Wex - Rhapsody in schmaltz: Yiddish food and why we cant stop eating it

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In Memory of

Theo Bikel

Tamara Brooks

Adrienne Cooper

Sybil Goldstein

Albert Winn

Chana Yachness

Sit eis terra levis

I

Researching and writing this book has been one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life.

Youre writing a book on Jewish food?

Yiddish food.

Yiddish, Jewish, same thing. Youre going to talk about bagels, I guess. I nod. You live in Toronto, right? I nod again, my interlocutor snorts. Then how the hell can you write about bagels? There isnt a decent bagel in the whole bloody city. Toronto bagels are dough pucks with a hole in the middle. You want a real bagel, go to Montrealand theres only one place there that still knows what theyre doing. You never even lived in Montreal, youre gonna write about bagels; youre gonna write about my ass. And dont get me started on those horse turds theyve got in New York.

It isnt only bagels. Dishes come and dishes goits the law of the kitchen. Chala and kugel, bagels and lox, gefilte fish, brisket, latkes, and schmaltz; the mighty cholent itself could go the way of pashtet , the now-forgotten medieval meat pie for which our ancestors drooled on Sabbaths and holidaysit wouldnt make any difference. The Yiddish-speaking kitchens principle product isnt chewable and cannot be swallowed. It isnt boiled, broiled, baked, or fried; its far from kosher and cant be legally killed. It is, of course, the nudnik, from the Yiddish to bore, to feel nauseousa flesh-coated windbag stuffed tightly with opinions that tend to repeat.

And repeat they did. I developed a fear of dinner parties and social events. If I didnt lie about what I was writing, I had to have the same conversation six, eight, ten times a night. The dish might change, but the theme was constant, invariable. The nudniks favorite dish was the essence of Jewish food and there was only one way to make it; anyone who did it differently was a fool and a fraud who needed to be exposed for the sake of authentically ethnic nutrition and the speakers peace of mind. And if that meant trying to record their screeds into my cell phone, just to make sure that I got everything right it wasnt their fault that I said no.

It had been decades since some of these people had eaten the dishes that they were so worked up about and few had ever cooked the thingsthats what mothers were forbut none of that mattered: The tradition of talkingand pontificating and complainingabout Jewish food goes all the way back to the Bible. Jewish cuisine, especially its Yiddish branch, is as focused on fight as on flavor. Centuries of rigorous schooling in dietary laws have helped to insure that statutory principles and the arguments they provoke will almost always take precedence over matters of taste. How do you cook swordfish? isnt really a Jewish question. If the swordfish loses its scales as part of its maturation process, am I still allowed to eat it? thats the kind of home ec that we were put on earth to practice.

The answer, of course, depends on who you ask. Orthodox rabbis say no, Conservative and Reform say yes. And since were dealing with Jewish law and tradition, there are a few Orthodox dissenters who agree with the Conservatives in principle, but not on the plate: Sure as they are that swordfish is kosher, theyre still not about to eat it.

When whats forbidden for Abraham is permitted for Isaac, when Jacob agrees with Isaac but behaves like Abe, recipes are the last thing anyone needs. When youre dealing with a cuisine whose signature dish has no fixed ingredients and is based entirely on the idea of eating a hot meal on a day when cooking is forbidden (see Chapter Five), the main course can all too often turn into an abstraction.

This tendency to think in categories instead of ingredients produces a way of looking at food that doesnt depend on the presence of food, a definite advantage once want began to pervade the lives of most East European Yiddish speakers. They were a nation of food critics without enough to eat and their tastessuch as they werewere more often a matter of theory than of practice: They were as happy to eat anything kosher as they were to argue about it. The Yiddish folk song Bulbes, in which no one ever eats anything but the potatoes named in the title, was sung by people who were happy to be able to complain; too many potatoes meant that they were still eating something , that whatever problems they might have, at least they werent in Ireland.

Hungry as the Jews might have been, though, there was still plenty that they wouldnt normally eat. Lifelong engagement with the dietary laws, the endless watch for forbidden ingredients or illicit combinations, gives rise to a way of thinking in which looking at food becomes looking for trouble. Attitudes developed to help safeguard the will of God have persisted as a kind of cultural reflex among less traditionally oriented Jews. Narrowly religious queriesIs turkey permitted? What about gelatin? Can permitted food A be eaten with permitted food B without incurring a metaphysical penalty?are easily secularized into equally hairsplitting concerns with a foods origins, calorie content, or methods of production. Looking for faults in the foodeven when its freemight be the one traditional activity at which contemporary, non-kosher-keeping Jews are more adept than their forebears. They have expanded their range of distaste, allowed their dissatisfaction to embrace foods that God told them not to eat in the first place. Standards of judgment might have changed, but the traditional Talmudically based approach to eating has only, if unconsciously, been refined.

II

Most of what we know about Central and East European Jewish eating before the mid-nineteenth century comes from rabbinic writing about the dietary laws rather than cookbooks or guides to home economy. Until the first Yiddish cookbook was published in 1896, vernacular food writing was a matter of handbooks explaining which of the half dozen preingestion blessings were to be recited over foods that readers were supposed to know how to make. Halachically according to Jewish lawthe finished product was all that mattered. So, for example, cheese takes one blessing, blintzes and cheesecake another, a cheese sandwich takes a third and also requires ritual hand washing. The preliminary blessings determine which of the three closing benedictions has to be recited once you finish eating. Traditional Jewish eating is so complicated that rabbis used to spend much of their time answering basic questions about the dietary laws: I spilled a tablespoon of milk into a pot of chicken soup. What do I do, and can I still eat the soup? The pot is affected, the soup is affected, the spoon is affected if it touched the soup. Relative amounts of milk and chicken soup can play a part in the decision. Theres also a human element: if the rabbi forbids the soup, will the questioner and her family be forced to go hungry? If so, maybe, just maybe, he can find some little-known ruling that will permit him to allow it without angering the Lord or upsetting the neighbors.

There is no respite. As long as you can even think about eating, this is how youre going to do so. Its an obsession that has nothing to do with aesthetics. Every mouthful of every meal is packed with moral and ritual drama, and the show goes on long after the script has been changed: