AVENGING THE SOUTH'S "GREAT MISFORTUNATE" AT $3.99 A POUND

So what happens when you’re a rabbi whose congregation decides to lynch you at the very moment your bipolarity rages out of control? You throw caution to the wind, quit your job in a huff and join the ranks of the long-term unemployed.

Stuck at home, I decided to test the hypothesis that I have talent in arts culinaires. I have yet to consult Dr. Freud, but my spirit first gravitated to cured salmon, Scandinavia’s prodigal child, gravlax.

My earlier years were laced with “lox,” not “lax”: oily, smoky, salty. Oh, I had seen gravlax in the deli showcase. But it was expensive, and my mother insisted that it was goyish. Now, though, I had the motivation and – forgive me, Mom – freedom, to sample the allurement of gentile debauchery. Besides, salmon is now the cheapest fish around: $3.99 a pound, with trout at $7.99 and sea bass an outrageous $14.99. Add a cup of salt, sugar, dill, a shot of Stoli, and ones pocketbook need not be raped at Zabar’s for $24.99 a pound.

My results? Superior! Firm yet velvety flesh. Lightly sweet, modulated by the vodka. An earthy undertone of dill. Oily, smoky, salty? Do we still live in the tenements? Alas, its position in the Holy Trinity alongside bagel and cream cheese may be forfeit. My mother was right. It’s not lox. Tres goyish.

But, how much gravlax can one man eat? Slowly I started bringing samples to a few appetizing stores and restaurants around town. Unanimous opinion? Delicious. Unlike any other cured item (including ham, I wondered) in the Greenville market. Soon, I became The Gravlax King of the South Carolina Upstate.

Recently, I popped in on a customer and spied a sign above the showcase displaying my tour de force: “Gravlax: Sweeter and Smoother than Yankee Lox!”

Ah, this is the ultimate benefit to being the Gravlax King in the heart of Dixie, where the Civil War is still called “Our Great Misfortune, the War of Northern Aggression,” and lox is neither Scandinavian nor Jewish, simply “Yankee.” What a delicious irony that a Yankee-rabbi-liberal-antiwar-Democrat has apparently liberated the xenophobic South from the oily, smoky, salty scourge of Northern Aggression. The goyim should only know the truth.

Now on to convincing them that chopped liver is really pate de foie gras . . .