Read more about Kathy Berrie in “A Moroccan Lemon Chicken That Marks the Start of the Fast” and try her recipe for chicken with lemon-saffron sauce.

It’s been more than 50 years since Kathy Berrie left Morocco. But, she still faithfully looks after her family’s recipes from Marrakech and Mogador. “Our mother didn’t have television and we didn’t go to the theater,” Kathy explains. Everything was focused around cooking and the family table, which was always open to guests.

She’s protected dishes like pastela, a casserole layered with ground meat and potatoes, spiced with nutmeg and saffron, and lashed with vinegar, that often graced her mother Fiby’s table for the holidays. And a light tomato salad with briny capers to top hand-rolled couscous, which was a summertime favorite when she was growing up. These recipes, which she shared with us at a cooking session in her home this summer, are resilient, having survived a war and a journey across the Atlantic.

Born in 1936, Kathy was still young when World War II reached its way into Morocco bringing with it a palpable anxiety. “My mother would listen to the news every minute and she’d tell us what was going on,” Kathy recalls. “We were very close to being deported.”

Her father, Meyer, who owned a milling company before the war, was forced to hand over the business to the government. And, flour, which was once used in their home to make bread daily became scarce.

She remembers her hometown changing — and the memory of the first time she saw German soldiers in it has stuck with her. After a Shabbat lunch of dafina (a heavy Sabbath stew), while her parents rested, the family housekeeper would take Kathy to a park. On a Saturday afternoon, when she was four or five, Kathy recalls seeing blond haired and blue eyed men aside motorcycles perched by a hotel next to the park. It wasn’t until she returned home, recounting the scene for her mother that she understood who they were.  

“It was a scary time,” Kathy adds. But, despite pressure from Vichy France and Nazi Germany, King Mohammed V of Morocco refused to allow the deportation of Jews to concentration camps.

When the war ended, “I remember my father took us to the terrace of my house in Marrakesh and we saw the planes coming in,” she says. The family drove the three hours to Casablanca where the troops had landed.

In the 1950s, as Morocco approached the end of French rule, Kathy recalls fears over how the Jewish community would be treated. She set out for North America, choosing to take a boat by herself at 17 for the experience of a sea journey.

The transition came with its challenges though. Struggling to find her place in a new home, she told her mother, she wanted to return to Morocco. “She said ‘don’t come back, because everyone’s leaving,’” Kathy recalls. Two years later, her mother and sister made their way to Canada too, bringing with them the family recipes for pastela, tomato salad, and Moroccan sweets. The family table and kitchen once again came together, with Kathy joining her mother in the kitchen.

Kathy has tended to those recipes and the family’s lemon chicken (which we will share around Yom Kippur) since. When we asked her about the next generation to cook Fiby’s recipes, she explained that her son Scott is “madly in love with that dish.” But, “everytime Scott cooks lemon chicken, he says: ‘it’s not like yours.’”

“There’s a touch,” Kathy adds. Perhaps it’s one that only comes from a life journey like hers.