of their chartreuse and shocking pink apartment: grist for the endless dinner parties Mom’s cousins remember vividly today, though they took place more than sixty years ago.
    Constitutionally incapable of following a written recipe, my parents expanded their culinary repertoires in different ways. Besides the cookbooks my mother used as departure