A Paler Shade of Red: Memoirs of a Radical. W. E. Gutman

a bright scarf partly covering her ruddy cheeks, would run up the back stairs and deliver some key ingredients: baskets of freshly laid eggs, sour cream, several types of cheeses, red currants, boysenberries. My grandmother would candle the eggs and reject questionable ones. The woman would also bring corn meal, pork loins, rolls of Sibiu salami and live chickens. Retiring to the rear terrace, she’d slit the birds’ necks with a deft slash of a small curved knife that she kept in the folds of her multi-layered, ankle-long frock. The blood would collect in a shallow pan and I remember watching, mesmerized and horrified all at once, the desperate thrashings of the now headless birds. Squatting on her heels, her white underwear accentuating the fullness of her pink thighs, the young woman would bare a semi-toothless grin in which I discerned both reassurance and mockery. Her posture, suggestive and vaguely enticing, telegraphed more than I understood at the time. I would soon discover the tantalizing secrets that lay hidden beneath all that finery, with her help, in the maids’ quarters.