CHICKEN PERFUME
I can’t believe that it’s been 35 years since I began my rabbinical career just outside of Chicago. Mine was a tiny schule, actually a remodeled greasy-spoon. We served Shabbos Kiddush from the short-order counter.
We were new and few in numbers, so we did everything for ourselves: No custodian. No kitchen manager. No one to shop for us, clean the bathrooms, set up the chairs. But, we were young, and we had a lot of fun.
I was their rav, and I held on to my strict orthodoxy. My congregants were another story. No one observed kashrut, but within the walls of the synagogue, it was the strict rule. God bless them for that. No matter how obedient, though, they could never understand why Corn Flakes were kosher but Corn Flake Crumbs required a separate hechsher. If someone would explain it to me, we’d all understand.
Then there was the time that they were preparing a Shabbos dinner for the congregation. A delegation from the sisterhood was dispatched to the kosher butcher in Chicago, where they purchased a huge bag of frozen poultry and left it in the schule refrigerator to defrost.
Thursday night, I received a frantic call. “We need you to check the chicken, and it’s an emergency!”
“All right,” I told them. But, I thought, what could be wrong with a bag of kosher chicken?
Two of them appeared on my doorstep carrying the dripping bag.
“Why don’t you come in?” I offered.
“No, it’d probably be better if you came outside.”
They gingerly opened the bag. It reeked. Rancid. Putrid. Disgusting. I reeled from the stench.
“What’s your question?” I asked. “That chicken is rotten.”
“Well, that’s what we thought. But then we started wondering if that’s the way kosher chicken is supposed to smell.”
35 years have passed. The questions have gotten easier, and I have yet to be asked to poskin on a broken chicken wing. I should have become a shoemaker, but I couldn’t drive the nails straight. Instead, I heard the calling to become a rabbi, and have paid by spending decades trying to convince balabotim that kosher chicken doesn’t smell funny. Or does it?
May 25, 2008
May 22, 2008
MY HUMBLE ORIGIN: NOM DE DOODLE, CIRCA 1968
Just like my doppelganger Bart Simpson, I write it on the chalkboard a hundred times each day: “Why should the origin of “Rabbi Ribeye” matter to anyone?” Regardless . . .
“Rabbi Ribeye” did not originate for its alliteration. Nor was it intended to be my nom de plume. It is the product of 40-year-old doodling during another narcolepsy-inducing Talmud class during my yeshiva years. The late Rabbi Aaron Soloveichik would lecture for three hours on an arcane point of Jewish law. He was an absolute genius, certainly the magnitude of an Einstein. But, like most luminaries, his mind worked immeasurably faster than his gift of speech. The geniuses in the class absorbed his enlightenment, while the rest of us doodled. Had it not been for borrowing the notes of one of the geniuses, I would probably be a cable guy rather than an unemployed rabbi who fritters away his time cooking and trying to write the great American cookbook.
As I look back over yellowing notes, I remind myself that some of my doodling is actually a collection of dated anti-war shibboleths (“Dump the Hump!” – a reference to pro-war candidate Hubert Humphrey) and vain stabs at profundity. I see that I had boldly inscribed atop one page, “God Is the Ultimate Prankster!” an aphorism that I later cultivated into a theology that I called “The God of Booga-Booga.”
Call it prescience, but even in my formative years, my doodling had led me to gastronomical subjects: puns of culinary personification, people who in my imagination took on the names of favorite foods: Terry Aqui. V.L. Piccata. Cheri Coque. Biff Steaque. Coco Vann. Chuck N. Soope. Chuck and Ella King. Sam N. Salade. Every class became a new pun, a new challenge, a new doodle, a new diversion.
Across from me sat Jay Hirshman. Jay was a diligent student with a terrific work ethic, which struck me as particularly admirable since he was one of only a few classmates who came from real wealth. When my folks moved to the Coast, I spent many weekend as Jay’s guest.
His home was ruled by a wonderful live-in housekeeper of the old school. She always had a whiskey sour waiting for Jay’s dad just as he walked through the door. This was the quintessence of luxury. Friday dinner always revolved around rare, succulent . . . ribeye, another quintessential luxury relative to the meatloaf or “roasted out” (that’s what my mother called it) chicken that graced the Wilsons’ Sabbath table.
One day, as I watched Jay hunched over his Talmudic tome, my wandering memory flashed up “ribeye.” A nanosecond later, my mind refocused on those few special occasions that my mother served steak, invariably the texture of dried out liver. Thinking of the long anticipated encounter between Stanley and Livingstone, I doodled in my notebook, “Rabbi Ribeye, meat Doctor Liver!”
Now you know the origin of my 40-year-old culinary nom de plume. Its meanderings since then have been bittersweet. In 1972, the same Jay who introduced me to ribeye went off to Israel and joined the army. A training injury forced him to watch helplessly as his platoon was wiped out in the Yom Kippur War. He was never the same. A few years later, he was murdered in a holdup.
Truth be told, Jay was always singularly unimpressed by my silliness. Be that as it may, I believe that every time “Rabbi Ribeye” brings a smile to someone’s face, it is recompense for all the smiles that Jay could yet have smiled, had he only been given the inclination. As for me, despite the good humor with which the name is spoken, the edges of sweetness will forever be furrowed by a twinge of melancholy over 40-year-old reminiscences of what might have been.
Just like my doppelganger Bart Simpson, I write it on the chalkboard a hundred times each day: “Why should the origin of “Rabbi Ribeye” matter to anyone?” Regardless . . .
“Rabbi Ribeye” did not originate for its alliteration. Nor was it intended to be my nom de plume. It is the product of 40-year-old doodling during another narcolepsy-inducing Talmud class during my yeshiva years. The late Rabbi Aaron Soloveichik would lecture for three hours on an arcane point of Jewish law. He was an absolute genius, certainly the magnitude of an Einstein. But, like most luminaries, his mind worked immeasurably faster than his gift of speech. The geniuses in the class absorbed his enlightenment, while the rest of us doodled. Had it not been for borrowing the notes of one of the geniuses, I would probably be a cable guy rather than an unemployed rabbi who fritters away his time cooking and trying to write the great American cookbook.
As I look back over yellowing notes, I remind myself that some of my doodling is actually a collection of dated anti-war shibboleths (“Dump the Hump!” – a reference to pro-war candidate Hubert Humphrey) and vain stabs at profundity. I see that I had boldly inscribed atop one page, “God Is the Ultimate Prankster!” an aphorism that I later cultivated into a theology that I called “The God of Booga-Booga.”
Call it prescience, but even in my formative years, my doodling had led me to gastronomical subjects: puns of culinary personification, people who in my imagination took on the names of favorite foods: Terry Aqui. V.L. Piccata. Cheri Coque. Biff Steaque. Coco Vann. Chuck N. Soope. Chuck and Ella King. Sam N. Salade. Every class became a new pun, a new challenge, a new doodle, a new diversion.
Across from me sat Jay Hirshman. Jay was a diligent student with a terrific work ethic, which struck me as particularly admirable since he was one of only a few classmates who came from real wealth. When my folks moved to the Coast, I spent many weekend as Jay’s guest.
His home was ruled by a wonderful live-in housekeeper of the old school. She always had a whiskey sour waiting for Jay’s dad just as he walked through the door. This was the quintessence of luxury. Friday dinner always revolved around rare, succulent . . . ribeye, another quintessential luxury relative to the meatloaf or “roasted out” (that’s what my mother called it) chicken that graced the Wilsons’ Sabbath table.
One day, as I watched Jay hunched over his Talmudic tome, my wandering memory flashed up “ribeye.” A nanosecond later, my mind refocused on those few special occasions that my mother served steak, invariably the texture of dried out liver. Thinking of the long anticipated encounter between Stanley and Livingstone, I doodled in my notebook, “Rabbi Ribeye, meat Doctor Liver!”
Now you know the origin of my 40-year-old culinary nom de plume. Its meanderings since then have been bittersweet. In 1972, the same Jay who introduced me to ribeye went off to Israel and joined the army. A training injury forced him to watch helplessly as his platoon was wiped out in the Yom Kippur War. He was never the same. A few years later, he was murdered in a holdup.
Truth be told, Jay was always singularly unimpressed by my silliness. Be that as it may, I believe that every time “Rabbi Ribeye” brings a smile to someone’s face, it is recompense for all the smiles that Jay could yet have smiled, had he only been given the inclination. As for me, despite the good humor with which the name is spoken, the edges of sweetness will forever be furrowed by a twinge of melancholy over 40-year-old reminiscences of what might have been.
May 14, 2008
DUMB SOLUTIONS TO DUMB PROBLEMS
Just got back from a Caribbean cruise. Not too shabby. The food was outstanding, and our every wish was the wait-staff’s command.
At one dinner, the fig cake was wonderful. Without asking, Alvin produced another piece. The next day, the dessert offerings were mediocre. I asked Alvin if they had any more fig cake roaming around.
“So sorry, Mr. Wilson. We throw out our leftovers every evening.”
A ton of filet mignon, a hundred gallons of milk, pitched overboard each day. Impoverished Third World people just outside the porthole. Do you see the absurdity? Poor people starve as we debate the feasibility and contingencies of ending starvation.
I might be dumb, but moving food a couple hundred yards from where it is to where it ought to be, should be a no-brainer. Maybe that’s the point.
A modest proposal: Look at every need, every looming crisis and injustice, through dumb eyes, with the social naiveté of your run-of-the-mill second grader, and think up a dumb solution. Once I had a bunch of dumb second graders in my Hebrew School. We’d raid the dumpster behind Bruegger’s each week, pick out that day’s bagel overrun, and unceremoniously drop it off at the Union Mission. Just plain dumb.
We also occasionally come across dumb adults. The restaurateurs who give their leftovers to Second Harvest and the folks who deliver Meals on Wheels are a bunch of dumbbells, too.
Think dumb along with me: There has to be some way to get that food from the Carnival Glory to impoverished islanders, if we were just dumb enough to figure it out. There should be some better way to get bagels to the homeless than second graders stealing them out of dumpsters.
Ask a dumb second grader how to stop the starvation in Myanmar. He could tell you in a second: Put the Marines in the vanguard and invade it. Set up soup kitchens and reconstruction projects until the people can get on their own feet. Damn the pigwhistle generals and their peashooter army. Just do it.
Illegal immigration? I may not know the solution, but it will start with a dumb supposition. Of this I am sure. In second grade, we learned that this is the Land of Opportunity. Then the teacher made us memorize the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, you know, “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,” and all that.
At the nub, the desire to for people to immigrate to our soil attests that we are doing something right. I dare believe that even the vast majority of illegal immigrants do not think us to be a bunch of suckers, but a nation founded on compassion and fairness.
This is the beginning of the dumb solution: Read the Statue’s inscription and sing a stanza of America the Beautiful, just like we did in second grade. Then feel honored, damn it, that the tired and the poor wish to make a home among us, not revile in them like a hoard of invading locusts. Our disposition would be to open doors, enabling a transition, not criminalizing it.
What of the specious arguments about the “legitimacy” of immigrants in earlier generations? Only a half-truth. My grandparents were the lucky ones. They arrived just before the doors of immigration slammed shut in the early 20’s. But, I know my grandparents’ moxie. Had it been a couple of years later, if they could have figured out a way to enter the country illegally, they would have. Instead, ship after ship was turned back at port, and thousands of potential immigrants who could have been saved were forced to return, remanded a decade later to the Third Reich, instead of Land of the Free.
How will we resolve the present crisis? I’m not exactly sure, but this I believe: We will find a way, and the answer is likely to be dumb. But, as my saintly mother would say, “Only with a good spirit.” A good spirit, not a misanthropic one, will find a way.
Will dumbing-down alone cure all society’s ills? No, but the starting point must be to presuppose that we will look at the world with the naïve credulity of a second grader. We need assume that the solutions to our problems are basically no-brainers. We need sophistication only to lop off the rough edges, not undo the solutions with a bunch of phony smoke-and-mirrors. A dopey kid could tell you what to do with the Glory’s leftovers. Just ask him.
Just got back from a Caribbean cruise. Not too shabby. The food was outstanding, and our every wish was the wait-staff’s command.
At one dinner, the fig cake was wonderful. Without asking, Alvin produced another piece. The next day, the dessert offerings were mediocre. I asked Alvin if they had any more fig cake roaming around.
“So sorry, Mr. Wilson. We throw out our leftovers every evening.”
A ton of filet mignon, a hundred gallons of milk, pitched overboard each day. Impoverished Third World people just outside the porthole. Do you see the absurdity? Poor people starve as we debate the feasibility and contingencies of ending starvation.
I might be dumb, but moving food a couple hundred yards from where it is to where it ought to be, should be a no-brainer. Maybe that’s the point.
A modest proposal: Look at every need, every looming crisis and injustice, through dumb eyes, with the social naiveté of your run-of-the-mill second grader, and think up a dumb solution. Once I had a bunch of dumb second graders in my Hebrew School. We’d raid the dumpster behind Bruegger’s each week, pick out that day’s bagel overrun, and unceremoniously drop it off at the Union Mission. Just plain dumb.
We also occasionally come across dumb adults. The restaurateurs who give their leftovers to Second Harvest and the folks who deliver Meals on Wheels are a bunch of dumbbells, too.
Think dumb along with me: There has to be some way to get that food from the Carnival Glory to impoverished islanders, if we were just dumb enough to figure it out. There should be some better way to get bagels to the homeless than second graders stealing them out of dumpsters.
Ask a dumb second grader how to stop the starvation in Myanmar. He could tell you in a second: Put the Marines in the vanguard and invade it. Set up soup kitchens and reconstruction projects until the people can get on their own feet. Damn the pigwhistle generals and their peashooter army. Just do it.
Illegal immigration? I may not know the solution, but it will start with a dumb supposition. Of this I am sure. In second grade, we learned that this is the Land of Opportunity. Then the teacher made us memorize the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, you know, “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,” and all that.
At the nub, the desire to for people to immigrate to our soil attests that we are doing something right. I dare believe that even the vast majority of illegal immigrants do not think us to be a bunch of suckers, but a nation founded on compassion and fairness.
This is the beginning of the dumb solution: Read the Statue’s inscription and sing a stanza of America the Beautiful, just like we did in second grade. Then feel honored, damn it, that the tired and the poor wish to make a home among us, not revile in them like a hoard of invading locusts. Our disposition would be to open doors, enabling a transition, not criminalizing it.
What of the specious arguments about the “legitimacy” of immigrants in earlier generations? Only a half-truth. My grandparents were the lucky ones. They arrived just before the doors of immigration slammed shut in the early 20’s. But, I know my grandparents’ moxie. Had it been a couple of years later, if they could have figured out a way to enter the country illegally, they would have. Instead, ship after ship was turned back at port, and thousands of potential immigrants who could have been saved were forced to return, remanded a decade later to the Third Reich, instead of Land of the Free.
How will we resolve the present crisis? I’m not exactly sure, but this I believe: We will find a way, and the answer is likely to be dumb. But, as my saintly mother would say, “Only with a good spirit.” A good spirit, not a misanthropic one, will find a way.
Will dumbing-down alone cure all society’s ills? No, but the starting point must be to presuppose that we will look at the world with the naïve credulity of a second grader. We need assume that the solutions to our problems are basically no-brainers. We need sophistication only to lop off the rough edges, not undo the solutions with a bunch of phony smoke-and-mirrors. A dopey kid could tell you what to do with the Glory’s leftovers. Just ask him.
May 13, 2008
THEIR OWN SPECIAL SAUCE
Linda and I finally took our long awaited cruise to the Caribbean. Wunderbar. The cuisine? Breakfast and lunch were hardly fine dining. So what. The vaunted “around-the-clock-buffet” was mostly soft-serve ice cream and corrugated-frisbee pizza. But, the suppers were marvelous, whether you were metro-kosher or all-out treife. I did not venture into the frozen strictly kosher offerings.
The typical cruise fastidiously avoids exposing the voyagers to the native Caribbean fare. No, it’s strictly scrambled eggs for breakfast, American-style lasagna for lunch, bloody-rare filet for supper. Even the somnambulating tours point you to lunch at generic restaurants, from which the guides receive significant baksheesh. And don’t get me started about phony tequila factories. The free Anejo was too good to resist.
The guides also try to gross you out by regaling you in local custom of dining on iguana, turtle, and alligator. Nu, again, so what? After all, it “tastes like chicken” anyways. Janelle the Guide was also quick to offer that the female iguana’s soup was “very tasty.” Right, and hush puppies are really matzo balls in disguise.
The closest that I came to native food was somewhere up the Belize River. Being kashrut-virtuous that day, I noticed a putative national delicacy on the menu, a mélange of red beans and rice – and it was even vegetarian.
Really quite good. By its side was a pill cup of a yellow-gray gunk that the server presented as “special sauce.”
“And is the sauce vegetarian?” I asked.
“Oh no, mon. You better be careful of it.”
“Why?”
“It’s rendered chicken fat.”
I had traveled 1,253 miles just to be served schmaltz.
Moments earlier Danelle had told us that no Jews had lived on Belize. Wrong. I Googled and discovered that a Jewish family had lived there in the 19th century and that a Brooklyn guy had been a major landowner in the 1950’s, and was buried there. Ah, the origin of schmaltz on Belize.
After lunch, we traveled on to a Mayan village. Asking one of the women about their native food, she told me that in her town they broil iguana liver, chop it up with onions and turtle eggs, and bind it with their own “special sauce.”
Mystery solved.
Linda and I finally took our long awaited cruise to the Caribbean. Wunderbar. The cuisine? Breakfast and lunch were hardly fine dining. So what. The vaunted “around-the-clock-buffet” was mostly soft-serve ice cream and corrugated-frisbee pizza. But, the suppers were marvelous, whether you were metro-kosher or all-out treife. I did not venture into the frozen strictly kosher offerings.
The typical cruise fastidiously avoids exposing the voyagers to the native Caribbean fare. No, it’s strictly scrambled eggs for breakfast, American-style lasagna for lunch, bloody-rare filet for supper. Even the somnambulating tours point you to lunch at generic restaurants, from which the guides receive significant baksheesh. And don’t get me started about phony tequila factories. The free Anejo was too good to resist.
The guides also try to gross you out by regaling you in local custom of dining on iguana, turtle, and alligator. Nu, again, so what? After all, it “tastes like chicken” anyways. Janelle the Guide was also quick to offer that the female iguana’s soup was “very tasty.” Right, and hush puppies are really matzo balls in disguise.
The closest that I came to native food was somewhere up the Belize River. Being kashrut-virtuous that day, I noticed a putative national delicacy on the menu, a mélange of red beans and rice – and it was even vegetarian.
Really quite good. By its side was a pill cup of a yellow-gray gunk that the server presented as “special sauce.”
“And is the sauce vegetarian?” I asked.
“Oh no, mon. You better be careful of it.”
“Why?”
“It’s rendered chicken fat.”
I had traveled 1,253 miles just to be served schmaltz.
Moments earlier Danelle had told us that no Jews had lived on Belize. Wrong. I Googled and discovered that a Jewish family had lived there in the 19th century and that a Brooklyn guy had been a major landowner in the 1950’s, and was buried there. Ah, the origin of schmaltz on Belize.
After lunch, we traveled on to a Mayan village. Asking one of the women about their native food, she told me that in her town they broil iguana liver, chop it up with onions and turtle eggs, and bind it with their own “special sauce.”
Mystery solved.
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