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Like Debbie I used flanken, but basically any cut with short ribs will do, as will high-quality beef stew meat.

When I asked Debbie why her dish tasted so good, she said that she makes it just the way her mother did, with only three ingredients: carrots, sweet potatoes and flanken, the German and Yiddish term for the chuck short ribs cut from the first five ribs, which are leaner and better for braising than plate short ribs.

And somehow, when I find a good one, I’m happy, the way split-pea soup makes me happy, or memories of my mother’s flanken, which I have not sullied by trying to make myself.

I remember her sitting at the table, eating flanken unmolested with the hardcover standing up on its own, forming an angled force field around her while our mother interrogated my “Baby-Sitters Club” book, whose cover featured a boy sitter named Logan.

Overweight and overwrought, Jewish enough to have flanken for dinner and speak a smattering of Yiddish at home, Friedman does civil, not criminal, law, and he's so good at it he makes old women in wheelchairs cry.