‘Tis the Season: A Kemach Torah Passover Digest

First things first: The 2012 Passover Guide is proving to be enormously popular, at least by the standards of a niche blog like this one. The hit count on March 30th, the day it was published, was more than three times the previous record hit count for a single day. Thanks to everyone who shared it through Facebook, Google+ and word of mouth, and please keep spreading the word!* Please treat the comments section of this post as the new suggestion box for additions to the 2013 Guide.

Now that we’re in the final week of preparations, I thought it would be a good time to present some relevant posts you might have missed last year.

1. Who Knows Three? An explanation, a bit on the technical side, of why we have three matzot on the modern seder plate.
2. A Question of Seasonality. Addressing the oddity of charoset, which is usually made with apples even though they’re a fall crop and Passover is a spring holiday. Read the comments section.
3. The Curious Case of Matzah Ashirah. How egg matzah is highly problematic for reasons that make no sense.
4. Carrot “consommé” (vegan). Not necessarily a Passover recipe, but if you read the Guide (just follow the first link in this article) you’ll see that that’s exactly the point.

So much for old business. Now, how about that Passover-hekhshered ice cream? No? And you don’t have a dedicated ice cream maker for Passover? No problem.

Shavua tov!

* I don’t make money off of this blog or anything. I just want to make Passover better.

PSA: How to get the latkes you want

The Internet is host to a zillion latke recipes. Some of them aren’t what you would expect. I’m not going to cram in another one, but since tonight is the first night of Chanukka I thought I should say something about them. Whichever recipe you choose to follow, here are some tips for making delicious, problem-free latkes:

1. Know your potatoes (assuming you’re making latkes out of potatoes). Waxy potatoes, also known as boiling potatoes, contain less starch and therefore don’t get as thick or bind to each other as well when fried. If you’re using these—and you might want to, because some of them are delicious—make sure you use a little extra egg and flour/matzo meal/whatever as binder. Starchy potatoes, also called baking potatoes, bind to themselves naturally when fried. Yukon golds also make excellent latkes without too much extra binder.
2. Alternate grating onions and potatoes, and mix the batter a little when you switch. When you grate a potato, you expose its internal starches to oxygen, which causes them to turn brown. (This is the same process that browns the slices of a cut apple.) The acid from onion juice slows down this process and makes for a nicer-looking latke. Grating all the potatoes and then the onion allows the reaction to get started quickly, while keeping the potato always in contact with some onion prevents this.
3. Drain the potatoes and onions once they’re grated. Many a cook has mixed up what seemed like the perfect latke batter, only to have it become watery and difficult to handle when the time comes to fry. (Frying very wet batter can also be dangerous, since lots of water dropped into hot oil causes spattering.) This happens because the vegetables continue to “bleed” watery liquid for a while after they’ve been grated. You can let them sit in a bowl for ten minutes and then tip it out, or even better, drain them for ten minutes in a colander and then squeeze out the excess.
4. Stir in the salt at the last minute if your circumstances allow. Salt leeches more moisture out of the vegetables and creates the same problem addressed in point 3.
5. Stir the batter between frying batches. No matter how diligent you are about steps 3 and 4, some liquid will always settle at the bottom of the bowl. Stirring from the bottom up redistributes it and keeps the batter moist, while not stirring results in a puddle at the bottom and a final batch of weird, splotchy latkes.
6. Keep the oil hot. Fried foods don’t have to be fatty, and the best way to keep them crispy and not soggy with oil is to make sure that the oil itself stays between 350 and 365 degrees Fahrenheit (177 to 185 Celsius). If you have a frying thermometer, use it. If not, drop a small test latke into the oil—enthusiastic sizzling should begin on contact, rather than sluggishly building up. Also, if you find your oil running low, do not add oil while there are latkes in the pan. This will cause the temperature to plunge and result in soggy, oily pancakes. Instead, finish the batch in the pan and then add more oil, giving it time to heat up before you start on the next round of latkes.
7. After frying, drain the latkes well. Some extra oil always follows a latke out of the pan, so place them on a towel-lined plate to dry. You can also drain them directly in a wire mesh strainer positioned over a bowl or the sink, which allows both sides to remain crisp rather than steaming the underside.

If you have any other advice for better latkes, please share! Chanukka sameach!

Jewish Food I.V*: Vox Populi

When I began planning for this project, I did some extremely unscientific research in the form of crowdsourcing posts on Facebook and Google+ that asked readers to suggest foods they considered “Jewish,” or that they felt most people did. (Or that they felt most American Jews did. In an effort to make the findings as unscientific as possible, I phrased the question differently each time.) Answers were varied, often passionate, and generally a lot of fun to read, so I thought I’d share a few choice responses.

Names have been omitted to protect the hungry—anyone who wants credit for something clever they wrote need merely say so.

“The only truly Jewish food is tsholnt-ḥamin-dafina in all its forms, since it was invented to fill a halakhic need.”

“Kosher for Passover desserts. Would anyone who’s not Jewish actually have reason to eat those?”

“As a Jewish convert who had a much more varied diet than most Americans (I grew up eating sushi way before it was popular, goat soup made with every bit of the goat that’s edible, etc.) I had never, ever heard of kugel before I ate at my now-husband’s parents’ house for the first time. It’s definitely become one of the foods that I most associate with the Ashkenazic Jewish culture.”

“Similar to the last poster (minus the goat soup bit), I had never previously heard of kugel or cholent. I also had never heard of lox (probably would have if I had grown up on the East Coast, however). While smoked salmon exists in many forms in many parts of the world, in the US I think it’s mostly a Jewish thing.”

“Latkes. Sweet wine. Bread with salt. Kasha varnishkes. Bread dipped in honey for the new year, or for Shabbes after a wedding. Parsley and eggs in salt water. Any kind of smoked fish, especially in the morning. Blintzes. Honey cake. Borscht with sour cream. Hot tea in a glass, served with a single sugar cube on the side. Any piece of candy that was hidden in my great-grandma’s pockets.”

“Well lookee here, a recipe for an old Jewish Passover staple using matza that’s completely treif.” (WARNING: The linked page contains video with sound. Best not to click if people around you think you’re working on something important. At very least, turn off your speakers.)

“Cranberry crisp as side dish rather than dessert (ok, maybe that’s a particularly seminary girl thing). Slow cooked meat and starch dishes (obviously), anything that has matzah instead of a standard chametz ingredient (lasagna, pizza, knishes). Knishes themselves for that matter, tzimmes (AFAIK), that bizarre raw broccoli, mayonnaise, red onion and craisin salad that I have never seen in the wild. (Editor’s note: I have no idea what this is. Will have to ask about it.) I’m afraid that my mom cooked way too varied a selection of food to be of too much help here. Most of my ethnic kosher food experiences are the kosher variants of other ethnicities.”

“The executive director of the synagogue where I work argues that there aren’t any Jewish foods anymore, unless you go back to Israel.”

“How about foods that the rest of the world eats in dairy form, but Jews have parevized (is that even a word?) in order to eat with/after meat meals. For example, I did a research paper on food for my Spanish class a few years back (we were supposed to visit a restaurant, but there were no kosher ones at the time with food from Spanish speaking countries), and I discovered that the Jewish version of flan differs from the regular version for this reason. Also, products like Stella D’oro cookies, which were kept pareve mostly for us Jews.”

“That should be a whole category on it’s own—you can combine “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Dairy” and “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Chametz,” as the two groups where one would think we would just survive without having to recreate the food everyone else is eating in (almost always) less appealing forms.”

“Not sure that gefilte fish is uniquely Jewish—I believe my wife was once served it as a traditional Lithuanian dish at a friend’s house.”

I’ll cap it off with an exchange between a married couple. One grew up in a Hasidic community; the other is not Jewish, but probably spends more hours per week in a synagogue than you do:

“That strange thing my co-workers do to brisket that involves ketchup.”

“Adafina; flam pletzele; sufganiyot; mohnkichel; That Apricot Chicken Everybody Makes That Surely Has A Name; gribenes; SHUT UP, WIFE, I LOVE GRAPE JELLY AND KETCHUP BRISKET.”

“THE GRAPE JELLY AND KETCHUP BRISKET IS WEIRD, OKAY? So is the apricot chicken. JELLIES ARE NOT MEANT TO GO ON MEATS. The end.”

This should be fun. As always, further insights are appreciated.

* It’s 1.5 in Roman numerals. What’s that you say? The Roman and Indo-Arabic numeral systems were developed hundreds of years and thousands of miles apart, and shouldn’t be confused? Oh well.

Jewish Food I: Boundaries

On the first day of my seventh grade music class, our teacher asked us to define the word “music” for him. This was a brave thing to do. When facing a room filled with eleven- and twelve-year-olds who have just enrolled in a prestigious test-admission school and who have been told to think very highly of their own intellects, one should think twice before asking them what might be taken for a stupid question. What is music? We’d all been around music since birth, and it was a waste of time to ask us to define it when everyone knew that music was …

Um.

• Sound with distinct pitches? But what about non-pitched percussion? What about rap? And some sounds have distinct, music-like pitches but would never be considered music, except maybe by John Cage.
• How about rhythmic sound, then? But lots of music doesn’t have a distinct rhythm or meter, and “rhythmic sound” would include the sound of a jackhammer, which you probably don’t think of as music (unless you’re John Cage).
• Artistically manipulated sound? A talented stage actor reciting a monologue by Shakespeare is manipulating sound artistically, but we don’t call it music. (John Cage probably would have been more interested in the sound of an audience member sneezing at the onset of “Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once / That make ingrateful man!” [King Lear, Act III, Scene II].)

Now that I’m no longer eleven years old—and now that “musician” is one of the things I tell people who don’t know what a cantor is but want to know my profession in a single word—I’m better able to appreciate how hard it is to define things that surround us so completely that we rarely think about them. If you’ve always known what music is and assume your audience has as well, why bother to formulate a sentence, paragraph or book to tell anyone what it is? It can’t be made known because it’s already known!

Loyal readers may have noticed—but will be forgiven if they haven’t—that for a blog about food and Judaism, Kemach Torah has barely touched on the subject of Jewish food. That’s not an accident. I’ve avoided talking about “Jewish food” because I don’t know exactly what that is. Of course, I and most people I know recognize some foods as Jewish and others as non-Jewish, but we might differ on which and why. What’s the qualifying factor? For some it may be a matter of technical distinctions, especially with regard to what’s kosher and what ain’t, but for most of us it’s a gut thing. A roast beef sandwich with Swiss cheese, mayonnaise, lettuce and tomato is treyf because it contains both meat and dairy products, but the mayo is what really makes it non-Jewish fare. (Jews add mustard, thank you.) Lenny Bruce understood this, and assumed his audience did too:

Kool-Aid is goyish. Evaporated milk is goyish even if the Jews invented it. [Editor's note: I have found no indication that Gail Borden, the dairy farmer who invented evaporated milk, was Jewish.] Chocolate is Jewish and fudge is goyish. Fruit salad is Jewish. Lime Jello is goyish. Lime soda is very goyish.

All Drake’s Cakes are goyish. Pumpernickel is Jewish and, as you know, white bread is very goyish. Instant potatoes, goyish. Black cherry soda’s very Jewish, macaroons are very Jewish.

So what are the qualities that make food Jewish? Must it be eaten primarily by Jews? Does food have to be kosher in order to be Jewish, and is food that’s kosher inherently Jewish or not? Should food have been created by Jews to be considered Jewish? How long a history should a given product or recipe have within a Jewish community before it ceases to be a food that Jews happen to like and becomes, as it were, part of the tribe? I don’t know any hard and fast answers to these questions, but I plan to explore them over the next few weeks, bli neder.

(The “bli neder” comes into play because my dear wife is 35 weeks pregnant, and it has been pointed out to me recently that that the last time a woman in her family line stayed pregnant beyond 37 weeks … well, let’s just say Guadalcanal was a very interesting place around that time. Parents of newborns tell me that sleep deprivation and the needs of an infant make it hard to get much of anything done, and if they are joking then their timing is way off, because they seem to be utterly serious and completely exhausted. Anyway, thanks in advance for your patience!)

Who Knows Three?

I hope to update the glossary soon to account for the jargon in this entry. Please be patient. I can answer questions if you e-mail me! Don’t forget to remove the 3.

The centerpiece of the Passover seder is a tray with a stack of three whole matzot: unleavened, usually cracker-like breads made with only flour and water. Early in the seder the the middle matzah is broken in two by hand, and the larger of the two pieces—it’s virtually impossible to make them equal, and I’ve tried—is wrapped in a cloth and set aside, usually off the table. This piece, called the afikoman, is shared by all participants at the end of the seder as a last course. (It’s often referred to as a “dessert.” Nobody else seems to find this as funny as I do.)

Some people never think to ask why there are three matzot. (If they do ask, the standard response is that they represent the three levels of the ancient religious caste system: the Kohanim [the priests], Levites [the acolyte caste of which Kohanim are a subset] and Israelites [all the other Jews]. I dislike this explanation, mostly because I’m a Levite and I don’t fancy being snapped in two.) Most of us don’t realize that until recently, at least according to a Jewish standard of “recent,” there were only two matzot. But first things first: why do we break one of them?

וַיְהִ֣י ׀ בַּיּ֣וֹם הַשִּׁשִּׁ֗י לָֽקְט֥וּ לֶ֨חֶם֙ מִשְׁנֶ֔ה שְׁנֵ֥י הָעֹ֖מֶר לָֽאֶחָ֑ד וַיָּבֹ֨אוּ֙ כָּל־נְשִׂיאֵ֣י הָֽעֵדָ֔ה וַיַּגִּ֖ידוּ לְמֹשֶֽׁה: וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֲלֵהֶ֗ם ה֚וּא אֲשֶׁ֣ר דִּבֶּ֣ר ה֔’ שַׁבָּת֧וֹן שַׁבַּת־קֹ֛דֶשׁ לַֽה֖’ מָחָ֑ר אֵ֣ת אֲשֶׁר־תֹּאפ֞וּ אֵפ֗וּ וְאֵ֤ת אֲשֶֽׁר־תְּבַשְּׁלוּ֙ בַּשֵּׁ֔לוּ וְאֵת֙ כָּל־הָ֣עֹדֵ֔ף הַנִּ֧יחוּ לָכֶ֛ם לְמִשְׁמֶ֖רֶת עַד־הַבֹּֽקֶר:־

It came to pass that on the sixth day they gathered double bread, two omer-measures [of manna] for one person, and the leaders of the community came and told Moshe. He said to them, “This is what Adonai has commanded: Tomorrow is a day of Sabbath rest for Adonai. Bake what you will bake and cook what you will cook, and leave whatever remains until morning.” (Exodus 16:22-23)