When describing a special shabes (Sabbath) meal that his grandfather used to host, Isaak Nibulskiy (interviewed in Zhytomyr, 2008) mentions that his grandmother would serve tsholent (cholent), a meat stew slow-cooked starting on Friday. Because cooking is prohibited on the Sabbath, making cholent is a way to have hot food on Saturday, as the stew would cook overnight, kept warm in the oven. In this clip, Nibulskiy relates his understanding of the origins of the word "cholent". He believes it comes from the consonant Slavic word "chulan", meaning closet or pantry, where the oven could be located in a Jewish home. This folk etymology does not conform to the history of the word, however, which dates back to the 13th century, before the Slavic component of Yiddish was prominent. The commonly accepted etymology of the word is that it can be traced to the "present participle of the Latin verb CALERE (to be warm)," "calentem" (Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, Volume I, p. 400). An alternative etymology holds that the word comes from the French "chaud" (warm) and "lent" (slow).
Nibulskiy grew up in Poninka, in northwestern Ukraine, where a subdialect of Volhynian Yiddish was spoken. His dialect can be heard in the combination of the vowel shift from "oy" to "ey" ("tseneyfgeyn", "azeyne"), more commonly associated with the Northeastern Yiddish (or Lithuanian Yiddish), with the vowel shift from "o" to "u" ("mul") and from "u" to "i" ("fin", "kimen"), more commonly associated with Southeastern Yiddish (or Ukrainian Yiddish). (See, for example, Shaya Mitelman's post on the Mendele listserv describing some features of the dialect.)
Berta Vaisburd was born in 1931 in Mohyliv-Podil's'kyi. Her father was a factory worker, and her mother was a homemaker. This interview clip (collected in 2005) begins with a description of the various foods Berta's mother used to cook for Shabes (the Sabbath) before the war. Berta mentions various types of tsimmes -- a kind of stew, often made with carrots or legumes and eaten on special occasions such as Shabes, which in Berta's family was always prepared sweet, with sugar.
When discussing tsimes nahit -- chickpea tsimmes -- Berta brings up the fact that her family raised geese -- both to sell for profit and to eat at home. Goose fat was an important ingredient in many dishes, such as tsimes nahit. In Berta's family, they would sell (or use) the goose fat separately, and then they would stuff the goose body with corn meal kneaded into dough and sell that separately. Because her mother did not have an outside job, raising, stuffing, and selling the geese was an added source of income for the family.
