Posted November 12 2007
Salami Sonar or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Schnitzel
I know we seem to have had a bit of a lull here at Jewneric, but it’s sometimes hard to remember to post when life comes at all of us so fast. That’s why I love to attend the Kosher Fest convention at the Javits Center in New York, normally held in the second week of November. Due to a number of scheduling conflicts, it was held this year on a Sunday for the first time, but I am usually all too happy to take a day off from work to attend this delightful display of deliciousness, delicacies, and deli.
The array is astonishing, the variation is fascinating, and the number of beards is frightening. As Jewish Kosher food producers, distributors, Kashruth certification organizations, restaurants, and caterers all pack themselves into the same enormous room, I consider the bizarre number of options. Kosher food used to be a compromise: no shellfish, no great meat, no complex cheese, no creative wines. Now Kosher food is a choice. What few things we can’t make Kosher - I remember my first M&M, Oreo, and piece of bleu cheese - we can artificially create. Passover is not the obstacle it once was, either. Bread-like items so similar in taste and consistency to their chametz counterparts that I watched one man accost a Mashgiach and force him to check the box are available in nearly all forms of leavened and unleavend varieties.
So what does Kosher mean anymore? If there are no restrictions on our options, what is the point? I can have a cheeseburger, crab, and the most sophisticated of French wines all Kosher. Is it still meaningful if it’s so easy?
Of course. People foolishly believe that Kosher is about being blessed by a rabbi, or about health, or about mysticism. It is, in fact, none of those things. Kosher is about a state of mind. The very act of laboring so hard to create more options, to make top-level cuisine available to even the most stringently Kosher homes, is itself a form of acknowledgment that God has laid down certain rules and damn it, we’re going to follow them. The self-control that Kosher represents in the Jewish world and the care and concern that Kosher represents in the non-Jewish world work together to bring us closer to an understanding of ourselves. If we had no restrictions, we would be slaves to our basest desires. The ability to fulfill those desires (culinarily speaking) is not itself a failure. Rather, it represents a subduing of our animal instincts for food and a harnessing of our intellectual and creative powers, turning what could be so simple - “see, want, kill, cook, eat” - into an activity of sophistication and even love. Watching a Jewish cook is like watching a poet writing a sonnet, balancing flavors and textures within an astonishingly comprehensive set of rules and regulations.
But within those boundaries, within the four Amot of Halacha, the cook is absolutely free, as the poet is.
Happy cooking to all, and to all a good dinner.
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