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.