WHY I LIKE MY STEAK THICK AND RARE . . . I THINK

When I was a kid, we of the Jewish underclass spent our summer vacations relegated to tiny bungalows known in Yiddish as “koch alenehs,” literally “cook alones,” because, unlike going to a bona fide resort, you bought your own groceries and prepared your own meals. The sparseness of the Wilson’s koch aleneh was at least counterbalanced by the grandeur of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and Lake Superior.

What was the cuisine is our koch aleneh, you ask? In my childhood, our kashrut standards were at a bare minimum, if at all. We bought our staples, including meat, from the local grocer. Fish, though, was a special treat, freshly caught from Lake Superior and much of it smoked that day right on the rickety dock at Front Street.

Treating the family by occasionally going out to a restaurant was problematic, exacerbated by my crabby grandmother who brought her cloud of disdain to even the most joyous occasions. Ironically, she was not a religious woman. In fact, she purportedly “escaped” to America to liberate herself from her father’s orthodoxy and did not even light Shabbos candles.

Something, though, made her phobic about food served in restaurants. Her universal complaint, asserted with the certainty that the sun rises in the east, was that dining establishments added sage to all their recipes, lending them a noxious taste and aroma . . . despite her having never seen, much less tasted, the herb. Restaurant meat was likewise suspect because, to give it “goyische” flavor, it was wrapped in “chelev,” a term that she herself did not know referred to the Biblically-prohibited suet surrounding the kidneys and other organs.

Aside from her inability to throw a baseball, the fit that she pitched every time someone suggested that we treat ourselves to dinner was so unbearable that my peace-loving parents invariably acquiesced. She had no intention of dining in a restaurant that served sage and chelev, and to spare us the fate, she would sabotage our plans to go, too.

I was a robust, loving kid, so her imprecations meant little to me. I met them with whining and even an occasional tantrum. One year, I apparently caused so much grief that my parents gave in to taking us to Rutherford’s, a memory-filled steakhouse where they dined on their honeymoon.

Upon entering, the air was already redolent with impending disaster. No, my grandmother would not eat the salad, because “it had sage in it.” After much cajoling from my father, she reluctantly ordered a steak “very, very well-done” and completely trimmed of any fat. When the steak arrived, it was deemed “too bloody” and was sent back for a second immolation. This time the steak returned bucked at the edges and charred, but she refused to eat it because it had obviously been “basted in chelev.”

At this, my father rose from the table, meticulously rearranged his silverware and folded his napkin, announcing that we were headed back to the koch aleneh. Imagine the irony as my grandmother unapologetically threw open the refrigerator door, dressed her salad in ketchup and picked flakes of flesh away from a bony whitefish.

All I remember, Dr. Freud, was being yanked away from my first serious encounter with a bloody rare sirloin steak and a baked potato oozing fresh butter. I wonder whether this pre-adolescent trauma lurks deeply my brain as I still quest obsessively after a perfectly rare, thick steak accompanied by baked potato dripping in, OK, pareve margarine. And what of my herb garden overgrown with sage? And what of my schmaltz surrounding my chopped liver?

As for my grandmother, she lived on crankily to the age of 95. Apparently, she would not surrender herself to the Angel of Death until he promised her that in Heaven no one would ever hoodwink her into eating sage or chelev.