On a book tour/talk/signing last week at Temple Israel in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, I sat at the same table with the remarkable Zelda Rose who, at 95, is still the brisket maker in her family. I ask her for her secret and she shrugs, embarrassed. "It's nothing," she tells me. (That's what a great brisket makers do - down play their mad skills.) "A couple of onions, some garlic powder. I brown it. Browning is important..." So the liquid in her brisket comes from the onions. And the recipe itself originated with her family back in Russia. And this is a woman who is so luminous and so sharp that you just know that it is the perfect combination of brisket and love that has made Ms. Rose the doyenne of briskets for all these years. Just when you think tradition today (do I sound like a curmudgeon?) is going to be Dorito tacos and Pinkberry and maybe the faintest memory of a meatloaf that isn't microwaved, all you have to do is look at this picture of Zelda Rose and smile. Brisket has a great future - I wish the same to Ms. Rose!
