Introduction
An Oral Fixation
I
Researching and writing this book has been one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life.
“You’re writing a book on Jewish food?”
“Yiddish food.”
“Yiddish, Jewish, same thing. You’re 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 isn’t 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 Montreal—and there’s only one place there that still knows what they’re doing. You never even lived in Montreal, you’re gonna write about bagels; you’re gonna write about my ass. And don’t get me started on those horse turds they’ve got in New York.”
It isn’t only bagels. Dishes come and dishes go—it’s 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 holidays—it wouldn’t make any difference. The Yiddish-speaking kitchen’s principle product isn’t chewable and cannot be swallowed. It isn’t boiled, broiled, baked, or fried; it’s far from kosher and can’t be legally killed. It is, of course, the nudnik, from the Yiddish “to bore, to feel nauseous”—a 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 didn’t 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 nudnik’s 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 speaker’s 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 wasn’t 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 things—that’s what mothers were for—but none of that mattered: The tradition of talking—and pontificating and complaining—about 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?” isn’t really a Jewish question. “If the swordfish loses its scales as part of its maturation process, am I still allowed to eat it?”—that’s 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 we’re 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, they’re still not about to eat it.
When what’s forbidden for Abraham is permitted for Isaac, when Jacob agrees with Isaac but behaves like Abe, recipes are the last thing anyone needs. When you’re 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 doesn’t 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 tastes—such as they were—were 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 weren’t in Ireland.
Hungry as the Jews might have been, though, there was still plenty that they wouldn’t 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 queries—Is 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 food’s origins, calorie content, or methods of production. Looking for faults in the food—even when it’s free—might 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 law—the 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. There’s 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 you’re going to do so. It’s 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:
“Glass of milk with your ham hock, Mr. Schwartz?”
“Milk? With ham? Feh!”
Difficult as keeping the dietary laws can be, trying to silence their echoes once you stop observing them isn’t always any easier. As the Hebrew has it, im poga noga: touch, and it touches back. The alacrity with which Chinese food was embraced by the first generation of East European immigrants to stop observing the dietary laws en masse—at least when out of the house—rests to some degree on the fact that Chinese food lay well beyond the pale of culinary respectability, so suspect with regard to hygiene and ingredients, so outré in cooking technique, that most people didn’t want to know what was in it and couldn’t always recognize it when they did. It was the “somewheres east of Suez” of the restaurant world, “where there aren’t no Ten Commandments” and ideas of Jewish and Christian were completely irrelevant. The common “white” concerns with Chinese restaurant hygiene were meaningless to people accustomed to being called dirty Jews. Indeed, Chinese food gave the Jewish consumer an unprecedented chance to pass for white. More than just a cheap and tasty break from kosher food (if that’s all you wanted, you could have eaten almost anything), Chinese food was a rare chance to take a vacation from kosher thinking.
Although the dietary laws no longer play a central role in the day-to-day lives of most American Jews, many of them continue to associate various “Jewish” times of year with “Jewish” food, generally in large amounts. For most American Jews, the age-old schedule of holidays—beginning with the weekly Sabbath—has been whittled down to occasional family dinners featuring dishes that the family considers traditional. Along with funerals and circumcisions, such dinners are often as close as these families get to traditional Jewish activities, and the food served at them comes to represent the entire aggregate of social and religious factors that make Jews so distinct. It’s the other side of their great-grandparents’ Chinese-food coin, a vacation from the unhyphenated homogeneity of American culture.
In a society that claims not to discriminate on grounds of faith, even more than in one that does, food becomes the all-purpose, immediately comprehensible expression of Jewish identity. Invoking Jewish dishes or dietary laws is a way of marking oneself—sometimes as different, sometimes as one of us. In more incongruous contexts, mentioning Jewish food becomes a way of taunting the dominant culture or trying to mask a certain self-consciousness about one’s own difference. Such references are always gratuitous, but never accidental. As with other Yiddish words and phrases that are as out of place in regular English as matzoh balls in eggnog, the names of Jewish foods are a way of telling anyone in on the joke that there’s more to the speaker (or writer or performer) than he or she usually displays in public. My attitude to The Simpsons’ Mr. Burns changed forever when he turned up for dinner at the Simpson house and announced, “Look, I’ve brought noodle kugel.” The very next week I asked for gefilte fish in Delmonico’s.
III
All observant Jews follow the same basic set of rules and observe the same holidays, but there are plenty of regional variations. The Jewish food that we’ll be talking about is the food of Ashkenazi Jews. Ashkenaz is an old Hebrew term for Germany, and Jews of Central and East European descent—roughly 80 percent of the Jewish population—are known as Ashkenazim. Their forebears are thought to have settled along the Rhine, then migrated east to such places as the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and the Baltic states. Despite the considerable territory involved, Ashkenazi culture changed little from country to country; minor variants in dress and religious customs were no more decisive than minor variants in the Yiddish once spoken in all these communities.
Unlike their Sephardic coreligionists whose ancestors were expelled from Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth century, Ashkenazim made a point of resisting acculturation. While Sephardim were (and are) no less religious than Ashkenazim, they were much more comfortable with the outward trappings of the societies in which they lived, and were quick to take on many of the manners and habits of their non-Jewish neighbors in places as diverse as Holland and Thessaloniki, Serbia, and Egypt. Although Ashkenazim were hardly immune to outside influence, Frankfurt is more like Kiev than Amsterdam is like Rabat. Where Sephardic cookery thus varies considerably from country to country, Ashkenazi cuisine is primarily a matter of slight regional variations on a relatively small number of themes.
Heavy, unsubtle and, once it emerged from Eastern Europe, redolent of an elsewhere that nobody missed, the food of Yiddish speakers and their descendants is a cuisine that none dares call haute, the gastronomic complement to the language in which so many generations grumbled about it and its effects. This vernacular food continues to turn up in vernacular form in the mouths of people who have never eaten it, or who don’t always realize the Jewish origin of the strawberry swirl bagel onto which they’re spreading their Marmite. We’ll be looking at the aftertaste of Ashkenazi food as much as at the cuisine itself. But before we can do so, we have to go back to the Bible to see why Jewish food exists and what it really is.
A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY, TRANSLITERATION, AND TRANSLATION
Aside from the idea of kosher, which is explained in the text, the terms that come up most often are:
Treyf—the opposite of kosher, both literally and metaphorically.
Milkhik—dairy. The noun is milkhiks.
Fleyshik—meat. The noun is fleyshiks
Parve—neutral, neither dairy nor meat. All vegetables are parve. The final e is pronounced.
Kashrus—kosherness.
Mishna—the first part of the Talmud, finished around 200 CE. Basically an attempt to work out rules of day-to-day life and behavior on the basis of the commandments in the Bible.
Gemore–the later part of the Talmud, compiled around 500 CE. An attempt to do for the Mishna what the Mishna attempted to do for the Bible. The final e is pronounced.
Halacha is Jewish law. People who act according to its dictates are said to behave halachically.
The Yiddish that appears in this book is transliterated according to the system of YIVO, the Yidisher Visnshaftlikher Institut (Institute for Jewish Research). The main points to note are:
1. Final e is not silent. So, for example, the Yiddish version of kasha would be kashe.
2. The hard “h” sound, as at the beginning of Chanukah, is rendered with kh. The Yiddish version of Chanukah would be khanike.
3. Ey is pronounced as in the English “hey.” A bagel in Yiddish is a beygl.
4. Ay is like the English long y in “my.”
Hebrew and Yiddish words that have come into English, including the names of many of the dishes discussed, are given in their common English versions. So, kreplach, Rosh Hashana, bar mitzvah all look like this. If used in Yiddish, they follow the rules above: kreplekh, rosheshone, bar mitsve.
Biblical quotations follow either the Jewish Publication Society or the Revised Standard versions, often with my own emendations. All other translations not credited in the endnotes are my own.
Copyright © 2016 by Michael Wex
