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My first experience with gastronomic pairing was matzo ball soup and Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray soda in the sprawling kitchen of my grandparents' Catskill Mountains hotel. While this cacophonous staging area for a 140-seat dining room may not seem conducive to a contemplative tasting experience, every flavour and aroma I experienced during those years is etched into my memory. As in many cultures, food was the emotional linchpin of the "Jewish Alps," and a hunk of sweet-noodle pudding or raisin-crammed rugelach was the currency with which to express love.

The commanding presence of my grandmother, Ida Forman, was synonymous with that legendary Borscht Belt cuisine, for me as well as for three generations of guests at Harry Forman's Manor. In her paprika-smeared chef's apron, straps gathered with an enormous safety pin to accommodate her 4-foot-9, 80-pound frame, Ida ran her kitchen with the panache of a Barnum & Bailey ringmaster. But even while folding dough for blintzes and barking at some hapless waiter to pick up another plate of lox, she could always find a moment to dispatch an extra pile of lukshen - Yiddish for noodles - for my soup or send over a chewy Toll House cookie studded with hunks of chocolate.

In fact, my grandparents were renowned in the Catskills for setting a bountiful table. Ida's opulent spin on Eastern European dishes plumped up by America's abundant agriculture - roast chicken shimmering with paprika gravy, or the cold sorrel-scented potato soup known as shav - kept Forman's Manor packed for almost 40 years.

We were a family of pioneers, I'd always been told, as my grandparents were among the first Jewish immigrants to open a hotel in the Catskills. Arriving in America at the dawn of the 20th century, they were hungry to own land, a privilege that had been denied to Jews in Russia. So around 1920, with a little cash and even less experience, but possessed of a fearsome will to succeed in this new world, they bought a chicken farm 160 kilometres north of New York City's Lower East Side.

A few years later, they snatched a better opportunity: hosting the rush of city dwellers who came to Sullivan County seeking a breath of country air. While other farmers ran kuchalayns - sparse rooms with kitchen privileges - my grandmother knew her way around a boiled brisket and was one of the first to offer three copious feeds a day - dishes like hefty mounds of roughly cut chicken liver studded with globules of schmaltz (rendered chicken fat) and the rosy beet soup that gave the Borscht Belt its name. So even as their guests demanded American-style amenities such as tennis courts and a swimming pool, it was food like Ida's tzimmes - an almost medieval-style sweet beef stew that might include sweet potatoes, prunes, carrots and cinnamon - that provided the sentimental touchstone they craved.

The 1950s was the Borscht Belt's heyday, a time when the immigrants who fled the Russian pogroms as children finally secured a toehold in America's middle class. And it was my grandmother's culinary largesse - the way she blanketed plump chunks of pickled herring with cupfuls of silken cream and crowded soup plates with so many meat-filled kreplach it was hard to find the liquid - that was a symbol of just how far they had come.

To me Ida's hotel kitchen was a thrill ride, a place where silverware thundered from sink to drying bin; where the mixer churned a mountain of strudel dough; and where waiters hoisted trays heavily laden with delicacies like gefilte fish, jelly omelettes or the unexpectedly flavourful boiled meat known as flanken precariously over the cooks' heads. With my privileged status as the owners' granddaughter, I roamed this hectic workplace as self-importantly as if I'd been granted an all-access pass to a Rolling Stones concert.

While the service at Forman's Manor was swift and accommodating, a room full of self-made businessmen - who had scrapped their way to a comfortable clearing in the garment business or the pickle trade or to a rarefied oasis peddling furs - was a demanding crowd. Every rag-trade entrepreneur considered himself a chicken-soup sommelier. Still, my grandparents managed to create an atmosphere that was part extended family table, part boot camp - with a return rate any Four Seasons would envy.

Still, even the most trying guests agreed that my grandmother was the keystone of the hotel's delicate chemistry. With the stamina of an Olympian, she rose at 3 a.m. to stoke the ovens and pack coffee into the industrial-size percolator - along with a few raw eggs to clarify the brew. And by the time I would arrive at breakfast, she was already behind the long metal work counter basting a battalion of chickens for dinner and reminding every perspiring waiter and butterfingered busboy that while they might be esteemed scholars for nine months of the year, right now they'd better focus on the pickled herring.

By the mid-1950s, however, the vicious pace had taken its toll on my grandfather's health and Ida and Harry retired.

On the surface, they accomplished everything they had set out to do: My father's dental practice was flourishing and he was a founding father of the split-level suburbs.

But Ida never could find her place in this new order. The concept of gardening or leafing through a magazine or taking in a movie for pleasure alone seemed quite mad to someone who had run a good-sized business all her life. Ida never understood how to cook for a family of four, only for a dining room of more than a hundred. So perhaps we shouldn't have been surprised when in her later years Ida's mind bobbed back to the time she inspired awe by turning out a thousand plates of food a day. For years after my grandfather died and the grandchildren went off to college, Ida could still be found in front of her stove churning out stuffed chickens, boiling cauldrons of soup and filling blintzes for the ghostly cadres still hungry for a piece of the shtetl.