After decades in Chabad and other haredi and Orthodox communities, I concluded that logic dictated that God—at least as Jews have usually defined Him—does not exist. But at the same time, I still had a personal belief in that God, something rooted deep inside of me, a belief that transcended logic.

Then I bought a copy of God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, who died last month at the age of 62. When the book arrived I nervously leafed through it, read the first few pages, and placed God is Not Great on a table next to my reading chair, where it sat for years untouched, on the bottom of what became a very large pile. In other words, I chickened out.

So, there I was, a cowardly atheist and a blind believer—a paradox that remained tenuously in place until Hitchens died in December.

In the wake of Hitchens’ death, I read comments from Orthodox Jews rejoicing over the news. One even wrote that Jewish law mandates that Jews should make a “festive meal” to rejoice that Hitchens had suffered and died from the same type of painful death some of them had openly wished for me. I could be a coward no longer. I dug Hitchens’ book out of that pile. I flipped it open to a random chapter and began to read about Hitchens’ view of … pigs.

***
In case you don’t know, pigs aren’t kosher. It is a statement so axiomatic that for most Jews, making it is akin to saying the sky is blue or snow is cold. But why is it that pigs are taboo? Pigs have cloven hoofs, a sign an animal is kosher to eat. But pigs are not ruminant animals and therefore do not chew their cud, which means pigs lack the other mandatory sign designating a kosher animal. And unlike the rabbit or the camel, which also lack one sign—or even shellfish, which is called an “abomination” by the Torah—the pig has become (and most likely always was) the paradigm of trayf. Why?

Midrashic literature composed long after the Torah was written sees the pig as deceptive; its cloven hoofs beckon the unsuspecting Jew and encourage him to eat the pig’s flesh, when in reality the pig is, well, chazzer trayf—an object of disgust and revulsion.

Years ago, just before my leap into ultra-Orthodoxy, I was at a friend’s parents’ house for the first time. We were in the kitchen looking for something to eat. My friend stopped his search to point out which cabinets and drawers had the meat dishes and which had the dairy dishes. I noticed one cabinet and one drawer had been overlooked. “What’s in those?” I asked. “Oh, they’re trayf. We use them when we bring home Chinese food,” he said without a trace of guilt. “You mean like pork fried rice?” I asked, not sure that I really understood him. “No,” he said with distain, “we would never eat pork.” “Shrimp?” I asked, perplexed. “Sure,” he answered. “But never pork. We would never eat pork.”

Archaeological digs in Israel have uncovered ancient biblical-era Israelite settlements where remains of shellfish are plentiful, but pig bones were not found. And even today there are many Jews like my friend’s family who eat shrimp and crab without a trace of guilt but would never eat pork. What could be so bad about pigs?

Anthropologist Marvin Harris believed Judaism’s pork taboo had practical origins. Pigs need lots of water to cool off in. They also need shade and a large amount of farmer-raised grain in order to survive—all things goats, sheep, and cattle don’t require. Pigs, Harris noted, compete with humans for grain and water, which man desperately needs in order to survive and which are scarce resources in much of the Middle East, including Israel. I would add that goats, sheep, and cattle can all be easily milked. Pigs cannot. That means the only way ancient humans could benefit from pigs was to slaughter them, and this made pigs even less cost effective to raise.

Other anthropologists, like the late Mary Douglas, see the pork taboo and other Jewish food taboos as separations between the “normal” and the “abnormal.” The ban on shellfish would be to separate the “normal” fish with fins and scales Israelites knew from the “abnormal” fish without them. The ban on pork would be to separate “normal” farm animals like sheep, goats, and cattle the Israelites were used to from the “abnormal” pig. This would have been an attempt to bring order to what ancient Israelites saw as a disorderly world, and an attempt to effect order on high.

Both Harris and Douglas touched on points that are, I think, reasons behind the taboo, but they don’t explain the venom with which Israelites and later Jews have viewed pigs for millennia. For that, dear readers, you have to turn to, of all people, Hitchens.

In God is not Great, Hitchens notes uneasy similarities between humans and pigs: Porcine DNA and human DNA are very similar, so much so that porcine heart valves can be transplanted into humans; pigs are noticeably smarter than other farm animals; and pig skin looks almost human, so much so that the smell and look of suckling pig and roasting human infants is, according to those who have had the misfortune of smelling and seeing both, disconcertingly similar. And make no mistake about it—many ancient Israelites had that misfortune. Hitchens thought this was the basis for the Jewish taboo against eating pork.

Hitchens’ understanding makes complete sense—especially if you extend the argument even further.

All meat consumption by Israelites originally required the animal be sacrificed to God. The choice parts were burned to soothe God—a necessary precaution in a world where natural disasters, disease, rampant infant mortality, death of an alarming number of women in childbirth, and famine had no other explanation than an angry or distracted god—or given to the priests to eat, and the remnants were eaten by the Israelite offering the sacrifice and those joining with him for that meal. Generations later, long after the taboo against eating pork had already been in place, non-sacrificial meat was allowed to be consumed. That means if pigs were kosher, Israelite worshippers would have smelled something eerily similar to the smell that emanated from pagan places of worship—if, as the Hebrew Bible claims, human child sacrifice was indeed practiced by the Israelites’ neighbors—and the Israelite priests would also have been seen consuming meat that bore a disturbing resemblance to those horrific pagan sacrifices. Would Israelites, who were then mostly illiterate, think that the Torah allowed human sacrifice? Would pig sacrifice cause Israelites to sacrifice their infants the way Torah claimed Israel’s neighbors did? Or could it be that the similarities alone were thought to be displeasing to God, regardless of how Israelites would or would not react to them? When understood in this context, and when we take into account the alarming frequency with which the Hebrew Bible says our ancient ancestors reverted to pagan worship, the taboo against eating pork takes on new meaning.

Hitchens dismissed Judaism’s anti-pork taboo as a Bronze Age superstition. But was it? Or was the Torah—divine, divinely inspired, or simply man-made—trying to do whatever it could to wean humans away from the perceived need to murder their own children? We may never know for sure—although Hitchens’ contribution has arguably done more to explain the reason behind our pork taboo than the 2,000 years of rabbinic commentary that preceded it.

I still irrationally believe there might be something—some being, some force, some deity—who is greater than us and who is there, watching, waiting for us to become just and good and kind. I don’t think this god has any real anger for Christopher Hitchens. On the contrary, I think this god must find it deliciously amusing that a half-Jewish atheist was able to decipher the basis of a religious mystery thousands of years old. Over the two millennia of Rabbinic Judaism, many of its leaders told their followers to accept truth from wherever and whomever it comes. That idea has fallen out of favor as the fundamentalism Hitchens so hated has grown to become the ultra-Orthodox (and even Modern Orthodox) norm. And that’s a shame, because in this case the truth—the Torah—comes from Christopher Hitchens, and the people who would truly cherish it the most will likely never allow themselves to read it.

Lerner, now 34 and married with a child of her own, is a descendant of Yom Tov Lipmann Heller (1579-1654), better known as the Tosfot Yom Tov (the title of his tract on the Mishnah), who was the chief rabbi of Prague and went on to head the rabbinical court of Krakow. According to Lerner family lore, he declared that turkeys were verboten and that none of his descendants should eat the animal. Lerner’s extended family continues to observe his edict, though they wholeheartedly embrace turkey kitsch when the fourth Thursday of November rolls around.

The debate over whether turkeys were kosher didn’t emerge until the birds, indigenous to the Americas, were introduced in Europe in the 16th century. Fish and animals must meet certain specifications in order to be deemed kosher (fins and scales; hoofed feet, chews its cud). For birds, by contrast, the Torah simply lists those that Jews are not allowed to eat, and these are mainly birds of prey. Turkeys were not on that list—they weren’t known at the time. But according to Gil Marks’ Encyclopedia of Jewish Food, the bird was ultimately accepted as kosher: a really big bird.

Yet the Tosfot Yom Tov refused to budge. Lerner admits she doesn’t actually think turkey is trayf. Rather, her refusal to eat comes out of respect and pride. “It’s a family thing far more than a Jewish thing,” she clarifies. And, she admits, it helps that her husband is a vegetarian.

We all agreed that most kosher turkeys are not as salty as they used to be, so you can brine them. In brining this turkey, I used salt with equal amounts of brown sugar, as well as thyme and apple cider. Other people add aromatics like juniper berries and bay leaves, and many people advocate using less salt for a kosher bird. If you decide to brine your kosher turkey, make sure you rinse the bird well and pat it dry before roasting. You also must use a cold, not hot, brine; hot brine cooks the turkey a bit and risks salmonella.

Some of my otherwise non-kosher Thanksgiving turkey-eating guests were put off by the feathers often left on kosher turkeys. When I asked an Empire spokesperson about this, he explained that since only cold water is allowed in a kosher slaughter, it is harder to get rid of the feathers. The reason that warm water, which would loosen the feathers and allow for easier extraction, is not allowed is that warm water would begin the cooking process forbidden during slaughtering. I also imagine that with the influx of buyers at Thanksgiving time, it is more difficult for the workers to keep up with the feathers. You can pluck them yourselves or forget about them.

When it is time to roast the turkey, try not to set the roasting pan on the very bottom rack of your oven, but rather the second from the bottom, as things burn too easily on the bottom.

How the turkey is carved is almost as important as how it is cooked. One school of thought—that of our turkey carver for the evening—is that you should first rest the turkey outside the oven for at least 20 minutes, then scoop out the stuffing if using it. Next, remove the legs and the wings by fishing around with the edge of the knife to find the right joint, take the skin off (but don’t discard it–it’s the best part), and with the turkey facing breast up, make a lateral cut at the base of the breast as deep and far back as you can. Then, start diagonally slicing white meat from the top down to the bottom. Lastly, cut the dark meat off the carcass. The backseat-driver school of thought proffered that after resting the bird, cut it down the center, because it is easier to carve that way.

Carving customs aside, this is a day about family coming together to celebrate that for which they offer Thanksgiving. We shouldn’t make light of these family traditions, as we saw in Avalon, the movie about a large Jewish family in Baltimore. In one memorable scene, the family is waiting for their uncle, played by Lou Jacobi, to arrive before they start the ceremonial carving of the turkey. While the younger family members want to feed their impatient children, the elders want to maintain the time-honored tradition and insist, “Don’t cut the turkey,” but to no avail. When Uncle Gabriel arrives, anticipating the coveted moment of the first slice, he sees the bird has already been cut. “What! You cut the turkey without me,” he shouts, leaving the house and never coming back. So please, don’t let my tips interfere with your family’s rituals.

• New Anti-Defamation League and Israel Project surveys find robust support among Americans for Israel versus the Palestinians. [JTA]

• Some folks in Midwood, Brooklyn, decided to celebrate the 73rd anniversary of Kristallnacht with some anti-Semitic graffiti. [Gothamist]

• #FF @jackabramoff. [Ben Smith]

• Foreskin Man has a friend, and her name is Vulva Girl. And she has a song. [PR Web]

• Punk-rocker Jello Biafra, who once canceled a show in Israel in the spirit of boycott, reports back from the Holy Land. “My hunch is that most Palestinians are not like this and just want peace. But Hamas is no joke, and suicide bombers and rockets are very very real.” [Alternative Tentacles]

• Tzipi Hotovely, you are the 24th hottest woman in politics. Mazel tov? [Complex]

• There’s a salmonella-related recall of MealMart kosher broiled chicken livers. [AP/WSJ]

• The ADL has condemned a pro-life film that, it argues, equates abortion and the Holocaust. [JTA]

• The Baltimore Orioles’ new general manager is Dan Duquette, a founder of the Israel Baseball League. [JTA/Jewish Journal]

• San Franciscans, head to the Mission to check out this Idelsohn Society-sponsored pop-up Jewish record store. [Boing Boing]

• The great Hamptons eruv battle rages on. [Hampton Bays]

• One of the top female super flyweights in the world is a 33-year-old Jewish Argentinian. [JTA/Jewish Journal]

Happy Veterans Day. Thanks to all who have served.

Maybe it was the kids at Nathan Bishop, the nearby public school, who showed us how much we were missing. (That is, when they weren’t throwing pennies at us.) Maybe we were seduced by the commercial that cheerfully sang, “Do you know exactly how to eat an Oreo?” The jingle became a handclapping game—like Miss Mary Mack—that rocketed around Jewish summer camps. An Oreo was a forbidden fruit, even more enticing than the one that got Adam and Eve kicked out of the Garden.

Ah, temptation. When I was 8 or so, questions about free will, crime, and punishment started dogging me. Our color war theme at Day School was ahava (love) vs. yirah (fear). According to Maimonides, we needed to experience both states to have a meaningful relationship with God. I was on Team Ahava. Team Yirah won.

I was very attuned to yirah, having devoured the stories of God’s omnipotence and cruelty. In school, we spent a lot of time on the book of Genesis, source of the juiciest Bible stories. It’s rife with examples of God’s scariness—the expulsion from paradise, the great flood, the Tower of Babel, Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac. Yet we were told God loved us and had chosen us; we were supposed to obey out of love as well as out of fear. Figuring out the balance of love and fear is essential to the creation of selfhood in child-development theory, too; we begin to internalize and believe in our own moral code, acting as we do because we believe in right and wrong, not because we’re afraid of punishment or want to win a pat on the head. As I got older, I wanted to explore what I believed. I just wasn’t sure what that was. Did I want to keep kosher? What would happen if I flouted God’s law?

One afternoon, I walked to the corner store, psyching myself up with each step. I bought a packet of Oreos. I didn’t have a purse, so I hid it in my sock, as if I were a young Rosa Klebb and it was a poison-tipped knife.

I knew I was about to do something momentous and terrible. I couldn’t bring those cookies of death into my home. I seriously worried God would strike the house with lightning and take out my family.

So, I took the Oreos to the gardening shed in our yard and ducked inside. That way, if it got hit by lightning, I’d be the only one to fry. I unwrapped the package—they really did look exactly like Hydrox!—took a deep breath, and nibbled the edge of a cookie. Nothing happened. The skies stayed un-rent. The seas did not boil up. I ate half. I remember it as having a slightly smokier, deeper taste than Hydrox; the lardy center was grainier and less greasy. And I was not dead.

Three decades later, when I read The Foreskin’s Lament, by Shalom Auslander, I was gobsmacked that someone else had had the exact same experience. Auslander’s Oreo was a Slim Jim. (“Imagine that,” he writes. “A stick of meat!”) He too worried that eating trayf would trigger God’s vengeance upon him and his family. (“He’d find a way to drown me,” he thinks as he stands at the Snack Shack. “Then He’d drown my mother. She might even be dead already.”)

I didn’t turn on God completely, though. I bobbed and weaved, still unsure about how observant I wanted to be. I left the day school after 8th grade, along with almost all the other non-Orthodox kids, and went to public high school. There I was a vegetarian (it was easy to blend in with the hyper-sincere animal-rights activists) except when it came to kosher meat cooked by Mom. When I went to college I ate no meat at all, which was probably a good thing given the state of the cafeteria. And when I moved to Manhattan after graduation, I kept a veggie kitchen. But I kept only one set of dishes, and I began to eat chicken outside the home.

Meanwhile the world changed. Oreos became kosher. Joe Regenstein, professor of food science and director of the Cornell Kosher and Halal Food Initiative, told students in a 2008 lecture how it all went down. “It was probably the most expensive conversion of a company from non-kosher to kosher,” Regenstein said. The process took more than three years and millions of dollars, and concluded in 1997. It involved rabbis climbing into the company’s ovens (I know!), each one about 300 feet long. To meet the strictures of the Orthodox Union, the 100 or so ovens had to be manually blow-torched inside on the highest heat.

Ironically, Nabisco, which makes Oreos, replaced the lard with trans fats, which are today considered demonic obesity-engendering child-killers but in the ’90s were considered healthy, at least compared to animal fats. Eliminating the lard was a way to woo new cookie fans, both Jewish and non.

Oreos remain the canonical sandwich cookie; Kraft (which now owns Nabisco) claims that worldwide, 7.5 billion Oreos are eaten every year. The Oreo line is ever-expanding, much like the universe itself. In a flurry of inexplicable spelling and internal capitalization, Nabisco has created DoubleStuf Oreos, Fudgees, Oreo WaferStix, Big Stuf, White-Fudged-Covered Oreos, Oreo Cakesters, and the Triple Double (a layer of vanilla creme and a layer of chocolate creme pancaked between three chocolate wafers). “Our fans’ passion and enthusiasm has challenged us to raise our game,” Jessica Robinson, associate director of consumer engagement, said in an unironic statement. There are also Oreo Sippers, chocolate straws lined with creme so you can actually drink your milk through an Oreo, but they’re sold only in Canada.

While Oreo’s embrace of kashrut contributed to its juggernaut status, poor underdog Hydrox fizzled out. In 1996, Sunshine, Hydrox’s manufacturer, was bought out by Keebler. In 1999, Keebler renamed Hydrox Droxies, which sounds like a band of drunk leprechauns, and continued producing them until 2003. For Hydrox’s 100th anniversary in 2008, Kellogg’s (which had bought out Keebler in 2001—are you keeping up?) brought back Hydrox in a flurry of nostalgic ads. But by the end of the year, Hydrox had quietly disappeared from grocery shelves again.

My relationship with kashrut is still ambivalent. I married a man from Wisconsin, who would no sooner be a vegetarian than a Minnesota Vikings fan. Oreos continued to play a role in my life. In 1999, I took a job at a new TV network located at the just-gentrifying western edge of Manhattan, in an industrial building that once housed the National Biscuit Company. Yes, I worked in the original Oreo factory. In a referential bit of hipster architecture, the iron base of one of the original ovens remained embedded in the floor 10 feet from my desk.

Today my husband and I still have only one set of dishes, but I insist on buying only kosher meat. I follow my own inconsistent, semi-random rules. When Josie was not quite 3, she attended a wedding in Utica where she tasted her first pork breakfast sausage in the hotel restaurant. Over two days she ate 13 of them. I felt strangely sad but didn’t try to stop her. Maxine, on the other hand, has my palate; she doesn’t like meat at all and is essentially a vegetarian. We all love Oreos.

Which are under fire again. They’re a symbol of everything that’s wrong with the current American food system. The company’s marketing of 100-calorie packs (each containing a small handful of communion-wafer-like “thin crisps”) isn’t fooling anybody. Today’s upper-middle-class Jewish kids, if they get cookies at all, get Late July brand organic vanilla bean cookies (“sustainably harvested from a beautiful orchid”) or Newman-O’s (made with “organic cacao that comes from small farmers in the Talamanca region”). How’s a Jewish mother to decide? Newman-O’s uses certified “slavery-free” cooperatives, but Late July makes a version with “white chocolate between Endangered Animal Vanilla Cookies,” which makes it sound like they’re made of actual Sumatran rhinos. Orthorexia is the new kashrut. The attention our people once lavished on fins and scales, vein-removal, and proper bloodletting is now dedicated to finding boxes that say “antioxidant” on them. Today’s trayf is anything stuffed full of chemicals and polyunsaturated fats.

Apparently Jewish Oreo ambivalence comes in stages. First there’s the ambivalence about being denied the cookie. Then there’s the ambivalence of being allowed to eat the cookie. (As Rabbi Joshua Hammerman pointed out on his blog, assimilation is a double-edged sword. “I know that in some perverse manner my Oreo envy kept me safely at the outer edges of middle America, shielding me from total absorption into the vanilla masses. … Oreo denial was, for me, a direct extension of Egyptian slavery—it made me uncomfortable enough to feel different and different enough to feel proud.”) Now there’s the ambivalence of not wanting to buy into the trend of demonizing foodstuffs, thus feeling ambivalent about feeling ambivalent about the cookie. Sometimes you yearn for the taste of your childhood; sometimes you don’t.

After college, I spent a few years working in high-end restaurant kitchens in New York. Then I decided to go to rabbinical school. I did not grow up particularly observant—I have a deep, abiding love for BLT sandwiches—so my transition from harried, pork-belly slinger to postmodern halakhic man involved some serious lifestyle changes. While I didn’t find it particularly difficult to give up pancetta, turning off the stoves on Shabbat was a different story.

For as long as I could remember, celebration meant cooking and cooking meant doing it as well as I knew how. This was true long before I entered the food world professionally. When I was 11, I religiously watched Julia Child and other Saturday-morning cooking shows and cooked dishes I learned from them, like peppers stuffed with wild rice. In college, I commandeered the kitchen of my girlfriend’s dorm suite to throw an elaborate dinner party—fried lemon sole with capers and brown butter, and spinach salad with caramelized fennel, goat cheese, and candied nuts. Six years later, when my girlfriend became my wife, I collaborated with our caterers to perfect the mushroom hors d’oeuvre that would be passed at our wedding.

Observing Shabbat makes that approach untenable. The laws of food preparation on Shabbat are complex; they dictate what can be reheated and what cannot, what tools can be used, how vegetables may be sliced, even the proper way to make tea—first by pouring the water from the water heater into a pot and then pouring water from the pot over the teabag itself. Together, the rules can feel overwhelming for the uninitiated, and they certainly did for me.

But I had an even bigger problem: I didn’t want to give up on cooking as a form of rejoicing. And my apprehension persisted even after I began to feel reasonably confident in my understanding of Jewish law, halakhah.

For one, I knew that food I prepared halakhically wouldn’t be as good. Coming from the restaurant world, I was (and still am) accustomed to being involved in each dish until moments before it was eaten. If left to sit too long in the kitchen, a steak cooked medium rare will be medium by the time it reaches the diner. But traditional Shabbat observance requires most food to be prepared well ahead of time. Readying food too far in advance, and having too little control over the dish when it goes to the table, means that what my family eats on Shabbat is inevitably inferior to what we eat during the week. The skin on a piece of sea bass won’t stay crispy if it has to be cooked 30 minutes before dinner. Lasagna that has been drying out in the oven from a 4 p.m. candle-lighting until a 7 p.m. dinner doesn’t cut it for me, culinarily or spiritually. And the perfect roast chicken, a popular Shabbat dish in the Ashkenazi world, is technically impossible to serve if one is observant. (It needs an hour in a blazingly hot oven, half an hour to rest, and then it needs to be served immediately, ideally with mustard aioli and bitter greens; any more time and the poor bird begins to desiccate.)

Of course, there are workarounds. Some have been around for centuries, such as cholent, a dish that gets better and better the longer it cooks; poached salmon, best served at room temperature, is a Sabbath favorite too. Then there are innovations such as sous-vide cooking, which involves slow-poaching meat in hermetically sealed bags for long periods of time. But cholent gets tiresome and most of us don’t have vacuum sealers and immersion circulators in our home kitchens.

I am all for boundaries in the kitchen. Whether they’re halakhic (not serving rabbit) or culinary (traditional Italian cuisine frowns upon serving fish with cheese), limitations tend to inspire creativity. Still, without the speed, the tools, or the technical skill of a professional cook, it’s a tall order to complete the dishes by Shabbat’s arrival and to warm them in such a way that is halakhically permissible and non-detrimental to the food. The meal inevitably suffers.

It’s nearly impossible to serve anything that is both warm and green, for example. Reheated vegetables almost invariably lose their color. This means I can’t make the chive sauce I like to serve with cod, or sautéed spinach. This means my pea soup is inevitably brown.

Restrictions like these can make traditional Shabbat observance seem like deprivation. Shabbat is not conceptualized as an ascetic practice; rather, the obligatory nature of Shabbat and its attending constraints are supposed to usher in a higher luxury. Eating has always been central to that sense of luxury. Rabbinic literature is full of imaginative descriptions of Shabbat meals. In the Talmud, Rabbi Eliezer tells us that a man should always set a full table on Friday night, even if he only needs an olive’s worth of food. Likewise, many traditional Shabbat songs feature culinary themes. “It is an honored day,” writes Ibn Ezra in his poem “Ki Eshmera Shabbat,” “a day of enjoyment, of bread and good wine, of meat and fish!”

Moishe Wendel, chef-owner of Pardes—an exciting new glatt kosher restaurant in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill neighborhood—acknowledges the inherent drawbacks of Shabbat cooking. Before he became religious, he spent time cooking in non-kosher restaurants. He says that halakhic boundaries actually have the potential to improve the food, and not just spiritually. “When you work within limits, the parameters make your food better,” he told me, gulping a beer and wiping his face with his kippah after a busy night on the line. At Pardes, he cures his own lamb bacon, something he says he wouldn’t spend the time making if he could simply buy it. But he’s pleased with his results. “It’s trial and error like anything else,” he says about Shabbat cooking. “Sear off a steak to a nice bloody rare. Let it rest. Put it on top of two forks on the blech and you’ve got yourself a perfect cote de boeuf!”

I know that conceptualizing Shabbat as obligation is essential to ensure that Shabbat remains distinct from the rest of the week. A robust sense of religious obligation doesn’t allow for picking and choosing. Traditional Shabbat observance is powerful precisely because its boundaries don’t bend according to individual preference. Shabbat allows us, potentially, to experience something infinitely larger than ourselves.

Like all Shabbat restrictions, the necessity of having everything prepared beforehand is meant to elevate the experience itself. Shabbat dinner is supposed to be the best meal of the week, spiritually and culinarily. The sages say that so long as it is prepared in honor of Shabbat, even a humble dish like fish-hash pie is a delight.

I love humble dishes. Excellent mashed potatoes, perfectly fried eggs: These are some of my favorite meals. But anyone who has spent a long time in the kitchen knows it’s the humble dishes that require the most exacting craft. It’s not hard to make great food if you are starting with truffles or foie gras. Making transcendent fish-hash, though eminently possible with salt-cod, fingerling potatoes, garlic confit, and sweet onions, requires more finesse. And because halakhic observance makes finesse in the kitchen difficult, if not impossible, I simply haven’t been able to reach culinary and religious heights simultaneously—at least not yet.

There is a traditional Jewish impulse to try to answer difficult questions by telling a story, so I’ll repeat a parable from the Gemara.

Once, the emperor of Rome said to Rabbi Joshua ben Hanania, “Why does the Shabbos dish smell so good?” The rabbi replied: “We have a certain seasoning called the Sabbath, which we put into it, and that gives it a wonderful smell.” The emperor asked for some of it. “To him who keeps the Sabbath,” Rabbi Joshua said, “it is efficacious; but to him who does not keep the Sabbath it is of no use.”

In a fabulous essay today, popular Asia Times columnist Spengler–who in person, I’m told, bears a more than passing resemblance to frequent Tablet Magazine contributor David P. Goldman—counts the ways in which this new law is bad:

• As Goldman explained in Tablet, kosher slaughter, in which an extremely sharp (and sanctified) blade wielded by a skilled butcher slices several crucial arteries at once in order to quickly eliminate the animal’s life (and therefore pain), is thought to be the most humane method there is, and was designed to be just that.

• Banning this type of slaughter is hypocritical, given that hunting and eating of wild game, which is far crueler to animals, is permitted.

• The law shames the memories of Holland’s historic tolerance to Jews—it was a haven for many who fled the Inquisition—and of the three-quarters of Dutch Jews who died in the Holocaust.

• The law is of course a blow to observant Dutch Jews. But really, it is properly seen as an assault on the general moral fiber, Spengler argues:

Those who reject religious arguments—as do the majority of today’s European—should nonetheless ask by what measure they gauge the value of animal suffering. Jews observe the ancient dietary laws because they believe that God asked them to do so. Whether or not the Hebrew Bible was given to Moses on Mount Sinai by God, the rules it set forth for kindness towards animals had no precedent in human affairs. And the influence upon ethics of this innovation cannot be overstated. If we must respect animal life—not only physical suffering, but even the emotional sensibility of animals—then we must respect human life and dignity all the more.

Dutch Parliament Votes to Ban Ritual Slaughter of Animals [Telegraph]
Poisoning the Well of Animal Welfare [Asia Times]
Related: Kosher by Design [Tablet Magazine]

Also present was Newark Mayor Cory Booker, who described Newark and the kosher food behemoth as “a great matchmaking.” For those unaware, Booker may well be Newark’s second-most-famous Jew, despite not, technically, being Jewish. As a Rhodes scholar, he was president of Oxford’s Jewish student group; at Yale, he helped found Eliezer, a semi-secret, explicitly Jewish society.

Not pictured: Six tons of charosets and horseradish, and four months of constipation.

Manischewitz Opens Company Headquarters in Newark [SouthWard]
Earlier: Skullcaps and Bones

Basically, this is why we’re losing to China.

Deli Sues Over Kosher ‘Heart Attack’ Sandwich [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

Until the 1980s, quinoa, originally from the Andes Mountains and now primarily cultivated in Peru and Bolivia, was essentially unknown in the United States, let alone among American Jews. But by the mid-2000s it vaulted to MVP status. Quinoa seemed to have it all: the satisfying heft of a starch, a high level of protein, and enough culinary versatility as a Passover grain to be turned into salads, stuffing, fritters, and a perfectly respectable oatmeal substitute. Less than a decade after being designated kosher for Passover, quinoa could be found in Passover cookbooks and on the ample buffet tables at Passover resorts. A handful of rabbis disagreed with Star-K’s decision, but they found their dissenting opinions largely drowned out by the endorsement of certifying agencies and consumers’ overwhelming enthusiasm for quinoa. As food writer Adeena Sussman put it in a 2008 article for Gourmet, “this grain-that’s-not-a-grain is becoming the belle of the Passover ball.”

But this year, the dissent has finally gained traction. In February, the Star-K released a consumer alert stating that some quinoa fields had been found in proximity to fields growing “certain crops”—by which they mean chametz or kitniyot grains—raising the risk of cross-contamination. As a result, consumers were advised to only purchase quinoa with reliable kosher-for-Passover certification. A few weeks later, the Chicago Rabbinical Council, whose influence and authority extend beyond the Chicago region, released a similar statement approving quinoa for Passover only if it was imported from Bolivia (where no chametz-contaminated fields have been found), packed in quinoa-only plants, and hand-checked for foreign grains by consumers before the first night of Passover. The statement gives Trader Joe’s, Ancient Harvest, and Israel’s Sugat brands the green-light for 2011, at least.

Red and yellow quinoa growing in Isla de la Luna, Lake Titicaca, Bolivia.
twiga269/flickr

If the Star-K’s supervisors found evidence of chametz growing near quinoa fields, the new regulations placed on Passover quinoa-eating this year make sense. But in fact the story does not end with a simple bowl of Bolivian porridge. In practice, it seems that the official approval stamp from the certifying agencies does not guarantee much of anything.

I recently took the subway to Pomegranate, the upscale kosher superstore in Brooklyn’s heavily Orthodox Midwood neighborhood, to stock up for Passover. Last year, along with matzoh, marinara sauce, and overpriced spices, I purchased at Pomegranate two boxes of Passover-certified quinoa. This time I could not find it anywhere. When I asked a store clerk, he gave me a curious look, then walked me over to the tiny kitniyot section where the quinoa sat next to the rice and chickpeas. “You know what kitniyot is?” he asked. “Sure,” I said. “So,” he said, glancing sheepishly at the package then back at me, “the choice is up to you.”

The marginalization of quinoa to Pomegranate’s kitniyot section is not the only indication that things may be shifting. Some catering companies like Boston’s Catering by Andrew and 12 Tribes in San Francisco follow the Chicago Rabbinical Council stated guidelines. Others are ditching quinoa entirely. This year, for example, the Fairmont Scottsdale Princess resort in Arizona will substitute faux Israeli couscous (made from matzoh meal) for the quinoa recipes they have offered in past years. Another caterer, whose client is one of the country’s most prestigious Passover hotels, asked to remain anonymous and refused to disclose whether quinoa would be on this year’s menu. “It is just too controversial,” he said.

The Orthodox Union, arguably the country’s most influential certifying agency, takes a soft-handed approach to the controversy. Quinoa is on its official kitniyot list, cited as a food that “may be kitniyot” and therefore should be avoided. But its Passover guide ultimately punts it, advising customers to consult their rabbis.

When it comes to kashrut in other communities, societal pressure to be the most kosher sometimes trumps common sense, or even Jewish law. As rabbi and food historian Gil Marks writes in The Encyclopedia of Jewish Food, kitniyot was problematic from the start and for many generations was not taken seriously. “In the thirteenth century,” he writes, “Rav Samuel ben Solomon of Falaise called the prohibition against kitniyot … an erroneous custom.” And yet, over the centuries, it has gained an increasingly strong foothold for the simple reason that, once enough people say something is wrong for long enough, it begins to legitimately feel wrong.

Quinoa is the latest in a long line of foods—from corn to peanuts and green beans—that have been designated as kitniyot despite evidence to the contrary. The revered Orthodox rabbi Rav Moshe Feinstein concluded that peanuts are a New World food—something the European rabbis did not know about when the notion of kitniyot began, and therefore not required to be included in the minhag (custom). And yet it is impossible to find Passover-certified peanuts or peanut butter in stores today. Granting them certification would unfortunately bring, as the caterer said, too much controversy.

As for quinoa: While it is not biologically speaking a grain and is unarguably a New World food, past trends would suggest that quinoa is headed for the kitniyot pile, despite its endorsement of the Star-K and Chicago Rabbinical Council. The question is, how much will consumers push back against this? For the last 12 years, Jews have grown used to the idea of quinoa as Passover’s starchy savior. They may not be willing to let go so easily. In the 19th century, there was an attempt to classify potatoes as kitniyot, as Marks writes, “but this was duly rejected by the populace.”

As for me, I decided not to buy the quinoa at Pomegranate this year. They were charging $6.99 for a one-pound bag—nearly double the typical price. I bought it at Trader Joe’s instead.

Reached by phone, Stern explained that a newly uncovered document from an archaeological site in the Negev reveals that Jews have been reading and interpreting the laws of kashrut—originally set out in the Torah itself—all wrong, for approximately 2500 years. “Around the time of Ezra, that’s when the misinterpretation occurred,” he said. “Back then, the Jewish tribes would eat pork and forego most other sources of protein. At some point,” he added, “a rather clumsy rabbi misread the injunctions and announced that everyone had been doing it all wrong—at which point he ‘corrected’ things to the way they are now, with pork and lobster and what-not outlawed, and cow and chicken okay.”

Rabbi Judah Rosenthal, an Orthodox scholar in Jerusalem, tentatively confirmed Stern’s finding. “It makes sense, in a way,” he told me. “Now we know why they sacrificed lambs: They weren’t allowed to eat it.”

The good (or bad?) news is that Passover rules are unaffected by this news: During the eight-day festival later this month, Jews are still prohibited from eating dough that has been raised. “Of course that’s the same,” Stern laughed. “That’s just logical.” On the contrary: Nothing seems logical anymore.

Pork: The Other Kosher Meat [Wnet]

Eating’s Pricier [The Daily]
Here’s Why You Can’t Afford Food Anymore [Grist]

• Speaking of! Jacob Heilbrunn has an informative explication of the neoconservative split between the unabashedly pro-democracy wing (which is winning out) and the old-school, realist one. [Foreign Policy]

• Iran wants you to sell it your uranium. Especially if you are Zimbabwe. [AP/Haaretz]

• EasyJet, the British budget airline, apologized for loading bacon-and-ham sandwiches onto a flight out of Ben Gurion. Do people even eat bacon-and-ham sandwiches? [CNN]

• Rabbis and other Jews are getting active in the pro-union protests in Madison. Unrelatedly: How ‘bout that buzzer-beater last night? On, Wisconsin! [JTA]

• Meet the Israeli Daily Show. [Splitsider]

Wonder what Pitchfork would think of Alamaailman Vasarat, an all-Jewish “Finnish group playing kebab-kosher-jazz-film-traffic-punk-music with a unique Scandinavian acoustic touch”?

Stoudemire’s much publicized trip to Israel last summer came off like a stunt, but it was actually motivated by the studying he did after eye surgery, which piqued his interest in Jewish history. Stoudemire wore a yarmulke on the trip, floated in the Dead Sea, visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and touched the Western Wall with his left hand, which is marked by a Star of David tattoo. He met with Shimon Mizrahi, chairman of the Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball club, and former Maccabi star Tal Brody, who offered Stoudemire a roster spot when his current contract expires. “We feel he is one of us now,” Brody says.

Stoudemire received invitations to more bar mitzvahs than he could possibly attend and grew uncomfortable with all the attention. He insists he is not Jewish—though he says an ancestor on his mother’s side may be—and practices no formal religion. He is planning a trip this summer to Mali, which is predominantly Muslim, because he wants to build a school there. But Stoudemire does keep kosher at home. “It’s a matter of learning the most I can about every culture and trying to bring people together,” he says, over a dinner of herb-crusted chicken breast, sautéed spinach and challah bread, prepared by his kosher chef. “That’s New York.”

You can, of course, select Stoudemire as your starting power forward on Tablet Magazine’s “pick your all-time Jewish-American starting five” game. Though personally I tend to go with Dolph Schayes in that position, there is no denying that Stoudemire, averaging 26.3 points and 8.7 rebounds per game for a (somewhat) resurgent Knicks squad, isn’t unworthy.

The Savior Cometh [SI]
Related: We Got Game [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Amar’e Stoudemire’s Excellent Adventure
Omri Casspi Steps Out

The small crowd included two babies and three older couples—one of whom, sitting at the counter, were pretty clearly sous chef Aaron Israel’s folks. Along with the day’s menu, the chalkboard above the deli’s open kitchen noted that loaves of challah are for sale every Friday for $6. “We should get some and start celebrating Shabbat,” I overheard one diner say to another. “We have candles. Dunno if we have candlesticks.” There were three cooks (including Bermanoff and Israel), two servers (including Cohen), and one prep-chef in the back. That’s it.

All the diners were there for the 4 pm seating, and so everyone received the same courses at roughly the same time. First out (besides delicious, vaguely seaweed-tasting green tea with a few grains of burnt rice) was the eggdrop soup with wontons. This was simple (and richly delicious) chicken broth, stringly scrambled egg, those delicious crispy-fried things bobbing at the top (to be eaten in either crunchy or soggy state, depending on your predilection), and, of course, the wontons, ribbons of dough with a ravioli-like center—filled, as wontons are wont to be, with pork. More on that in a sec.

Next came duck buns: Standard light buns; standard plum sauce; standard thinly sliced cucumbers; but un-standard duck tongue, a nice, salty, and thoroughly deli-inspired alteration.

Then, egg rolls, stuffed with various veggies, shrimp, and, well … . Well I don’t eat pork. I am not kosher: As a proud American, I eat cheeseburgers; as a proud Marylander, I eat crabs (and other shellfish). But I tend not to have made the leap to pork. This has kept me from pork chops, ham, prosciutto, pepperoni, sausage, chorizo, and—I am told, most importantly of all—bacon. And it has of course kept me from wontons and egg rolls. On Christmas Day, I nibbled at the dough of the wontons but kept my distance from their centers. The egg rolls? I broke them open, used my chopsticks to ease some of the unfamiliar meat (pork and Chinese sausage) out, and then, well, took a bite. Who knows what I actually ended up eating? That’s my story, anyway. They were good.

Next came the main courses: Smoked meat fried rice; roast duck; and Chinese broccoli. I was most excited, of everything, for the smoked meat fried rice, but—though my eating companion emphatically disagrees—to me this was the least impressive dish. Not that it wasn’t scrumptious: The fried rice was fine, with the egg and the standard peas, carrots, etcetera; and Mile End’s signature homemade smoked meat—the native-to-Montreal brisket/pastrami mash-up—is always welcome. But together, they were, well, smoked meat and fried rice. Neither ingredient detracted from the other, but nor, to my tastebuds, did either complement the other especially well. You were either tasting (perfectly good) fried rice or (typically fantastic) smoked meat. I would rather eat fried rice with the typical chicken protein, and smoked meat in its traditional sandwich setting (or in Mile End’s phenomenal poutine), is what I’m saying.

The broccoli was superb seasoned by the usual garlic and the inspired ginger (which I ate by itself, getting that kick of a mouth-sting).

And then there was the duck, for me the clear highlight. Duck for two—the chefs must have resisted the temptation to accurately but tritely name the dish “duck three ways”—was one half of a roast duck: Leg confit-ed; breast cured and smoked; and wings roasted and basted. The leg was great, fatty and delicious. The wings were finger-lickingly fun. And the duck breast was the ultimate triumph: You could not eat it and not think of Peking duck, and yet it was different than Peking duck, clearly cooked with superior craftsmanship—different and better. It is the dish I find myself thinking of a day later, and the dish I will continue to crave.

Dessert was fortune and almond cookies and orange slices. When I read this on the menu several weeks ago, I felt disappointed—surely they could be more creative than that? But Saturday, circa 5:30 pm, there was nothing else I would have wished to eat, and probably nothing else I could have eaten.

“You guys’ll have to come back for the Seder tasting menu,” Cohen quipped to departing diners. (I am pretty sure she was joking, although Bermanoff did note that, last Passover, they made their own matzah.) As for the Chinese food, though: I can officially report Cohen’s unofficial guess that, pretty soon, on one Sunday per month, you will be able to line up outside Mile End’s small Boerum Hill storefront for a traditional Jewish Sunday night supper. You will want to do this.

Related: Jewish Christmas [Tablet Magazine]

Today, France has the third-largest Jewish population in the world, about 600,000, with approximately half that number living in Paris. Despite successive waves of anti-Semitic violence, expulsion, and disfavor throughout history, France has generally been a pays d’accueil, a welcoming country for Jews. While the population has waxed and waned, there has been a continuous presence of Jewish communities in much of what is now France since the 1st century, and possibly before.

Paris has seen an enormous ebb and flow of Jews since the first Jewish community was established in the 6th century just south of what is now the Cathedral of Notre Dame. The Parisian Jewish population surged in the late 19th century, with more than 100,000 Jews coming to France after fleeing pogroms and poverty in Russia, Poland, and Romania. And, in 1870, the Jewish population of Algeria received French citizenship, making it easy for Jews to immigrate. In July 1942, some 13,000 Jews living in Paris were arrested in a mass roundup by the French police and killed at Auschwitz. The Jewish population of France didn’t see growth again until the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the Jews of North Africa immigrated in droves to France after countries like Tunisia and Algeria declared independence. This doubled France’s Jewish population almost overnight.

Today, the second generation of North African Jews has given a positive boost to Jewish French life, creating and sometimes resurrecting communities in Paris and other cities from which so many left during World War II. Jews have also moved to new areas of Paris and its suburbs and redefined certain traditional Jewish neighborhoods like the Grands Boulevards, the 9th Arrondissement, and Rue des Rosiers in the Marais. Lubavitchers and other Hasidic sects have also come to France, directing Orthodox schools, kosher restaurants, and grocery stores.

Contemporary Parisian life is very different from the 1960s, when I spent a year there as a student. That was a time when Jews who had been in France for generations were still in the majority, as were their traditions and their palates. In more recent years, as the children of these French Jews intermarried and became more adventurous about trying different recipes, Paris has seen a new and exciting openness in its Jewish population.

Many years ago I discovered Le Monde des Épices (the world of spices), a tiny shop on the rue François-Miron near the Marais, the area where Jews were ordered to live in the 13th century after being expelled from the city limits. As the years pass, this food emporium, first on my list of places to visit, seems to get better and better. Inside, signs written on cracked pieces of pottery label burlap sacks filled with bulgur for taboulleh and barrels overflowing with homemade preserved lemons from Morocco. Olives are marinated with a variety of pungent flavors: orange peel, fresh garlic, kumquats, cranberries, parsley, Indian Tellicherry peppers, and star anise from Asia.

In the postwar years, the shop, originally opened in 1945 by Samuel Izrael, a Polish immigrant, catered to a largely Jewish clientele, mostly Eastern European refugees who came for the homemade pickles. By the time I first discovered the store in 1964, the shop was frequented by recent immigrants from Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. Spices like cumin and coriander were completely new to me then. Today, most people who walk in don’t have a clue that it is a Jewish store; it caters to all lovers of exotic cuisine. The spices themselves illustrate a colorful history of food in France, a history that stretches back for centuries.

The heart of Jewish Paris is a central square near the Metro St. Paul, often referred to in Yiddish as the pletzel. As holidays approach, Parisian Jews flock here to buy skullcaps, prayer books, challahs, and cakes.

Like the Lower East Side of New York City, the Marais is now filled with chic fashion boutiques and bars, transforming it from a quaint shtetl into a buzzing neighborhood. Many of the old bookshops and restaurants have closed, but the shops that are left in this ancient quarter with its narrow streets still overflow with delicacies from Eastern Europe, France, Israel, and North Africa. Today you’ll find homemade farfel (tiny bits of pasta) and great falafel as well as fijuelas and other Sephardic delicacies.

In the past the pletzel has also served as a meeting place for Jews in less auspicious circumstances. Escaping the pogroms of Eastern Europe in 1881, Jews flocked here in large numbers, more than half of them from Poland. During World War II’s police rafles (round-ups) of Jews, many called out to each other as they were separated to meet in the pletzel if they survived.

Whenever I visit the Marais, I stop in at Florence Finkelsztajn’s Traiteur Delicatessen. The quarter has two Finkelsztajn delicatessens, one trimmed in yellow (Florence’s ex husband’s) and one in blue (Florence’s). According to Gilles Pudlowski, a gastronomic critic of Polish Jewish origin who writes the popular Pudlo restaurant guides, Florence’s store is the best place to satisfy a nostalgic craving for Eastern European cooking. In addition to Central European Yiddish specialties like herring, chopped liver, and pastrami, Florence also sells pletzel—a round, flat onion bread; like a bialy, only larger— baked in the back of the shop. Eat the pletzel hot from the oven or as a big pletzlach sandwich stuffed with fillings as varied as the different ethnicities of Jews living in Paris today: Alsatian pickelfleish (corned beef), Romanian pastrami, Russian eggplant caviar, North African roasted peppers, and French tomato and lettuce.

What would Paris be without outdoor markets? You can see so many all over the city. But for me, “little Tunis,” the multicultural and bustling Belleville market, populated with French farmers and merchants from North Africa, is a must. In the restaurants and stores bordering the market, you feel as if you are actually in North Africa as Tunisians and others congregate at kosher and halal restaurants, bars, and bakeries. You also feel the influence of the Italian tenure in Tunisia: Italian bread, beignets shaped like the Italian manicotti, and canned tuna in olive oil.

In 1966 when Alexandre Zbirou came to France from Tunisia to study marketing, few good kosher restaurants existed in Paris. In 1976, he opened a French restaurant called Au Rendez Vous, La Maison du Couscous in the 8th Arrondissement near the Champs Élysées. Four years later, he turned it into a kosher Tunisian restaurant, the only one of its kind in the quarter. Today, there are more than 38 kosher restaurants in the 8th Arrondissement alone. “I saw Jews arriving in the quarter,” he told me over lunch at his restaurant. “They came and I was waiting for them. It was home cooking for Tunisians and Ashkenazim. After all, there are lots of mixed marriages here in France.”

Despite the kosher menu, his restaurant does not close on Friday night or Saturday. “I feel that we are rendering a service to kosher clientele, to give them a kosher meal for the Sabbath,” he said. Other restaurants, under the supervision of the Parisian Rabbinical Authority called the Beth Din, are either closed for the Sabbath or are open only to customers who pay in advance.

Sitting down at Zbirou’s restaurant, we were first served an array of kemia, similar to the ubiquitous mezze at Arab restaurants. We began with flaky brik, filled with potatoes, parsley, and hard-boiled eggs. At least a dozen salads followed, served on tiny plates, all brimming with bold colors and flavors. Some of my favorites were raw artichoke slivers with harissa, oil, and onions and turnips with bitter orange.

Recently, a second generation of North African Jews has opened a number of stylish kosher restaurants in Paris. One is the super chic l’Osmose, which calls itself a fusion and health-food restaurant. The evening that I dined there, the space was packed with well-dressed young French couples who could clearly afford the steep prices. The food, prepared by the Tunisian-born Jewish chef Yoni Saada and his family, is delicious and sophisticated. Our meal began with a long narrow plate filled with cumin-roasted almonds, fava beans, and tiny olives, and a tasty carrot-and-mango soup served in a champagne glass. The first course was a tomato cappuccino and a salmon tartare with avocado. The second was a sizable entrecôte steak with tiny roasted potatoes and a confit of onions. And for dessert: an extravagant plate of the now-classic molten chocolate cake topped with little marshmallow lollipops. The restaurant’s menu could have fit in anywhere, but only in Paris could it be both chic and kosher. Yoni confessed to me his great ambition: to be the first kosher Michelin-star rated chef in France.

What was most fun for me in Paris was to peek into the kitchens of home cooks. On a fall Saturday afternoon, I was invited for lunch at the home of my cousin David Moos, an investment banker, and his wife Carène, a divorce lawyer. As I walked to their apartment building on the outskirts of Paris in Boulogne, I passed by the Edmond de Rothschild Park and the Albert Kahn Museum and Gardens, both reminding me of the Jewish presence in this lovely suburb. David, Carène, and their three adorable children, Hanna, Simon, and Natan, live in a top-floor duplex strewn with the happy clutter of children’s playthings.

Carène comes from very humble Jewish origins in Algeria, where her grandmother was a cleaning lady for rich French colonists, but her food is not humble at all. David, whose family is of southern German and French Jewish background, loves her North African dishes. At this Sabbath lunch, Carène prepared many salads for the first course: fennel, avocado with lemon and cilantro, sautéed eggplant, eggplant caviar, sautéed mushrooms, and tchoukchouha (grilled peppers and tomatoes slowly cooked to a jam-like consistency).

The entrée was adafina, a Moroccan Sabbath dish, cooked overnight. Adafina varies according to the cook. Algerians who live near Tunisia, for example, might add white beans while some Tunisians add spinach. For dessert we had strawberries and raspberries topped with meringue. Afterward we sipped our coffee on the rooftop, where we could hear the sounds of children playing outside and enjoy a lovely view of the Eiffel Tower. It was a beautiful and relaxing Shabbat lunch in Paris.

CARENE MOOS’ DAF MAROCAINE (SABBATH MEAT STEW WITH CHICKPEAS AND RICE)

1 cup dry chickpeas
3 cups wheat berries
1 cup vegetable oil
2 onions, roughly chopped
1/3 cup raisins (In Alsace and the south of France, prunes or dates are often substituted for the raisins.)
2 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons sea salt plus more to taste
3/4 teaspoon turmeric
½ teaspoon paprika
½ teaspoon hot red pepper, such as cayenne pepper
½ teaspoon crushed pepper flakes
3 pounds chuck roast or brisket
12 small red bliss, Yukon gold, or new potatoes
½ teaspoon cumin
2 cups long grain rice
1 garlic clove, peeled, plus 1 whole head of garlic
2 sweet potatoes, peeled and halved
4 large eggs in the shell
½ cup honey

1. Two days before serving, fill 2 bowls with warm water. Pour the chickpeas into one bowl and the wheat berries into another. The next morning drain both and set aside separately.

2. Heat 4 tablespoons of the oil in a large ovenproof casserole. Add the chickpeas, onions, raisins, and sugar, sautéing for about 5 minutes.

3. Make a rub of ¼ teaspoon each of the salt, turmeric, paprika, hot pepper, and pepper flakes and rub on the meat. Put the meat in the casserole and scatter the potatoes around, then fill the pot with enough water to cover and bring to a boil.

4. In a separate bowl, mix the wheat berries with another 2 tablespoons of the oil, 1 teaspoon salt, and the cumin. Then place the berries in a cheese-cloth and loosely tie it up, keeping in mind that the wheat berries will expand as they cook.

5. In another bowl, mix the rice with the remaining 2 tablespoons oil, another teaspoon salt, the garlic clove, and the remaining turmeric, paprika, hot pepper, and pepper flakes. Tie the rice up in another piece of cheesecloth as you did for the wheat berries, again leaving room to expand.

6. Place the sacks in the casserole and add the head of garlic, the sweet potatoes, and the eggs. Bring the stew to a boil and simmer, covered, for an hour and 45 minutes.

7. Preheat the oven to 250 degrees and remove the cover, drizzle honey over all, and cook in the oven for at least 5 hours or until the vegetables are reddish brown. (You can also cook the adafina in a 200-degree oven overnight.)

8. To serve, remove the bundles of rice and wheat berries. Spoon the meat and vegetables onto a platter with a slotted spoon, and pile the grains and eggs in their shells around them.

Yield: 8 to 10 servings

FLORENCE’S PLETZLACH

1 scant tablespoon active dry yeast
4 tablespoons sugar
4 to 5 cups all-purpose flour
2 large eggs
¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 teaspoons salt
3 cups diced onions
¼ cup poppy seeds

1. Pour 1 cup lukewarm water into a large bowl. Stir in the yeast and the sugar. Add 4 cups of flour, the eggs, ¼ cup of the oil, and the salt. Mix well and knead for about 10 minutes or until smooth, adding more flour if necessary. Or use a food processor or a standing mixer with a dough hook.

2. Transfer the dough to a greased bowl and let rise, covered, for 1 hour. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees and grease 2 cookie sheets.

3. Divide the dough into 12 balls, and roll or flatten them out into rounds about 6 inches in diameter. Put the rounds on the cookie sheets, and make thumbprints in the centers.

4. Brush the dough with cold water, and sprinkle about 1/4 cup of onion in each indentation. Brush the onions with the remaining vegetable oil, and sprinkle the poppy seeds on top. Let sit for 15 minutes, uncovered.

5. Bake for 20 minutes. Then, if you like, slip the pletzel under the broiler for a minute to brown the onions. Serve lukewarm as is or in a big pletzel sandwich.

Yield: 12 pletzlach

L’OSMOSE’S MOLTON CHOCOLATE CAKE

Cocoa powder, for dusting
2 sticks unsalted butter or pareve margarine, plus more for greasing
10 ounces bittersweet chocolate
6 large eggs
1 1/3 cups sugar
½ cup all-purpose flour
Pinch of salt
Confectioners’ sugar for garnish
Strawberries or raspberries for garnish

1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees and grease a 9-inch round cake pan or 18 muffin tins with butter or margarine and lightly dust them with cocoa powder. Tap out the excess cocoa.

2. Melt together the butter and the chocolate in a double boiler. Remove from the heat and let cool for about 10 minutes.

3. Beat together the eggs and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer set on medium-high speed until pale yellow. Lower the speed, and pour in the chocolate. Add the flour and salt, mixing gently, until just combined. Do not over-beat.

4. Pour the batter into the cake pan or divide evenly among the muffin tins, filling them about half full. (At this point, you can cover and refrigerate the batter for several hours or overnight; just make sure to leave time to bring them to room temperature before baking.)

5. Bake for about 10 minutes for the muffins or about 20 for the cake. The center should still be soft, but the sides should be dry and set. Let cool for a few minutes before running a knife around each tin and inverting the cakes onto a cookie sheet. Quickly turn each cake back over and place on a large platter or individual serving plates. Serve sprinkled with confectioners’ sugar and garnish with fresh berries.

Yield: One 9-inch cake or 18 individual cakes

This column and its recipes are excerpted in part from Joan Nathan’s new book, Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France, which has just been released.

• The new Text/Context, which is published in a partnership between The Jewish Week and Nexbook Inc., has dropped. [Text/Context]

In a late article today, Mideast columnist Lee Smith profiles José María Aznar, the former Spanish prime minister who is now a major international actor in defending Israel. [Tablet Magazine]

• Noting that President Ahmadinejad is visiting Lebanon next month, influential columnist Aluf Benn has an idea: Kidnap him. [Haaretz]

• Arthur Penn, director of one of the most important films in American history, Bonnie and Clyde (to understand why, read this), died at 88. [NYT]

• They’re young. They’re in love. They’re Polish neo-Nazi skinheads who turned out to be Jewish and are now practicing Orthodox Jews. [JPost]

• Borat is please to explain how great and impressive Israeli coalition government function for benefit of mankind. [Haaretz]

• David Miliband, one-time foreign secretary and older brother of new Labour leader Ed, is backing away from high-profile politics in deference to his victorious sibling. [AP/NYT]

• Jewish Fiction.net. Bookmark it.

• Don Draper’s love interest on this season of Mad Men is (like in season one) a Jew. [LAT]

• Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon see their best hope for returning to the land not in a peace deal but in continued violence that eventually leads to Israel caving. [Christian Science Monitor]

• In 2000, as peace talks faltered, Yasser Arafat ordered Hamas to conduct terrorist attacks. [JPost]

• Jewish groups and U.S. museums are coming into conflict over art restitution claims, reports frequent Tablet Magazine contributor Robin Cembalest. [ARTnews]

• What is up with Jews not really drinking much alcohol? [Forward]

• There are more American Jews living in poverty than ever before. [Jewish Week]

• Why the rest of America is going kosher. [TNR’s The Book]

• A profile/interview of controversial Israeli journalist Gideon Levy. [The Independent]

• Shmuel Rosner says Netanyahu should fire Lieberman, as do others, while also acknowledging he can’t. [Rosner’s Domain]

• Given an earlier court ruling, eviction notices for Arabs living in the East Jerusalem Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood threaten to come every day and topple the peace process. [LAT]

• In his first speech as British Labor Party leader, Ed Miliband traced his desire to aid society’s lower rungs to his parents’ having needed to escape the Nazis. [Haaretz]

• Former cardiologist writes pork cookbook. In Israel. Hey, it happens. [NYT]

When Kahane was incarcerated, the Bureau of Prisons refused him kosher food. He sued, and the case came before Judge Jack Weinstein. The issue was whether kosher was an essential part of Judaism. Judge Weinstein, in his decision, quoted from my late father’s Understanding Genesis that following Jacob’s battle with the Angel, from that day forth Jews do not eat from the sciatic nerve, and that this was the origin of the laws of Kashrut, a fundamental tenet of the Jewish faith.

Ever since that decision the BOP has been required to provide kosher food for all Jewish inmates who request it.

Interesting fact. Also, it gives me an excuse to point out that Lance’s article is truly must-read, establishing as it does that the ultra-nationalist Kahane’s 1990 murder in Manhattan was not some small provincial story, but rather an absolute hinge moment in the United States’s war with al-Qaida; and that, in fact, you can trace the success of several al-Qaida operations, including 9/11, to the mishandling of the prosecution of Kahane’s killers. It’s a long piece, but you have a three-day weekend coming up, so print the damn thing out and give it a read.

First Blood [Tablet Magazine]
Related: Understanding Genesis [Amazon]

• The United States has convinced Israel that it will take Iran longer—a year, minimum—before its nuclear weapons are operational, somewhat forestalling the possibility of Israeli military action in the near- to mid-future. [NYT]

• President Ahmadinejad reportedly said he was ready to restart fuel swap talks with the five permanent Security Council members (as opposed to Turkey and Brazil, with which he already struck a deal). [Haaretz]

• A new U.N. report says restricted land in Gaza has caused additional misery to a sizeable percentage of its residents. [NYT]

• Here’s the thing, though: The Islamic center almost certainly won’t actually be built. [Politico]

• Amar’e is apparently keeping kosher. [Page Six]

On the Menu: Kosher Guineafowl, Locust [Ynet]

• Mort Zuckerman says he helped write one of President Obama’s speeches. It isn’t a very credible claim. [Ben Smith]

• Jerusalem was named Travel + Leisure’s “Best City” in the Middle East/Africa region. [Travel + Leisure]

• Brooklyn kosher fish company Dagim is donating 2500 portions of fish to New York’s Masbia kosher soup kitchens. [WSJ]

• David Berkowitz, a.k.a. the Son of Sam, who became a born-again Christian in jail two decades ago, has gained many admirers in the evangelical world. [NYT]

• Prompted by last week’s Times article, J Street has called for a U.S. Treasury investigation into pro-settler charities. [JTA]

My favorite Seinfeld Steinbrenner scene. Although, as Queens residents, wouldn’t the Costanzas be Mets fans?

| MySpace Video

• Haifa U. has a breaking news report: Better-looking politicians tend to be more successful. Who’da thunk it? [JPost]

• President Obama reaches out in an Israeli TV interview. [JPost]

• An artist has put old pictures of Jews who used to live in Lublin, Poland, at real-life spots in the modern-day town. [Ronen Dvarim]

• Jason Diamond praises Dalkey Archive Press’s Hebrew literature series. [Jewcy]

• Grey Goose is now officially kosher. [Jerusalem Kosher News]

Washington City Paper has great photos of a Neturei Karta anti-Zionist rally in the nation’s capital yesterday.

Fishkoff discusses when ballparks began to have exclusively kosher stands (the first, I’m proud to say, was Oriole Park at Camden Yards, in 1993), and explains why Hebrew National isn’t sufficient for many Orthodox Jews. My favorite point of Fishkoff’s, though, concerns the ad campaign’s timing, which

captured a pivotal moment in American Jewish history: a newly confident but still largely immigrant community, basking in Israel’s victory in the June 1967 war, was almost reflexively looking back over its shoulder, not quite sure of its position in the majority-Christian society.

American Jews have always tried to balance their desire to be fully American with an equally strong desire to preserve their Jewish identity. As the social historian [and Tablet Magazine contributor] Jenna Weissman Joselit points out, one way that immigrant groups cement their position in a new society is by appropriating the foods of the dominant culture while simultaneously integrating their own into the mix. What better way for Jews to signal their full acceptance into American society than by stamping their imprimatur—kosher certification—on that most American of food products, the hot dog?

Next: Pesadik cookie dough.

Red, White and Kosher [NYT]
Earlier: Kosher Is Hip
It Oughta Be Kosher

“We’re all Jews, we’re all on the same team,” says Tov owner Ron Rosenbluth. “I’m more than happy to help a fellow Jew in any way I can.”

Abramoff, who used to own and operate a kosher restaurant in Washington, D.C., is helping out with “all aspects” of Tov’s business, particularly marketing strategies. For starters: He is educating the business as to the principle that there is no such thing as bad P.R.

Abramoff To Work at Tov Pizza [Baltimore Jewish Times]

• In a similar vein, J.J. Goldberg argues that the silent majority of American Jews is getting drowned out. [Haaretz]

• An environmental group warns that the stretch of the Jordan River from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea is in danger of drying out. Between Israel, Jordan, and Syria, 98 percent of river water is diverted. [JTA]

• Yuri Foreman: The ESPN profile. [ESPN]

• Prime KO, a Japanese joint on the Upper West Side “where kosher aspires to be cool,” opens. [City Room]

• Jewish Funds for Justice, which initiated a Gulf Coast charity after Hurricane Katrina, is asking for donations related to the oil spill. [Jewish Funds for Justice]

Check out Deputy Editor Gabe Sanders’s interview with Chilean-American author Ariel Dorfman from the PEN festival.

We started the night with a round of drinks from Traif’s imaginative cocktail list. This allowed me to order my only item with the word “bacon” in it: Henry Bacon’s Bathwater, a refreshing medley of Meyer-lemon-infused vodka, cucumber, and St. Germaine. My friends were also pleased with their cocktails and wines.
Round 1: Tie.

We first ordered a hearts of palm appetizer that we all could enjoy, but it proved unimpressive. Bottomless Pit became distracted by the crisp pork-belly appetizer with her name on it. Soon, my favorite dish of the night arrived: marinated yellowtail, asparagus, Meyer lemon, shitake. Very agreeable spicy tuna tartare on tempura eggplant with kecap manis followed.
Round 2: Kosher person.

Thus ended the possibilities of dishes I could eat. Fish Lover ordered herself “sea scallops, snap and English pea risotto, caper-brown butter,” and Bottomless Pit surveyed the hangar steak with potato latkes. The scallops were well received, but the hangar steak was overcooked.
Round 3: Non-kosher people.

As the night wore on, I noticed that the Adventurous Jew (who doesn’t eat at non-kosher restaurants) kept sampling food. At first it was the raw fish, then the cheese, then the risotto around the scallops. Eventually, he dove into the scallops. Adventurous Jew ate trayf for the first time at Traif. “Tastes like fish,” he said.

To test the restaurant’s flexibility toward people with dietary boundaries, I asked if there were meat or shellfish dishes I could order sans meat or shellfish. The staff graciously obliged, but what remained of the pancetta and pork-belly appetizers minus pancetta and pork belly wasn’t very tasty.

The rest of my party ordered the bacon-wrapped blue-cheese-stuffed dates with spinach a la catalana, and the braised BBQ short rib slides, smoked gouda, and sweet potato fries. The former was unremarkable, but latter turned out to be the hit of the night. Bottomless Pit loved it. Adventurous Jew—more adventurous than we’d bargained for—looked like he was in heaven.
Round 4: I am losing.

For dessert, we ordered “bacon doughtnuts, dulche de leche, coffee ice cream” and “candy bar: dark chocolate, p.b., raspberry, pistachio ice cream.” I could only eat the latter (“p.b.,” luckily, meant “peanut butter,” not “pork belly”), but the former seemed to be the real star. Adventurous Jew bit into the bacon doughnut, closed his eyes, and said, “This is the best sufganiya I’ve ever had.”
Round 5: Game over.

I lost in a landslide. But I’ll be dreaming about that yellowtail for the rest of my life.

• The Iowa meatpacking plant once owned by kosher slaughter behemoth Agriprocessors, which shut down after a 2008 immigration raid, is producing (kosher) beef again for the first time, its new owner says. [Vos Iz Neias]

• An Israeli bookstore chain stopped selling a book called The National Left, a political manifesto denouncing settlers and calling for a revival of the Israeli left wing, after receiving “many complaints that the book hurts the feelings of some of our customers.” [NYT]

• The Nation reexamines the life and legacy of the late Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg. [The Nation]

• Self-congratulations are due: the Webby Awards have named Tablet Magazine an honoree in the category of “Religion and Spirituality” on the Web! [Webby Awards]

To clear the air, I called up Rabbi Charles M. Feinberg of Adas Israel, the Conservative synagogue in Washington, D.C., which is the chosen congregation of both the Israeli Embassy and my family. Rabbi Feinberg confirmed that, indeed, normal cookie dough, even eaten as cookie dough, is not Pesadik. “Because the dough is sitting together, there’s a minimal amount of leavening,” he explained. This would probably apply even if you mixed the flour and water but then ate it—without baking it—in under 18 minutes. “The rabbis defined it in this way,” he added, “that’s part of what Judaism became, part of the old tradition. It’s in the Talmud, and that’s the basis for most of our observance.” Well, phooey.

Earlier: It Oughta Be Kosher!

• Savoy, the Manhattan restaurant that trail-blazed the currently haute local-food movement, is leading a trend of seders-in-restaurants with a Sephardic-themed affair next week. [Forward]

• Ooh, and here are several more NYC restaurants with some great seder offerings. [Grub Street]

• Iranian seders sound awesome. [NYT]

• A restaurant called Traif—“Specializing in pork, shellfish, and love”—is opening in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, not far from a huge Hasidic enclave. [Bang it Out]

• Kosher wine that’s actually, y’know, good. [NYT]

• Untouchables-style, Israeli police raided a warehouse containing seven tons of matzoh with fake kosher certificates. [AP/Google]

• Many folks know that The Last Supper was actually a Passover seder. Well, it probably wasn’t. [Biblical Archaeology Review]

• Gatorade has started getting Orthodox Union kosher certification and is actively marketing to the yeshiva set. [The Jewish Star]

My first thought was to make lettuce wraps with crab salad. Then I considered a rabbit terrine, only to discover that the hare, a cud-chewing animal without a cloven foot, has been prohibited since Leviticus. I considered making a bluefish pate, but I realized I probably shouldn’t serve a cream cheese-heavy recipe at a meal where there would be meat. Instead of continuing with the guesswork, I decided to throw myself into a culinary investigation about how to make my repertoire kosher for Passover. By the end, I knew more about biblical dietary laws than my host.

After long hours online, I could point out the differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardic rules. I could recite a list of kosher animals and explain why camel doesn’t qualify but giraffe does. (In short, the camel chews its cud, but doesn’t have a cloven hoof. The giraffe ruminates and has the right feet.) I had learned, from the essays of two different experts, what to do if I found a blood spot in an egg. (One said if the spot was in the white, it could be removed. The other said the whole egg had to be thrown out.)

“Do you think I should kasher my utensils?” I emailed Matt. “And do you avoid kitniyot for Passover, or is rice OK?”

“You’ll have to ask my father,” he replied, befuddled. “And, failing that, a rabbi.”

After peppering Matt with this litany of questions, a suggestion emerged: chicken liver pate. It was a challenge heightened by my inexperience with livers, but the stakes were already high: Matt’s seder would start with homemade matzo ball soup and move on to a brisket that he had braised for days. There would be two perfectly roasted chickens, platters of vegetables, and all the symbolic holiday foods. I quaked at the idea that I would show up with a sub-par spread—the kind that makes people go silent, or, worse yet, mutter a tepid “mmmm.” There was a promising recipe in the Gourmet magazine cookbook. I perused the ingredients: onion (kosher), garlic (kosher), butter (I’d substitute olive oil). It called for a pound of chicken livers. I bought two—just in case—at a pop-up Passover store on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Rounding out the recipe were currants and Cognac, and a kosher for Passover brandy was easy to find in New York City. During my trial run in the kitchen, I trimmed too much of the chicken fat. The pate was insufficiently creamy. I called my cousin Jeannie, one of the best cooks in my family.

“Easy fix,” she said. “Add a tablespoon of bacon fat.” It was the first time in my culinary career that bacon couldn’t save me.

I made a batch with more chicken fat, a little more oil. The result was better. I outfitted the rest of my appetizer platter with snacks that could do no wrong: pickles and vegetarian spreads. Then I hit my final roadblock. I needed something to dunk in my red pepper dip, something on which the pate could be spread. I’d gathered that chips are chametz and would not do. It had to be matzo. I realize some people love matzo. But, for others, no amount of butter, honey, or charoset will liven it up. I bought garlic matzo and rosemary matzo and plain, broke them up into shards, arranged them alongside my various spreads. Given a second chance, I’d bring endive for the dip.

“You know,” said Matt as he noshed, “we’re not that strict, and it’s not even sundown yet. You could have served this pate on toast.”

My hors d’oeuvres were a hit. More important, the creativity required had imparted a sense of occasion. For me, it made that night truly Different From All Other Nights. In fact, after the first few sumptuous courses, the menu is a blur. I recall, instead, the songs we sang—I knew “Dayenu” from Quaker grade school—and the surprisingly delicious variety of kosher wines.

Recently, I phoned Matt to see if he could remember what flourless dessert he served. “I think I made your pear cake,” he said. “You gave me the recipe.”

“But that cake is leavened,” I said.

“Oh?” he said. “Is that a problem?”

Basically, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer have done extensive research (no, but really) into both fictional creatures and the laws of kashrut to determine whether 34 imaginary animals are kosher or not. Only seven are, including the biblical Behemoth, Leviathan, and Ziz. (Jewcy took a look at a few of these as well a couple months ago.)

Oh, and if you want to learn a bit more about mythical animals from Jewish folklore—presumably they are more likely not to be trayf, right?—Tablet Magazine had the skinny on several last Halloween.

It’s the Monster Manual With Manischewitz [i09]

Related: The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals [Jewcy]
A Very Hebrew Halloween [Tablet Magazine]

• A small group of ultra-Orthodox rabbis declared lox to be unkosher due to a certain parasite that salmon can host. Most rabbis disagree, though, so stick that on your bagel and eat it. [Grub Street]

• Prominent Palestinian lawyer Elias Khoury was moved by his son’s murder by a Palestinian terrorist to pay for the translation of top Israeli writer Amos Oz into Arabic. [NYT]

• Hannah Rosenthal, the Obama administration’s anti-Semitism envoy and a one-time J Street board member, said that anti-Semitism’s foes need more non-Jews on their side. [JTA]

• Eight Republican senators expressed worry over appointing a U.S. ambassador to Syria for the first time in five years. [Laura Rozen]

• Los Angeles Laker star, skilled defender, and crazy person Ron Artest had the word “Defense” dyed into his (dyed-yellow) hair in several languages, including Hebrew. [Deadspin]

Below, the making of the haircut:

Kosher food has even become a totem for the Bourgeois-Bohemian set. Pomegranate market—“the kosher Whole Foods”—is located in a largely Orthodox neighborhood deep in Brooklyn, but that has not stopped it from attracting hordes of yuppies who live in brownstones closer to Manhattan. If you’re familiar with the demographics of Park Slope and Boerum Hill, you know that kosher food’s appeal for most of these people is not religious. Although in fairness, and as you know if you’re familiar with their demographics, not a few of these people are Jewish.

For Some, ‘Kosher’ Equals Pure [NYT]

“A new real estate firm bought the building and I couldn’t get a new lease, I was evicted, whatever you want to call it,” said Diamond Dairy owner Samuel Strauss, who used to commute every day from the Orthodox suburb of Monsey, in Westchester County, to this block of West 47th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues. Strauss noted that nearly two dozen other tenants have met the same fate: “In about two years he wants this building completely vacant. He wants to turn it into a fancy office building.” Strauss said that by mid-January he will begin looking for a venue in the diamond district where he can reopen.

The old-fashioned dairy restaurant’s chief mourners are the jewelers who work in the area, many of them Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox Jews.

“I used to eat there every day,” said vendor Gaby Raz. “Delicious food. The best tuna fish, scrambled eggs, blintzes, cholent. I remember when I first came here”—in 1976—“the old woman who had opened the place was still there. She reminded me of my grandmother.”

A room adjacent to the restaurant was used daily for mincha, the afternoon prayer service, and Talmud study, which made it an even more popular destination.

“If somebody comes to midtown from anywhere in the United States and they want to daven mincha, they come here,” said Yitzchok Fleischer, another vendor. The short service would be held six times in a row so that if a worshiper missed one, another would quickly follow.

Diamond Dairy also drove business to the jewelers on the floor below, including the many tourists for whom the restaurant was a New York landmark. They’re still showing up, Raz said, not knowing that the restaurant has closed.

“People are shocked. They almost cry,” Raz said. “Let me tell you, darling: nothing in life is forever. Nothing but Hashem.”

In a jury trial held in Sioux Falls, South Dakota (defense attorneys feared that Iowa jurors would be biased against Rubashkin because of pretrial publicity), Rubashkin was found guilty of bank fraud, making false statements to a bank, mail fraud, and money laundering, the Des Moines Register reports. He was found not guilty of five additional charges of failing to pay livestock providers within a 24-hour window required by law. Defense attorneys “tried to portray Mr. Rubashkin as a bumbling businessman who was in over his head,” said the AP, but prosecutors successfully countered in his closing arguments that “Mr. Rubashkin had been aware of the fraud at the plant and that to assume otherwise was ‘ridiculous.’”

Rubashkin’s attorneys say they intend to appeal. They are also seeking to dismiss the charges related to money laundering because, they say, Rubashkin did not profit from the crime. “It’s unbelievable,” Rubashkin’s daughter Roza Weiss told the Argus Leader, a Sioux Falls paper. “My only comment is, we’re Jewish and we’re proud of it.” The Rubashkins are part of the Chabad-Lubavitch sect of ultra-Orthodox Judaism.

Jury: Fmr. Slaughterhouse Manager Guilty of Fraud [AP]
Sholom Rubashkin Guilty on 86 Charges in Fraud Trial Involving Postville Meat Plant [Des Moines Register]
Rubashkin Found Guilty on 86 Counts [Argus Leader]

Witnesses Say Fraud in Postville Occurred for Years [Des Moines Register]
Slaughterhouse Worker: Manager Was Incompetent [AP]
Judge in Rubashkin Case Refuses to Order Mistrial [Des Moines Register]

Bacon-Wrapped Matzvah [Sic] Balls With Top Chef Ilan Hall [LAJJ]

It’s a Fine Broth of a Campaign [NYT]

Growing up in a kosher home, I always took for granted that I’d be confronting a limited menu, though the way my family practiced kashrut was a lot less restrictive than the way some other families did. We had two sets of dishes, of course, and never mixed milk and meat. We never ate a huge amount of meat anyway, but what we did consume was kosher. Anything on the list of forbidden animals (from the obvious—pig, shellfish—to the less intuitive, like catfish) was verboten. We ate in restaurants pretty often, which wouldn’t have been possible if we were limiting ourselves to kosher ones; in public, we were vegetarians by default. Perhaps owing something to the fact that my father is a Reform rabbi, we were practically the only family I knew who kept kosher, but our version of things made sense to me and was what I’d always known.

It was so ingrained in me that that’s what kashrut was—basic vigilance, and some manageable rules that were foreign to most people—that I was shocked to discover that more observant Jews made kashrut look like obsessive-compulsiveness. For them, kashrut meant they couldn’t eat in non-kosher restaurants or in the homes of friends who didn’t keep kosher. Everything they bought—from chicken to cereal to chocolate—needed to be certified by a solemn rabbinic authority. Conscious consumption was one thing, but it seemed strange to me to take such fanatical caution with absolutely everything you ate. The fundamental rules of kashrut, as I understood them, were about there being things you could eat and things you couldn’t. Cheese pizza, Goldfish crackers, and unfrosted Poptarts might not have a hecksher, but what could possibly be un-kosher about them?

I might have gone on to decide that an illicit cheeseburger was the perfect act of teenage heresy. Instead, I became a vegetarian. It just made sense: I was hanging around with a bunch of vigilant animal-rights types, and at 14, in a small town north of New York City, taking that kind of stand was invigorating. Although I flirted with militancy, the decision was more instinctive than ideological. I didn’t even really like burgers. And though I had come to believe that all meat consumption was wrong, it was some comfort to know (as I digested some very convincing propaganda: horrifying undercover footage of blood-clogged slaughterhouses, and pamphlets that graphically detailed the injustices of jam-packed feed lots), that I’d never really been implicated in any of it. Those particular slaughterhouses weren’t where kosher meat came from; surely those would look different. For all of kashrut’s strange rules, the ethics had always been what really spoke to my family. My dad liked to say that keeping kosher was the next best thing to being a vegetarian; since keeping kosher meant animals suffered less, your meat supposedly arrived on your plate with less baggage. By choosing to keep kosher, I reasoned, Jews could opt out of the particularly appalling practices of the mainstream meat industry. I could rag on my parents for their occasional steaks and barbecued chicken, but compared to the rest of the world, they were less culpable.

By becoming a vegetarian, I was conveniently exempting myself from the specifics of kosher laws, But I was also building on those principles as my family practiced them, taking certain ethics to their logical conclusion. Being a vegetarian just meant I didn’t have to understand any of it in Jewish terms. Not surprisingly, I wasn’t thinking about that at the time.

Over the years, people would ask me why I shunned meat and fish: was it because of health issues? Moral ones? Did I think I’d eat this way forever? I’d shrug and say I didn’t know, and explain that it was hard to picture myself doing otherwise. Every once in awhile I’d find veganism seductive, and would tell myself that if I really cared about animal welfare, I wouldn’t eat eggs and milk products, either. Somewhere along the way, though, any dogma that once motivated my diet fell away. I started to remember that I’d made a choice. “We do what we can,” I began rationalizing, the handy slogan equal parts truth, consolation, and evasion.

I won’t try to explain my shift, because I can’t necessarily defend it. Let’s just say that my Food Network infatuation and habit of binging on food criticism took their toll: for the first time, I’m finding I want to taste prosciutto-wrapped figs, crab cakes, and southern fried chicken from the place down the street. I want to explore mysterious, possibly gross, yet fascinating foods like raw oysters. There’s a delicious novelty to eating certain things for the very first time in my late twenties, like I’m starting from scratch.

At least in theory—I haven’t quite gotten there yet. Some subconscious limits are hard to overcome. That redfish was one thing, but when I see shrimp or crab on a menu, my eye instinctively glosses over them. I’m daunted: it’s not my food. We don’t eat that, says a voice in my head. Theoretically, I may be eager to eat adventurously, but my childhood eating habits are having an unexpected influence on what I can stomach. Though I’ve never felt strongly about keeping kosher, I can’t deny the hold its basic rules have on me, more than a dozen years after I last ate anything they specifically sanctioned. It’s a reflex, really—a blocked nerve.

When I was growing up, my family’s diet reinforced the fact that we were different, at a time when that was the last thing I needed to be reminded of. When my mom was a kid, her family didn’t keep kosher outside their house in any way. And my dad’s family didn’t keep kosher at all. “I certainly don’t feel commanded to do it,” my mom told me recently. Jewishness is ingrained in me in ways I can’t always explain, and one of the places it’s hunkered down seems to be my palate. But I don’t want to relate to it by way of restrictions on things I’ve never experienced. Left up to me, Judaism isn’t about what I can’t have, or won’t try. For that, there’s always vegetarianism.

Thanks in large part to companies like Prince and Ragu, many of our ideas of Italian food revolve around pasta and tomato sauce, chicken parmesan, and sausage and peppers. It may not be real Italian food, but it is real Italian-American food. Meantime, a whole industry tells us that Italian cuisine encompasses more than marinara. Marcella Hazan, Paul Bertolli, Lydia Bastianich, and the omnipresent Mario Batali have staked their careers on broadening the Italian culinary horizon.

Add to their ranks Edda Servi Machlin, who wrote The Classic Cooking of the Italian Jews: Traditional Recipes and Menus and a Memoir of a Vanished Way of Life, published by Giro Press more than 28 years ago. Though her original book is long out of print, many of its recipes are included in the still-available Classic Italian Jewish Cooking. Her pioneering example also inspired a number of other books on Italian-Jewish cooking, notably Joyce Goldstein’s Cucina Ebraica and The Jewish-Sicilian Cookbook by Pamela Hensley Vincent.

While Jews were and are scattered throughout Italy, the region of Pitigliano in Tuscany was once home to is largest concentration, and that’s where Machlin grew up. Because of community’s relative robustness, Pitigliano became a hub known for its libraries—one of religious texts and another for secular texts—that drew scholars from all over the country. It had an old, beautiful synagogue. There was no discernable tension between Pitigliano’s Jews and Catholics, many of whom adopted Hebrew words into their vocabulary and Jewish dishes, like a honey-nut “sfratti,” the classic pastry of Pitigliano’s Jews, into their cooking.

Machlin’s book, which tells the story of Pitigliano Jews before it gets to recipes, is ultimately commemorative. Although she paints her early childhood as largely idyllic, she came of age as Fascism started exerting itself. The tone of Machlin’s story—so joyous and nostalgic at the start—becomes elegiac when she describes how the Fascists’ grip first eroded the bonds between the Jews and Catholics, then led to physical segregation, discrimination, and, ultimately to persecution and destruction of the synagogue. (It has since been restored but is now a museum, not a house of worship.) The town itself was bombed during World War II and today has lost its Jewish population, and Machlin’s recipes are, perhaps, the most vivid and living keepsakes of a heritage that spanned a thousand years.

Though Machlin’s recipes deviate from some Italian conventions (she refrains, for example, from butter in veal scallopine in deference to the rules of kashrut, substituting instead olive oil,), she take the same approach as other Italian food champions. The cuisine, they all imply, is authenticially Italian because it fetishizes stark simplicity and out-of-the-garden freshness,an attitude many Italian cooks seem to feel is unique to the terroir of Italy. Of course, there are ways of disguising a lack of these components.

On my initial trip through the book, I found a recipe for risotto with mushrooms, an easy cheat if your ingredients are subpar. Simply dump as much cream and parmesan in as you can, and no one will know whether your vegetables are inferior. Most risotto recipes call for chicken or beef stock, and virtually every one is finished with parmesan. If you are kosher observant, you must find another way. The Pitigliano Jews use water. This may not sound like a big deal, but to an aspiring culinary professional, like me, it was astounding. At school, we’re taught the immutable doctrine that stock is the key to risotto. And to not use it, well, now I’m tempted to throw the word “authentic” around. I wondered, why would Machlin not recommend vegetable stock? Perhaps because boiling pounds and pounds of perfectly edible vegetables just to extract their flavor is, arguably, wasteful.

I had to try using Machlin’s water method to see the results. They were surprising. The finished risotto was a little lighter on the palate than what I was used to, but tomato paste, seasoning, and salt helped compensate for the subtle depth of a good stock. And a generous helping of parmesan (the real thing, not the dreck from a jar), made the risotto great.

Not all of Machlin’s recipes are kosher variations on classics. She takes great pains to point out that artichoke dishes—risotto, golden fried, stuffed—so widely consumed today were the gift of Jewish cooks. At one time Jews were the only Italians using that vegetable. The same was true of eggplants and fennel, she points out, quoting the legendary cookbook author Pellegrino Artusi, who wrote that these vegetables “were considered vile food of the Jews.” The same is true for a veal and romaine salad, thought to have originated among Jewish cooks during Roman antiquity, now commonly found in trattorias. Sometimes, Machlin demonstrates the ingenuity in keeping kosher while simultaneous indulging in Italian specialties: the country’s love affair with pork is well documented, and Italians justly pride themselves on their prosciuttos, guancinales, and salamis. Machlin includes a number of cured meat recipes but makes prosciutto and salami out of goose rather than pork. Goose yields a similar amount of the fat essential to air-dried meats—but consuming it does not break any dietary laws.

Machlin includes a number of recipes for holidays and special occasions and offers complete menus for the High Holidays, Hanukkah, and Sukkot, some of which—like the chicken galantine—take some time and effort. But most of the dishes are straightforward, using few ingredients and the basic techniques of frying, braising, poaching, and roasting. This means each element needs to be of best quality—when a dish is simple, there’s not too many ways to disguise mediocre components—but it also underscores the book’s title. Machlin’s recipes are an illustration of how a bygone community ate day-to-day.

RECIPES

Risotto Coi Funghi (Risotto with Mushrooms)

¼ ounce imported dried porcini mushrooms

½ cup hot water

¾ pound fresh white mushrooms

1 small clove garlic, minced

½ cup olive oil

Salt

Freshly ground black pepper

1 tablespoon tomato paste

1 tablespoon freshly chopped Italian parsley

3 cups cold water

1 ½ cups short-grained rice (such as Arborio)

½ cup freshly grated parmesan cheese (optional)

Soak dried mushrooms in ½ cup hot water for five to 10 minutes. Wash, trim, and finely chop fresh mushrooms. Place in a small saucepan with garlic, oil, ½ teaspoon salt, and a dash or two of pepper. Lift soaked mushrooms from bath with a fork; reserve water. Chop finely and add to saucepan. Place on high heat and cook for approximately two minutes, stirring. Add tomato paste and cook for one more minute, stirring. Add the reserved mushroom water, taking great care to leave any dirt and sand from the soaked mushrooms at the bottom of the cup. Add the parsley and cook, uncovered, until all the liquid has evaporated and the sauce is nice and thick.

Bring three cups of water with a teaspoon of salt to a boil. Add rice and stir until boiling resumes. Lower heat and cook, covered, for about 13 minutes. Add mushroom sauce, stir to combine, and cook, covered, over low heat until rice is quite dry. Serve with or without cheese.

I also tried this recipe using the traditional method for making risotto. Sauté the rice in a few tablespoons olive oil and add about a cup of liquid. Stir constantly until the liquid is absorbed. Repeat with the other two cups of water. Add mushroom sauce and parmesan.

Scaloppine al Madera (Veal Scaloppine with Madeira Wine)

1½ pounds veal scaloppini

1½ teaspoons salt

¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

½ cu unbleached flour

6 tablespoons olive oil

1 medium onion, minced

1 clove garlic, minced

1 tablespoon freshly chopped Italian parsley

1 cup Madeira wine

1 ½ cups tomato juice or two tablespoons tomato paste diluted in 1½ cups water

Sprinkle the veal with salt and pepper; dredge with flour, and pat to shake off the excess.Heat the oil in large skillet with the onion, and cook over moderate heat until the onion is golden brown. Temporarily remove onion to a dish. Add veal to skillet and brown for two minutes on each side.

Return onion to skillet; add garlic, parsley, and Madeira, and cook over high heat for one or two minutes. Add the tomato juice or diluted paste and simmer, covered, for five to seven minutes longer. If the veal is of good quality, it should not take any longer to be cooked through and tender. If prepared in advance, simply heat through before serving.

Man on a Mission to Save the Jewish Deli [JTA]
Related: Meat Up [Tablet]

Top Chef [Bravotv.com]

The story of Tootsie Rolls began in 1896, when Leo Hirshfield opened a little corner candy shop in New York City. Although he made many candies, having come from a confectionary family in Austria, his most successful penny candy was a cylinder-shaped uniquely chewy cross between fudge and caramel, in a wrapper twisted at both ends, which he named for his five-year-old daughter Clara, nicknamed Tootsie. By 1922, the company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Joseph Rubin & Sons, originally box suppliers to Hirshfield, took control in 1935, with Bernard D. Rubin masterminding a plan to move manufacturing out of New York. When Bernard died in 1948, having expanded the company’s locations and increased its annual profits 12-fold, he was succeeded by his brother William, who headed the company until 1962. Headquartered today in Chicago, Tootsie Roll Industries is run by William’s daughter Ellen Gordon, 77, who has been president and CEO since 1972. Her husband Melvin Gordon, 81, has been chairman of the board since 1962. Neither seems ready to step down, which is just as well, given that among their four daughters there is no obvious heiress apparent. (One daughter, Karen Mills, clearly has administrative capability, having recently been appointed by President Barack Obama to head the U.S. Small Business Administration.) Over the years, Tootsie has acquired Charleston Chews, Andes Mints, Junior Mints, Sugar Daddies, Dots & Crows, Nik-L-Nip Wax Bottles, and Dubble Bubble. With plants around the world, the company produces more than 62 million Tootsie Rolls every day.

In 1880, David Goldenberg arrived in Philadelphia from Romania. (Born David Seltzer, he heard on the boat from Europe that Goldberg is a good name to have in America, and embellished it with an added syllable.) After working for a decade making candies for carnivals and fairs, he opened a store, where he sold a popular chewy walnut and molasses candy, and in 1917, the walnut roll mutated to a peanut confection since peanuts were cheaper. Goldenberg’s Peanut-Chews won government contracts as nutritious, non-melting ration bars for American troops in World War I. When David Goldenberg retired after the Second World War (during which the company won more military contracts), his children Sylvia and Harry bought the very successful Peanut-Chew division of the business. Goldenberg’s Peanut-Chews stayed in the family for two more generations, with Harry’s sons Carl and Ed expanding the varieties of Peanut-Chews to include Chew-Ets, smaller bite-sized versions of the original. In 2003, David Goldenberg’s great grandson, also named David Goldenberg, sold the business to the Just Born Candy Company, which continues making Peanut Chews and Chew-Ets, now minus the Goldenberg name.

Just Born’s founder Sam Born arrived in New York from Russia in 1910. He invented the process for hard chocolate coating of Eskimo Pies, created a machine that mechanically inserted sticks into lollipops, and came up with a chocolate-sprinkle producing machine, whose yield—Jimmies—were named for the employee who operated the apparatus. Born opened a shop in Brooklyn in 1923. His brothers-in-law, Irv and Jack Shaffer, became partners in the business and in 1932, they moved to an empty printing factory in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Just Born introduced the popular Mike and Ike candies in 1940, whose name was likely inspired by the 1937 song “Mike and Ike,” which in turn was based on a 1920s Rube Goldberg comic strip. In 1953, Just Born acquired Rodda, a jelly bean company which also made a small line of marshmallow sweets, among them an Easter Peep. It took 27 hours to produce the Peep by hand. Sam Born’s son, Bob, invented a machine that reduced that time to six minutes, and today the company is the world’s biggest manufacturer of marshmallow confections. While Mike and Ike and Hot Tamales are kosher, Peeps, made with gelatin to achieve its signature squishy texture, are not. “We see no conflict in offering a non-kosher brand or one that is so associated with Easter. We are a candy company for everyone,” said Ross Born (Bob Born’s son), an observant Jew and co-CEO of the company. The 86-year-old family business “is most definitely influenced by being Jewish,” says Ross Born, who will be inducted into the Candy Hall of Fame this fall. “Like many people, much of our philosophy about operating our business emanates from our background: the importance of family (caring about others, appreciating who they are), the importance of education (how to learn from each other and also from our mistakes), and the importance of values (our statement of philosophy that supports our vision).”

Dubble Bubble ruled the bubble gum market when Abraham, Ira, Philip, and Joseph Shorin developed Bazooka Bubble Gum, recognizing, as World War II ended, that the wartime slogan for their spearmint-flavored Topps Chewing Gum, “Don’t Talk Chum, Chew Topps Gum!” (a variation of “loose lips sink ships”) was about to become obsolete. Topps was established in 1938 by the four Shorins, after their father’s American Leaf Tobacco business (founded in 1890 in Crown Heights, Brooklyn) faltered during the Depression. (Their father, Morris Chigorinsky, changed his name to Shorin after he arrived from Russia in 1888.) Wanting to take advantage of his tobacco distribution channels with a product they could sell to those same outlets, the brothers relaunched the family business with a name—Topps—which echoes a Cole Porter lyric. When sugar was rationed during World War II, Topps bought up small candy companies in order to close them up and use their sugar quotas. Topps thrived even while larger gum brands went out of business. In 1950, Topps changed focus with the introduction of celebrity trading cards, starting with Hopalong Cassidy, but turning to baseball players a year later. Originally developed as a clever means of getting people to buy more gum, the baseball cards quickly turned into a lucrative centerpiece of the business. Serious collectors don’t want the value of the cards compromised by gum residue, and gum is no longer packaged with the trading cards. In the ensuing decades, Topps went from a publicly traded company to a privately held one, expanding all the while, with Ring Pops (the Topps bestseller, introduced in 1977 and certified Kosher just this year), Push Pops, Baby Bottle Pops, Pro Flip Pops, and the just-introduced Wazoo. Arthur Shorin, 74, son of Joseph (on whom Bazooka Joe was modeled), was CEO at Topps from 1980 until 2007, when Michael Eisner’s investment firm, the Tornante Company, took over. Eisner is reportedly planning to make a movie based on Bazooka Joe, whom he regards as an American icon. “Bazooka Joe is my new Mickey Mouse,” the former Disney CEO has said.

The Annabelle Candy story began when founder Sam Altshuler arrived from Russia in 1917, though he arrived via China (with forged identity papers), beginning his new life in Seattle instead of New York. He worked various food-related jobs until he found his way to San Francisco, where, in 1950, he developed his chocolate-and-cashew-covered marshmallow bar, which he called Rocky Road, made in his kitchen, and sold from a pushcart on Market Street. Rocky Road was so successful Altshuler opened a factory, naming the business for his daughter Annabelle. Fifteen years later, the company moved to Hayward, California, and in 1971, when Altshuler died, Annabelle Altshuler Block took over. The following year, the company acquired the Golden Nugget Candy Company, makers of Big Hunk and Look, and six years after that, it also purchased the Cardinet Candy Company, bringing U-No and Abba Zaba candy bars into the Annabelle family. Altshuler’s grandson Gary Gogol ran the company for several years and then in 1995 handed it off to his sister Susan Gamson Karl, a former deputy district attorney in Los Angeles, who is the company’s current President and CEO. “My mother’s name was actually Hanna Basha on her birth certificate,” Karl said. “But she started calling herself Annabelle because it sounded more American.” Although most of the Annabelle candy bars are kosher, that is “a business decision, not a choice about any personal religious belief or identification,” Karl said, as many consumers consider kosher certification to signify a high standard of quality control.

The first generation Jewish immigrants scrabbled for traction in the land of opportunity. The next generation built on the foundations laid down by those entrepreneurs who parlayed determination and ambition into success and prosperity. Subsequent generations, born with so much opportunity, have the privilege of pursuing entrepreneurial ambition while making the world a better place.

Deborah Schimberg founded Verve, Incorporated, makers of Glee Gum, in 1992. A motivated community organizer who founded a community land trust and a dual-language immersion elementary public school, Schimberg is also the Executive Director of Social Venture Partners of Rhode Island, a consortium of donors devoted to entrepreneurial philanthropy. Verve is a family business “dedicated to linking world communities and creating environmentally and socially responsible products and activities.” Their first product, still in production, is a Make Your Own Chewing Gum kit, was inspired by a visit to an economically depressed chicle-producing village in northern Guatemala. Chicle, the sap extracted from the Sapodilla tree by workers called chicleros, was once used for all chewing gum, but has been replaced by cheaper and more efficient synthetics. Glee Gum, the only American brand made from chicle today, is the natural next step on a path of what Schimberg calls a Jewish social conscience, “Doing well—making money while doing something you love—and also doing good.” Katharine Weber is the author of several books, including the forthcoming novel, True Confections, to be published in December from Shaye Areheart Books.

Restaurants that feature the specialties of India’s southern Madras region, along with those of Gujarat and Punjab in the north, cook for members of Hindu sects, such as the Jain, who adhere to the strictest vegetarian diets, shunning meat, fish, eggs, and cheese set with rennet. These restaurants were thus de facto kosher and their owners sought the corresponding certification as they realized they could attract a potential new group of customers.

About 30 years ago, I was introduced by Indian friends to just such a restaurant in Manhattan, Madras Woodlands, now relocated to Long Island. N.Y. I was unaware that it was vegetarian, and it was not yet kosher. My friends ordered an intriguing meal of savory diversity—crunchy and hotly spiced appetizer salads of crisped rice puffs and legumes, followed by a rainbow of saucy curries of mellow eggplant, okra, cauliflower and green beans, parchment crisp breads, juicy biryanis golden with saffron and flecked with dates and nuts, soothing sauces based on yogurt and black lentils, fiery but gently soft pancakes dotted with peas and onions or white cheese or coconut and cilantro. There was so much heft to flavors and rich textures that were so organoleptically satisfying, that I never missed having any meat.

Since then I have frequented Madras Mahal, a New York favorite, although others here, such as Chennai Garden and Pongal, have been well-reviewed. Outside of the northeast, you can find Madras Pavilion in Texas, Amma’s Kitchen in Cincinnati, and Pabla Indian Cuisine in Seattle.

If you have suggestions of certified kosher vegetarian Indian restaurants where you live, let us know by sending an email to life@tabletmag.com.

Newcomers to the Indian vegetarian meal might find it useful to have a brief glossary. The following are fairly typical of all such menus as are inexpensive weekday buffet lunches.

Appetizers

Iddly: snowy white, semolina-like steamed dumplings of lentil and rice, with various dips

Vadai: crisply fried lentil crullers, with various dips

Kachori: crunchy fried balls of chickpeas and green pea

Bhel puri: a tossing of rice puffs, thin noodles, golden wisps of onions, and sweet-sour sauce

Bhaji: sliced vegetables fried in a golden batter

Chaat: potato (alu), chickpeas (channa), or fruits flavored with mint and spice

Samosa: lightly fried turnovers plumped with spiced vegetables

Dosai and Breads

Dosai: huge parchment thin and crisp folded sheets of a bread-crepe baked on a stone griddle, usually plain or filled with seasoned butter-mashed potatoes

Paratha: flaky layered bread that may be stuffed

Poori: huge puffed whole wheat balloons

Chappati: unspiced whole wheat flat bread

Rice dishes

Pilaus and biryanis: sweetly scented basmati rice tossed with various vegetables, saffron, tomato, dried fruits, nuts, and spices

Main courses

Uttapam: eggless pancake omelets of rice and lentil flours filled with various vegetables

Vegetable curries: softly aromatic stews based on okra, eggplant, greenbeans, spinach, and legumes

Alu gobhi: cauliflowerets with potato, ginger, garlic, and other spices

Garnishes

Raita: yogurt sauce that may have cucumber, coriander, or spices—a must with hotly seasoned dishes

Daal: a velvety sauce of simmered yellow or, preferably, black lentils

Chutney: pungent relishes of lemon, onion, mango, and more

Desserts

Kheer: a soft sort of white custard of rice, sugar, milk, and almonds

Kulfi: milk ice cream subtly seasoned with cardamom, almonds, pistachios, and rosewater

Gulab jamon: fried squiggles of dough in sweet syrup

My hands quivered as I inserted the disc into my gaming console. I revere Ghost Busters, the 1984 Ivan Reitman comedy, the way some men worship sports teams, rock bands, or organized religions. I quote it often. I think about it frequently. I sometimes pass by 14 N. Moore Street in Manhattan just to look at the firehouse that served as Ghostbusters HQ in the film. A chance to play as a new Ghostbusters’ recruit, to slap on a proton pack and blast some ghouls, felt less like a game and more like a childhood dream come true.

After completing a short training session, I found myself joining Dr. Peter Venkman (voiced in the game, as in the original film, by the peerless Bill Murray) in the lobby of the Sedgwick Hotel. Slimer, the green and gluttonous ghost, had escaped from captivity, and found his way back to his old haunt, seeking refreshments in the hotel’s luxurious ballroom. But the hotel’s manager, a pixelated persnickety dude, told Venkman and me that the ballroom was off limits. The Rodriguez bar mitzvah was about to begin, and, ghost or no ghost, the hotel couldn’t risk alienating its customers.

As Venkman snuck us in through the kitchen, blasting everything in sight with his proton beam, my mind wandered. The Rodriguez bar mitzvah? Sure, I thought, there were probably Jews named Rodriguez, but why choose such an atypical name in a medium not usually given to nuance? Finally finding my way into the hall, I realized that their last name wasn’t the only thing that made the Rodriguez’s simcha unusual: there on the buffet table, right next to the wine bottles and the silver candlesticks, were a few huge chunks of honey-glazed ham.

I froze in my tracks. It was time, I realized, to make a major decision about my identity. Was I a Jew first and a Ghostbuster second? Or was it the other way around? Do I catch the ghost? Or do I take care of the treyf? My heart beat fast. Then, suddenly, I knew just what I needed to do.

Ignoring Venkman’s repeated pleas to help him with the manic Slimer, I walked decisively over to the buffet. I took my time, making sure my aim was just right. Then, I pressed the button, and blasted the offensive ham into smithereens. I stopped and smiled. But what happened next left me astonished: a bright-colored tag popped up on the upper left-hand corner of the screen. I had accomplished, the game informed me, one of its many hidden mini-missions, little puzzles meant to keep gamers on their toes and help them score more points. “Achievement unlocked,” read the tag, followed by one more unexpected word: “Kosher!”

So the mission, I thought with amazement, wasn’t just about capturing the fugitive apparition. It was also about making sure the Rodriguezs enjoy a halachically proper party.

I refocused my beam on Slimer with renewed zeal. My heart was at ease. In this strange and wonderful game, I realized, busting ghosts and blasting pork were just two sides of the same coin. I was a Jew and a Ghostbuster, just like I always wanted to be.