Jewish food that actively thumbs its nose at the laws of kashrut clearly holds tremendous social allure for some. As Jeffrey Yoskowitz wrote in the Atlantic, Traif’s Marcus “is counting on other Jews to hear about his restaurant and think, ‘Cool, I’m a non-kosher Jew too.’ ” Indeed, most of the critical praise earned by establishments like Traif and Mile End has highlighted—knowingly or not—the clever disjuncture of embracing Jewishness while simultaneously rebelling against it. Thus when the New York Times fawned over Traif’s “seared foie gras, slumming it with fingerling potatoes, crisp shards of ham, and a fried egg, all dribbled with maple syrup and hot sauce,” the reviewer, Ligaya Mishan, had to add: “Now this is chutzpah.”

Before starting rabbinical school at the Jewish Theological Seminary in 2009, I put in time behind the stoves at Telepan on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where I smoked upward of 5,000 trout, and at Restaurant Saul, in Brooklyn, not far from Mile End, where I once cooked by candlelight when the block lost power in the middle of dinner service. At the time I was working in kitchens I was not observant—and I therefore ate just about every abomination in the book. I also learned all the tricks at chefs’ disposals. But now I know some of the rabbis’ tricks, too, and, with this dual knowledge, I can’t help but see the menus offered up by this new generation of trayf-worshippers as lazy—not religiously, necessarily, but culinarily.

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Traditional Jewish foods, mostly of Ashkenazi origins, have been cropping up on the American culinary landscape for more than a century. For most of that time, their makers have frequently disregarded the dietary restrictions that historically characterized Jewish eating. (The Carnegie Deli, founded in 1937, has been slinging matzo brei alongside ham and eggs for decades.) Neither these older restaurateurs nor their contemporary counterparts are interested in kashrut—to say nothing of their customers. Rather, as Leah Koenig, author of The Hadassah Everyday Cookbook, told me, they aim to “celebrate Jewish heritage and cuisine in a broader more global context.” They aren’t concerned with the ritual specificity of traditional Jewish eating, and they divorce themselves from the emphasis on inwardness, on home and hearth, that has been an integral part of Jewish cookery for thousands of years.

But is such a disjuncture really possible? The game of baseball, for instance, only makes sense within a certain framework—of three strikes, three outs, nine players, four bases. Could you hit a ball with a tennis racket instead of a bat and still, with integrity, call it baseball? To call food “Jewish” only makes sense in the context of what “Jewish” has meant throughout history. That history has included innovation and change, but it has also included a crucial element of preservation and repetition.

This isn’t a religious argument. The best “Jewish food” has historically been created by Jewish cooks who were trying, simultaneously, to preserve and innovate. One of the staples in the Ashkenazi Jewish larder, for example, was schmaltz. Usually made by rendering chicken or goose fat (the leftover crispy bits, called gribenes, became a delicacy in their own right), schmaltz was an essential element of Ashkenazi cookery because frying meat in butter is forbidden, and the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe didn’t have ready access to non-dairy alternatives (like sesame and olive oil) that were common in the Mizrahi world. Eventually, in an effort to produce more and more goose fat, Jews began over-feeding their birds. In addition to ramping up the rate of gribenes consumption (and perhaps the rate of heart attacks) among Ashkenazi Jews, the process of force-feeding geese produced an inadvertent by-product—foie gras, which would go on to become a cornerstone of haute-French gastronomy. Although fattened goose liver was a well-known delicacy in the ancient world (the Talmud actually mentions the process of intentionally fattening geese), it was subsequently lost to European cuisine until 16th century, when, as Michael Ginor writes in Foie Gras: A Passion, renaissance chefs, looking to expand their culinary repertoires, started exploring butcher shops in the Jewish ghettos.

And so, while Jewish cooking has always been driven by cultural exchange, it has also, crucially, been influenced just as much by cultural boundaries—which dictated that Jews participate in a shared ritual system, through which the meal became an opportunity to reify and reinforce one’s commitment to a certain way of life.

Thus, the incorporation of outside cuisines also included their adaptation to the dietary restrictions of kashrut—which is how someone came up with the idea to cover toast in schmaltz instead butter, which couldn’t be eaten with meat meals—or to the rhythms of Jewish life, which inspired the one-pot braise known as cholent that was meant to cook all day on the blech.

The early rabbis made the laws surrounding kashrut more stringent precisely to ensure that Jews and non-Jews never ate meals with one another. In a section of the Babylonian Talmud dealing with idolatrous practice, Rabbi Kahana says that while bread baked by a non-Jew is not forbidden according to the Torah, the rabbis forbade it nonetheless. Bread being fundamental to a proper, halakhic meal, traditional rabbinic thought understands this prohibition in terms of an overarching effort to prevent Jews and non-Jews from ever developing close relationships. While reasonable people can certainly disagree about the wisdom of this sort of mandated cultural insularity, the fact remains that rabbinic stringencies have left on indelible imprint on Jewish cookery. Culinary traditions around the world use braises, but they occupy such a central place in Jewish cookery because they provide solutions to the restrictions of cooking on Shabbat. And many cultures around the world produce rich, celebratory egg breads (the Czechs’ Hoska, often eaten around Christmastime, is even braided), but their recipes almost invariably include milk. Because most Jewish communities have a strong tradition of eating meat on festive occasions (indeed, there is a statement in the Talmud that says there can be no celebration without meat), Jewish egg-bread leaves the milk out, an omission that makes the loaf heavier and gives challah its signature chew.

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To be sure, it is possible to inflect non-kosher food with Jewish culinary influences. These inflections often speak of genuine cultural exchange. The offerings at Telepan, my former employer, include not only smoked trout, but brunch options like the “Upper West Sider” (smoked salmon, gravlax, scrambled eggs, whitefish salad, and a mini bagel with cream cheese), and “babka-style” French toast. What my old boss is doing is exploring Jewish cookery by riffing on Jewish dishes that have already entered the broader cultural lexicon—a lexicon in which knishes stride alongside sushi, lo mein, and pork belly. He’s not interested in an ironic, self-consciously hip return to one’s roots, the subversive frisson evinced by Mile End’s breakfast sandwich, a dish that includes bacon and calls it “chazzer.”

More than 100 years after the founding of Bagel Bakers Local 338, a Manhattan trade union comprised of Yiddish-speaking bagel makers, celebrated chef Wylie Dufrense opened up shop on the Lower East Side and made an everything bagel out of ice cream and served it with smoked salmon threads. He did not, however, throw pancetta in the dish.

By abandoning the uncomfortable tension that comes from pushing to innovate while also striving to preserve, many young Jewish chefs are balking at the challenge inherent in creating truly new Jewish food—the kind of food that is so successful, so popular, and so Jewish that it finds its way into the collective imagination of an entire people and takes its place among their ever-evolving traditions. Six generations hence, Jewish culinary lights, out of an inevitable desire to reshape Jewish cuisine according to their own visions and contexts, will have to reinterpret whatever we pass on to them. But what will be our current legacy? Where do you go from bacon cholent?

She’s a great role model—she’s funny (she calls “hootie-hoo,” like an owl when she loses her husband in a grocery store), self-aware (she ruefully called her undercooked quinoa “un-duntay” instead of “al dente”), and sane in times of crisis. In the last episode, she accidentally cut off half her fingernail in a chopping-knife mishap, but unlike a certain other drama-queeny contestant who ran to the hospital with a lesser injury, she told the medic to bandage her up, then put on a rubber glove and kept cooking. … When other chefs derided her desire to make an African ground-nut soup for a challenge at the U.S. Open (saying it wasn’t “elevated” enough for a fine-dining experience), Hall politely stuck to her guns, and went on to win. Again: a great lesson for kids.

For Real

You heard me. Rest assured I do have standards in boobtube-itude. I will not, for example, let my kids watch live-action Disney TV. But I enthusiastically encourage them to watch Top Chef and Project Runway, shows that contain a host of moral lessons.

This season, for example, we’re watching Top Chef All-Stars, in which promising but eliminated contestants from past seasons get another shot. The chefs’ very first elimination challenge involved having to once again cook the dish that got them booted during their first appearances. One woman made the exact same dish and defiantly insisted there was nothing wrong with it. But other chefs tweaked and recalibrated, learning from their mistakes. They weren’t combative with the judges but rather accepted what they’d done wrong the first time and showed that they could do better. Isn’t that how we want our kids to learn from criticism?

My favorite character so far this season is Carla Hall. The kids love her, too. She’s a great role model—she’s funny (she calls “hootie-hoo,” like an owl when she loses her husband in a grocery store), self-aware (she ruefully called her undercooked quinoa “un-duntay” instead of “al dente”), and sane in times of crisis. In the last episode, she accidentally cut off half her fingernail in a chopping-knife mishap, but unlike a certain other drama-queeny contestant who ran to the hospital with a lesser injury, she told the medic to bandage her up, then put on a rubber glove and kept cooking. In her first appearance on the show, she kept professing the importance of cooking “with love,” blending classic French technique and culinary education with soulful, joyful unpretentiousness. At first I was suspicious—irksome hippie!—but it turned out she had all the good aspects of hippie-dom without the annoying self-righteousness. When other chefs derided her desire to make an African ground-nut soup for a challenge at the U.S. Open (saying it wasn’t “elevated” enough for a fine-dining experience), Hall politely stuck to her guns, and went on to win. Again: a great lesson for kids.

The last season of the show, as Tablet Magazine’s Marc Tracy noted, was not good for the Jews. But it was very good for Jewish parenting: As we watched Jewish contestants steal, lie, and use cooking sherry in a lunch meant for children, we had many lessons to offer our children on how not to behave.

Then there’s Top Chef Just Desserts, in which a humble, heroic baker held his own, challenge after challenge, against schmancy pastry chefs. Not only did The Baker approach cooking challenges he’d never faced before, surrounded by people with far more pastry experience, he kept making simple, homey, comforting desserts—some the judges loved, some they didn’t. The Baker’s epic journey really resonated with Josie, my 8-year-old, who tends to be afraid to attempt anything she can’t be great at right away; he taught her it’s OK not to win. And there was Morgan, the guy with tons of technique but a sour, domineering attitude. He spewed homophobic insults at another contestant and treated a far more established pastry chef, Claudia Fleming, with sexist condescension. Sadly, he taught my daughters the disparaging use of the word “fairy.” (When you’re 5, fairies tend to be viewed as awesome.) Moral lessons galore!

I’d hoped that Top Chef would help turn my kids into less picky eaters. It didn’t. Still, viewing these shows as a family has been a great way for me to convey my values, and the values of our people. Family therapists often say that talking shoulder-to-shoulder, as opposed to face-to-face, allows conversation to flower in a low-pressure way. What we talk about when we talk about cooking isn’t really about cooking. It’s about treating others well, being able to recover after a setback, holding yourself to a high but not paralyzingly impossible standard.

Do I think every reality series offers such lessons? Of course not. Many are exploitative, stupid, venal. My kids will not soon be watching any Kate Plus 8, Bachelorette, or Real Housewives (sorry, Alana). But Project Runway? Bring it on. We’ve watched every season, ordered in crazed binges from Netflix. We love the show’s most creative, out-there challenges: Design an ensemble for $50 using only things you can buy in a grocery store! Make an outfit using parts of a car! Whip up a functional costume for a female wrestler! Create a garment inspired by a work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art!

There’s opportunity for art education there, of course, as well as the chance to admire creativity and resourcefulness in action. But the interpersonal dramas create teachable moments, too. One contestant was kicked off for having pattern books in his room, which sparked an animated conversation: Was it right for another contestant to tell the producers about the books hidden under the bed? Is that being a tattletale? Should the contestant have been kicked off if, as he claimed, he didn’t actually know the rules?

We loved to loathe Season 5’s villain, the petulant, uptalking Kenley Collins, who was later arrested for throwing a cat at her boyfriend’s face. She was disrespectful to the show’s beloved educator/mentor, Tim Gunn; she laughed openly at other contestants on the runway; she refused to take any criticism or advice from fashion designers or editors; she had a persecution complex as big as Bryant Park. For a while, the catchphrase in our house was “I wasn’t going for elegance, Heidi!,” Kenley’s snotty retort to judge Heidi Klum. From then on, whenever Josie or Maxie kvetched Kenleyishly, the rest of us would snap, “I wasn’t going for elegance, Heidi!” (Josie turned the saying into a welcome sign on our door. It meant take responsibility and don’t whine.)

Reality shows can depict the choices we all face: whether to be collaborative and generous or whether to hide ingredients under the table so no one else can use them. They can encourage us to stand up to bullying and show us the distastefulness of being a mean girl. Reality shows prove that talent comes in all ages, races, religions, body types, and economic backgrounds, and that loving your work is more important than being irresistible to the opposite sex. These are emphatically not lessons one learns from the Disney Channel.

Of course, reality TV isn’t all blessings. We recently passed a newspaper box containing our community paper, a picture of Bill Clinton on the front cover. Maxine ran to the box, yelling, “Tim! Tim Gunn!” Oops. So, I’ll teach morality first, politics later. Reality TV is often more moral than politics anyway.

The elimination challenge gives each of four groups of four chefs a paltry $130 budget at something called “Restaurant Depot” (no Whole Foods this week) to make a delicious and nutritious school lunch for 50 middle-schoolers. In other words: $2.60 per child. “I could make a dessert,” Amanda confides, “but I don’t want to, because people who make desserts go home.” A longtime Top Chef viewer, this one! “Take one for the team is not in my vocabulary,” she adds. Her group-mate Jacqueline has to cut back on her, yes, dessert because her ingredients took the group to over $170. “Kinda looks like Jacqueline thought the $130 was the individual’s budget,” Amanda snarks.

They go to cook at the Hilton—which the locals call the Reagan Hilton, because—and then head to the middle school, which is Alice Deal Middle School, in upper northwest D.C., which, in a funny coincidence, is no more than a quarter mile from Politics & Prose (it is also my father’s alma mater). Meanwhile, Amanda’s teammates have realized that, y’know, she is making something with sherry for middle-schoolers. “Alcohol is inappropriate for the kids,” says one; another suggests tomato paste instead. But Amanda presses on, the way young lemmings do. SPOILERS FOLLOW.

The judges dig in to Amanda’s dish, and shockingly find it inappropriate. “Sherry jus doesn’t usually come into the lunchroom scenario,” is the lovely Gail Simmons’s polite way of putting it. (Speaking as someone who pronounced the word “jus” phonetically until about a year ago, I feel compelled to agree.) Later, and admittedly out of Amanda’s earshot, head judge Tom Colicchio notes of Amanda’s chicken: “It looks like someone put a big piece of turd on the table.”

(Oh, by the way, Alex also makes chicken, only he makes his with apple cider, which is delicious and good for you, and he gets a nice pat on the back from the judges for his troubles.)

Amanda’s group and one other are singled out for being the bottom two. At this point, something that I think is unprecedented happens: The invisible wall between the two groups is shattered, as they bicker at each other over their meals. (Among other things, there is a complicated bit of gamesmanship involving the two members of the other group who won immunity and may have decided to strategically kill off one of their teammates. Let’s just say that Angelo Sosa may be the best villain Top Chef has ever had.)

Amanda’s main polemical point in this pissing contest is: Who gives processed peanut butter to kids!? I mean, do you even know how much sugar is in processed peanut butter? “It’s horrible!” In response, a member of the other team goes for the easy left jab: Yo, you served middle-schoolers sherry jus! “I wasn’t serving it by the glass!” is Amanda’s entirely accurate and entirely inapposite response.

In the end, the four on the chopping block are Amanda; Jacqueline, her team’s dessert-maker, who prepared some sugar with a few bananas thrown in; and the two members of the other team (which, the judges agreed, presented the worst overall meal) who didn’t have immunity.

And the loser is … Jacqueline! Rewind, if you would, to Amanda’s comment at the beginning of the episode: “I could make a dessert, but I don’t want to, because people who make desserts go home.”

Earlier: Cheftestant Cooks His Mother’s Borscht

Both survived the first episode handily. And in fact, Reznik received special props from the judges for his Elimination Challenge dish: A deconstructed version of, yes, his mom’s borscht.

Top Chef [Bravo]

Padma Lakshmi’s Baby Will Grow Up With a Dad [Page Six]

Kirshtein, currently cooking at Solo, a kosher restaurant in midtown Manhattan, took the challenge head-on, brushed up on his Mishnah, and made us a dish as scrumptious as it is symbolic. Such studious cooking, he says, is what life is like outside of the mercurial environment of reality television.

“I think the main thing you got to remember about Top Chef is that it’s more Top Cook,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about food cost, labor cost…. A New York City kitchen is a really difficult thing, because the clientele is so demanding and the food public really knows what’s quality versus what’s gimmick.”

Click below to watch Kirshtein ply his craft, and scroll down for the recipe.

Eli Kirshtein’s Tu B’Shevat Persimmon Salad

2 Fuyu persimmons
1 can ginger ale
2 tablespoons marcona almonds
2 tablespoons cocoa nibs
5 leaves Belgian endive
10 leaves tarragon
1 tablespoon honey
1 tablespoon yuzo juice
1 tablespoon white truffle oil
Sea salt, to taste

1. Peel persimmons and punch out with a ring-cutter. Place the remaining scraps in a blender and add ginger ale as needed, until the puree is smooth. Slice the punched-out persimmons into rounds.

2. In a separate bowl, mix the yuzu juice, truffle oil, and honey, stirring until the vinaigrette is unified.

3. Using a spoon, smear a stripe of the puree onto a large plate. Place fresh marcona almonds and cocoa nibs on top of the stripe, and add two or three leaves of endive, and four or five leaves of tarragon on top. Line the sliced persimmons on the plate, and dress with the vinaigrette. Season with salt.

Serves two.

Chef Telepan Reinvents the Brisket from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

At Hanukkah, Chefs Make Kitchen Conversions [NYT]

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

We’ll leave the charges that Friedman’s post is racist to her commenters.

‘In or Out’: Why Heidi Klum Makes Me Nervous [Forward]

Top Chef [Bravotv.com]