A MASHKE MARTINI

Scotch or vodka, it makes no difference to me. Pour me three shots of Glenlivet or Grey Goose, and I’m a happy man, gleefully under the table.

However, the discriminating palate of my Lubavitch friends prefers “white” liquor (vodka), over “brown,” (scotch, bourbon, etc.) Indeed, they simply call white “mashke – the beverage par excellence.”

Why “white” above “brown”? Perhaps the answer derives from kashrut: Brown could attain some of its darkness by adding goyische wine, rendering it unkosher. White, could not be polluted.

I recently had conversation with a young Lubavitcher about drinking white mashke. He whispered to me that he had hard time drinking vodka – nausea, headache, horrific hangover. He craved, he said, to have the same celebratory, euphoric buzz that his friends enjoyed at the various Chasidic functions, while he was busy steering the porcelain bowl.

I have decades of experience in drinking white, so I offered him unsolicited advice. I told him: “Chill the mashke, almost to the point of freezing. Only use the best vodka, nothing less than Stolichnaya. Then, pour it into a broad glass. Shot-glasses are used to measure, not drink. Why broad? Mashke must be allowed to breathe, so that its bouquet is savored. And, I bet you’re drinking it with cake or nauseating sweets. Sweets make mashke disgusting. Good mashke deserves something salty. Do you like olives? Try soaking some of them in the mashke. Then, sip it. No more shots.”

A few months went by. We encountered each other. Yes, his friends consider him a heretic, but it was a price he was willing to pay for a buzz without a retching hangover. And the best benefit, he said, was that his bride-to-be was no longer furious with him, nor did she have to clean his shoes the next morning.

So, he is a heretic. But, if Lubavitch has evolved into the age of laptops, iPods, and satellites, why shouldn’t they bring the same modernity to the mashke they drink?

And along the way, no one will realize that I have just taught them how to transform the yesterday’s “white mashke” into a beverage that they will never know is a really great Martini.