XENOFOODIA (11/23/03)

I'm telling you now: If one day they find me dead from an overdose of rare roast beef, have my mother posthumously arrested for contributory negligence.

Growing up in a kosher home is hardly a life of self-denial. Just check out my girth. Jews have always found ways to partake lavishly of the bounty that the Good Lord permitted them, and let the pork chops be damned. Yet, kosher has its rules and its stringencies, a resounding “No!” to the decadent life of the Whopper, the Surf' ‘n Turf, the Egg McMuffin.

Now try overlaying the demanding minutiae of kosher regulations with a second system of taboos. They are ordained neither by Talmud nor Torah but an otherwise rational mother who suffers the ravages of Xenofoodia, the phobic abhorrence of strange and untried gentile foodstuffs.

"Spoiled" was my mother's code word for the array of foods that induced Xenofoodia. Only later did I discover that "spoiled" was a euphemism for "goyish," a mild pejorative meaning "of the gentile persuasion." "Spoiled" was my mother's resolution of the dilemma of raising a child in an environment free from prejudice, yet inculcating him with a resistance to odd and alluring temptations.

Foods designated as spoiled included any meat not pot roasted to the consistency of wet hemp, any steak not immolated to the texture of vulcanized rubber, fried chicken, fried onion rings, fried anything, cream-filled anything, any gravy thickened with flour, cream-of-anything soup (except when used to bind the omnipresent tuna casserole), any foodstuff prefixed with the appellation "barbecued" or "Southern style." All spoiled.

White bread was spoiled. This was a particularly bitter pill for a tot under the daily influence of Howdy Doody, who was sponsored, as you might remember, by Wonder Bread. The taste of white bread did not cross my vestal lips until I was six, when the doctor recommended -- before the days of fiber and oat bran -- that it would be healthier for my grandmother. Obviously. My grandmother lived to a crotchety 93. Her well-intentioned doctor dropped dead of a heart attack at 48.

Near Terre Haute, Indiana, on a trip to Florida at the tender age of nine, my mother somberly introduced me to the Hash-Brown/Grits Line, prototype for the newly erected Berlin Wall. It is a North-South demarcation more taut and inviolate than Mason-Dixon, determined by the lump of regional starch placed gratuitously next to your eggs at Howard Johnson’s. I remember inquiring about the blob of white stuff that graced by breakfast plate. "Spoiled!" my mother pronounced the verdict, and a choir of angels intoned "Amen!"

At 17, I returned from a year of rare-steak debauchery at college in New York. Naive and arrogant, I propose to "treat" the family to a rib roast dinner I will prepare in honor of my first Sabbath home. Rib roast, naturally, is the quintessence of spoiled. My mother reluctantly indulged this caprice, on the premise that it is best that I be humbled and learn first hand the error in my ways.

My grandmother, though, will have no part of it. At the very moment that the roast should be attaining the zenith of its succulent perfection, she, with atypical impulsiveness, decided to pop a potato kugel (pudding) in the oven, irreparably sabotaging my masterpiece. To make the lesson stick, my mother unceremoniously served the roast still cold and quivery in the middle, at Sabbath dinner. It is greeted by a chorus of "Spoiled" and the ultimate Yiddish taunt of disapproval, "Feh!" My mother deftly sliced a salami-in-waiting that is served with the golden-brown potato kugel, met by accolades of "Ah, better!" By the next day, the roast has been mercifully festooned with vegetables and potted to a fare-thee-well . . . the way God intended it to be. Sic semper tyrannis.

The years quickly pass. My kids have been raised in a kosher home, but with remarkably worldly palates, largely liberated from the ravages of Xenofoodia. I, for my part, have gone on dabble in an odd and curious variety of cuisines: Szechwan, Korean, Cajun, Thai.

As generations came full circle, I occasionally found myself cooking up something exotic for the kids and me at my parents' home. I would always prepare my parents alternative foods, since the ones that the kids and I ate were spoiled. My father, may he rest in peace, would from time to time furtively pick a Southern fried drumstick over a roasted one, but approached it as gingerly as had it been booby-trapped.

My mother, however, remained resolute. Confined to a wheelchair, spirits undimmed, she would hermetically double-seal my teriyaki sauce, my sesame oil, my ginger root, my file powder, in baggies and twist-ties before they were quarantined on a special shelf in her cupboard, a safe distance from the foods we know to be ethnically and theologically pure.

They were, after all, spoiled. She was, after all, a Jewish mother. Ever the defender of the faith. May her memory be for a blessing.