We were never allowed to call her Bubbe, because that’s what you called old ladies. She was a stone cold fox with three suitors begging for her hand before my cocky grandfather squeaked by; she got her hair done once a week and had a chic chapeau for every occasion. While my grandmother, Ethel Shapiro, was many things—a lady with a glossy manicure, a lady with a magenta astrakhan coat trimmed in faux fur, a lady with a legendary command of her bustling kosher kitchen—a bubbe she was not.

Grandma wasn’t blessed with typical Toronto Jewish granddaughters, either—the kind who flatiron their hair, sport two-carat engagement rings by precisely 27.5 years of age, and affect a vaguely New York accent that’s actually more specific to York Mills Collegiate. By the time Grandma died of cancer in 2000, I knew she still held out hope for my younger sisters, Robyn, a high school teacher, and Jodi, a kinesiology student. But she had long given up on me, then a scruffy writer who dated goyim (with tattoos!), seemed utterly incapable of getting married any time soon and couldn’t so much as fry an egg, never mind help her cook Shabbat or Passover dinner.

“You’re…different,” she’d say to me. Affec­tionately. (I think.)

I can barely hear her voice anymore, and even the rhythms of how she spoke are fading in my memory. But I can still see her clearly, and when I do, she is always in her flowery orange apron in her kitchen, marshalling her battery of pots for one of the countless meals we spent around her dining room table. I always sat in the chair farthest from the kitchen (all the better to avoid helping), and unless she was serving a rare dairy meal, my grandmother always, always made matzo ball soup. The warm, deliciously oily chicken and dill-infused broth with its soft, satisfying dumplings is such a staple that when my goyish friends—i.e., most of them—admit they’ve never had it, they might as well tell me they’ve never eaten bread. Matzo ball soup is something that every good Ashkenazi Jewish girl should know how to make. Matzo meal is cheap, leftover chicken is useful, and the old joke about what a JAP makes for dinner—reservations—was not one that Grandma thought amusing.

"A woman of worth, who can find?” asks the inscription on my mother’s copy of A Treasure for My Daughter: A Handbook for the Jewish Home (1950). “For her price is far above rubies / She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness / Her children rise up and call her blessed, her husband also, and he praiseth her…” I’ve heard it before—at my grandmother’s funeral. Grandma is dead, my mother will get old. Someone has got to make the soup.

Which is how I find myself back at my parents’ house in Richmond Hill—the strange land of lavender walls, spoon collections and framed puzzles of baked goods from which I sprung. My mother is bustling about.

“Wait, did I miss something?” I ask, panicked.

“I put the water into the pot,” she says, “and now I’m boiling it.”

“I can do that,” I say, suddenly confident.

We fill my mom’s well-used stockpot with chicken bits and bones, peeled carrots and parsnips—products of a painfully early morning trip to the Thornhill Sobeys, “the kosher market for all your kosher needs”—as well as a bay leaf, some cracked peppercorns, celery and dill sprigs. The broth simmers, and my mother starts skimming the fat off the top. She doesn’t say, but I know she’s a little bit thrilled I’m here. This is her domain, she is all-knowing, and I—the uninterested, overeducated, undergrateful downtown daughter—am, for once, her faithful supplicant.