A LITTLE SOMETHING FOR THE TABLE

Food can be a tempestuous mistress. I always treat my paramour with unconditional love. She tempts me, rouses my senses, then deceives me and leaves me to languish on Hades’ threshold.

The macabre dance begins innocently, even joyously. She beckons me to an orgy. Now, no one in orgiastic flagrante delicto calls it an “orgy.” In my vernacular, the euphemism for a food orgy is “for the table.” It usually convenes at New York’s quintessential Jewish dining establishment, the Second Avenue Deli, surrounded by family and friends. They love the food. I am enthralled. I look at the long list of appetizers and want them all. Do they want to share some, I ask? No, they’ve ordered quite enough already.

Then I make my treacherous offer: “How about if I order some ‘for the table’?” Laughter. They know that the question is purely rhetorical. Moments later, arrayed in front of me are plates and bowls of the most delectable and toxic chopped liver, kishke in gravy, kasha varnishkes, chicken fricassee, farfel, gefilte fish, tzimmes, matzo ball and mushroom-barley soups, accompanied by a stack of rye bread and a pot of emerald-green pickles.

“Please join me!” I beckon them. Joey and Ben may take a forkful, but they know that my offering is gratuitous. None of this preprandial fare “for the table” deters me from the main event, a sandwich as high as Haman’s gallows of corned beef, pastrami and chopped liver . . . and an order of French fries.

By dinner’s end, everyone else is ready for a stroll around Rockefeller Center. I am ready to hang from Haman’s gallows. But after the acute gastritis subsides, oh, the memories. And does it stop me from ordering “for the table” on our next soiree? You guess.

But once it almost did. I had eaten myself stuporous so many times that the Malach Ha-Moves did not pass over on the night of the Seder. Surrounded by the entire family, I collapsed from pancreatitis, which brings excruciating pain. More critically it can impair a variety of other organs, the damage from which I suffer to this day. Had I not received immediate heroic treatment, Chad Gadya would have ended one verse too soon.

When I awoke, still groggy from my narcotic cocktail, my mother, Linda, three kids, two step-kids, and two kids-in-law were surrounding my bed. My mother wept. I was feeble, but I still had a little of my wit: “How did they let all of you into ICU?” Pause. “Ah, I get it. This must be what they call the deathbed scene.” At this, the nurse administered another knockout punch.

Weeks later, I asked my mother if after that episode everyone was upset. “Oh no,” she said. “When we got home, it was time for lunch. So we pulled everything milchig out of the refrigerator and ate like it was going out of style. Joey said that you would have loved it, because you would have had so much food in front of you that we brought out exclusively ‘for the table’!”