An appreciation of Pete Seeger – and a ’60s recipe

February 2, 2014 by 1 Comment

I knew it would happen sooner rather than later. After all, he was 94 and increasingly frail. Still, I was very sad when I learned that Pete Seeger had died January 27.

Even though his career spanned more than seven decades, to me he always epitomized the 1960s, the era when I came of age. He was one of my personal heroes. From him I learned that music has the power to bring people together for good.

I met my best teenage friends at an art and music camp in Pennsylvania. Many of us were kind of misfits at our high schools, happy dorks when we were with each other. At our gatherings we didn’t listen to rock n’ roll, we  sang folk music, often while one or more of us played guitar.

Our favorites included several songs written by Pete Seeger: “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” (popularized by the Kingston Trio), “If I Had a Hammer,” (made famous by Peter, Paul and Mary) and “Turn, Turn, Turn,” (which became a No. 1 hit for the Byrds). Pete himself popularized “We Shall Overcome,” which originated with striking tobacco workers in the South and became the anthem of the civil rights movement. Pete sang everything from pro-labor and anti-war anthems to children’s songs to folk songs in a dozen languages. “My job is to show people there’s a lot of good music in this world, and if used right, it may help to save the planet,” he said.

Blacklisted by anti-Communists

From my lefty parents I learned that Pete had been a member of the Weavers, a quartet that led the folk music revival of the 1950s. I promptly bought a couple of LPs by the Weavers to complement my Pete Seeger records.

The Weavers’ career as a group tanked in the early 1950s during the McCarthyite anti-Communist witch hunts. After the Weavers broke up, Pete went out on his own. He played at folk festivals (including the granddaddy Newport Folk Festival, which he helped found), coffeehouses, union halls and college campuses, especially small, liberal schools like Reed, Oberlin and my alma mater, Antioch. He was the living embodiment of Antioch’s motto: Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.

Here’s an excellent obituary of Pete from Huffington Post. From another great obit, this one in the New York Times, I was shocked to learn that “Hootenanny,” a television show that featured folk singers, refused to allow Pete to appear on the program.

When I was a sophomore in high school, I loved “Hootenanny.” Once I made a poor date sit in my living room for a half hour before going out so I could catch Chad Mitchell’s appearance on the show. Because of the network’s mistreatment of Pete, many other performers – including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary – boycotted the show. If I had known all this at the age of 15, I would have boycotted it too! “Hootenanny” finally offered to let Pete on the show if he signed a loyalty oath; he refused.

A hero for a generation

I’m far from alone in my generation in my admiration of Pete Seeger. I asked friends for their thoughts and theirs echoed mine.

“In my parents’ house we had all the Weavers albums, we knew all the songs,” said Nancy Federman Kaplan of West Bloomfield, Mich. “He and his fellow Weavers were heroes to us for their steadfast commitment to principles of racial and economic justice, which got them into hot water with ‘The Government’ (the House Un-American Activities Committee – how many people remember what that was?),” she said.

Mike Corbin of Huntington Woods, Mich. remembers attending a concert with Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie in Detroit in 1969. George Crockett, a Recorder’s Court judge, was in the audience. He had just released a group of 150 black people, including juveniles, who had been arrested after someone shot a police officer and ran into the church where they had been meeting.

“Pete introduced the judge and led the audience in a truly rousing rendition of ‘We Shall Overcome,’” he said. “Then people danced the ‘Ring Around the Rosy Rag’ in the park across the street. What a night!”

Pete always engaged the audience like that. This video is a good example – it’s from a concert in honor of his 90th birthday at Madison Square Garden. Everyone in the hall joined in as he and his folksinger friends sang the wonderful Woody Guthrie anthem, “This Land is Your Land.”

Jo Ann Dollard of Chicago also became a Pete Seeger fan as a teen but says she  came to appreciate him  more  as an adult and to understand the meaning of his music on a deeper level.

“He felt the music and he lived social justice and combined the two like no one else,” she said. “I felt inspired by his boundless energy, integrity, intelligence, strength, courage and all-out joy. He inspired me to become more engaged with caring, with making the world better and with life itself.”

Pete touched people across a wide spectrum, including many who never in a million years would describe themselves as politically left-wing.

“His folk songs gave us strength, hope, and assurance that we could stand up and be counted for the good, the just, the free. We truly could love one another in a way that changes everything in us and in our land,” said John Elmore of Grand Rapids, Mich., who is on the more conservative side.

As John points out, the 1960s were not only roiled by the Vietnam War, but racial and gender discrimination were the norm. The youth of America wanted something better.

“The line in Pete’s song ‘If I Had a Hammer’ that always hit me, choked me up, was ‘It’s the hammer of Justice, it’s the bell of Freedom, it’s the song about Love between my brothers and my sisters, all over this land.’” said John. “We sang this in our church youth group and we meant the words we sang. “We of that generation carry those words in our hearts and hope and pray and continue to work for this ideal today.”

A champion for clean water

Nancy Kaplan also cited Pete’s campaign for clean water. In the late 1960s he built a 106-foot sloop, the Clearwater, and sailed it up and down the Hudson River. He started a nonprofit environmental organization, the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater.

After decades of litigation, General Electric in 2009 finally began to dredge sediment containing pollutant PCBs that it had dumped into the Hudson. Thanks, Pete!

Folksinger extraordinaire, champion of the oppressed, anti-war activist, advocate for the planet…if anyone can rest in peace, knowing he left the world a better place, it’s Pete Seeger.

A recipe from the ’60s

As part of my nostalgic look back to the 1960s, here is a recipe for Ambrosia Salad, which was very popular at that time. In fact, Cool Whip, probably the world’s first fake whipped cream, first appeared in 1967. I doubt I would make it today, when we’re all trying to eat healthy – but I might serve it at a Sixties theme party or as a treat for my granddaughter (if her health-nut parents aren’t around). This recipe comes from a blog called Brown Eyed Baker (which also provided the Lebkuchen recipe I posted a couple of months ago).

What I Learned from the Yeasts

January 26, 2014 by Leave a Comment

A Note from Your Host, Bobbie Lewis: Today’s post is by guest blogger Louis “Eli” Finkelman, a rabbi, scholar, teacher and freelance writer in the Detroit area. He is also a cook, brewer, vintner and assistant to the cheese-maker with whom he shares his home. He previously wrote about his father’s rumtopf and making pickles.

I wanted a recipe that includes white wine vinegar to go with this story. The recipe for Crispy Cauliflower with White Wine Vinaigrette comes from a fairly new cookbook, Balaboosta, by Einat Admony. Balaboosta is Yiddish for housewife, but it has the connotation of a woman who keeps an immaculate home and is an excellent cook. To call someone “a real balaboosta” is high praise! The author called it “Cauliflower Everyone Will Love,” and she spoke the truth! I don’t love cauliflower, but this recipe was a hit at a company dinner where the guests included four children; in fact it was the only one of many dishes that was devoured completely.

By ELI FINKELMAN

Late in the summer of 2010, I happened to gain possession of a few ounces of not-very-appetizing grape juice.  Give me a while to get around to telling you how that happened.  For the moment, let it suffice that it took some effort to get the juice.

I had a bit more than I needed, and I did not feel like just throwing that extra juice out. So I kept it in a Mason jar. Someday, I thought, I might think of what to do with this; until then, I can keep it someplace in my closet, where it won’t get in my wife’s way.

A few weeks later, I had another few ounces of fresh grape juice, and nothing to do with it. By now, however, I had a plan. I added it to the juice in the Mason jar in my closet, where no one would notice a bit more juice.

Yeasts at work

A few weeks later, I remembered to loosen the cover of the Mason jar. Grape juice ferments, even if you do not add yeast. Wild yeast will grow in grape juice, and, as the juice ferments, it gives off carbon dioxide. If I had not remembered to release the pressure, the Mason jar in my closet might have exploded. A few weeks later, I tightened the cover. Yeasts do not need oxygen to work. Who knows, I thought, maybe the grape juice would turn into wine.

I must have gone though this cycle of loosening the cover and tightening the cover a few times. Eventually, I forgot all about the jar of grape juice in my closet. During the next three years, the jar just sat in my dark closet, undisturbed and unloved. It waited there.

This might be the right time to tell the story of how I got the juice in the first place.

Recreating medieval recipes

My wife likes to reconstruct medieval recipes from Europe and the Middle East. Many of these recipes call for the juice of unripe grapes, called verjus, and we had no supply of verjus. That summer, our neighbor offered us the grapes that grow in her yard, but said, “do not plan to pick them just yet; they’re not quite ripe.”

With our neighbor’s permission, we dashed over and picked a load of unripe grapes.

Pressing unripe grapes takes more effort than pressing ripe grapes because they are not as juicy.  When we had pressed the grapes, we felt tired of the whole project, but we had a pitcher of verjus. We poured it into little freezer containers, ready for the next medieval reconstruction recipe.

The green verjus in the top of the pitcher looked somewhat clear and attractive; it had a sharp, sour taste, just as the medieval cooks said it would.

Using the dregs

When we had filled all the containers, a few ounces of muddy-looking unripe grape juice from the bottom of the pitcher remained. I did want to throw that out, but it looked too ugly to use. So I put it in my Mason jar.

A few months later, when local grapes ripened, my wife and I picked enough grapes to put up a year’s supply of wine in our fermenter. After we had filled our fermenter, we still had a few cups of grape juice, the muddiest grape juice from near the bottom of the pail. I could have thrown that out, but I did not want to. Instead, it went into the Mason jar in my closet.

And it stayed there, more or less undisturbed, for three years.

I finally paid attention to the Mason jar again this summer. The bottom of the jar held a layer of repulsive brown opaque stuff, and the top had a few fragments of whatever, but in between was a perfectly clear, yellow liquid; it looked like a delicate white wine. I had a wine bottle ready to store that middle liquid.

I loosened the cover of the Mason jar, and smelled the heady aroma. I thought I recognized that bouquet. Then, bravely, I sipped a bit of the liquid.

No doubt about it.

An unanticipated treasure

It was vinegar.  I had a wine bottle filled with delicious, delicate, lovely, white wine vinegar.

When my wife had a chance to smell it, she agreed. A few days later, when we had emptied a vinegar bottle and relabeled it as homemade wine vinegar, we filled it with the new wine vinegar.

That gave me an idea. I threw out the muddy dregs from the bottom of the Mason jar, and put just a few ounces of the clear wine vinegar back into the jar. Then, after an evening of celebration, the last few ounces from a nearly empty wine bottle went into the Mason jar.

When I bottled this year’s wine, at the bottom of the fermenter I found a few ounces of imperfectly clarified white wine. That went straight into the Mason jar, too. If all goes well, I should have more homemade vinegar one of these weeks.  I may have learned how to make vinegar at home.

The moral of this story

So what else have I learned from this experience?  Only this: While I was not paying attention, unseen forces were busy at work, patiently turning my muddy remnants of grape juice into clear, delicious vinegar.

I did not need to direct the project.  I did not need a recipe. I did not need the illusion that I could control the process. I just needed to set up conditions where the unseen forces could work their magic, and then, patiently, let them be.

We had the word “yeast” long before Louis Pasteur discovered that yeasts are little living creatures, hard at work turning sugars into carbon dioxide and alcohol. “Yeast” meant the froth on top of the fermenter. Vintners, brewers and bakers knew that the froth helped the invisible forces ferment their wine and beer and raise their bread.

Vintners, brewers and bakers knew how to treat these unseen forces to let them work. Pasteur discovered why we cannot see them–because the living creatures are so tiny.

The invisible forces that turn wine into vinegar also have a name, a wonderful  one: “mother of vinegar.” Like yeast, “mother of vinegar” turns out to be a different bunch of Pasteur’s little creatures, hard at work making a product that we value, so long as we let them be.

Here’s the moral of the story:  If I pretend that I have control, and can get to a certain goal directly, I often fail. If I let the right conditions obtain, and have patience to let them be, sometimes humble tiny unseen forces, undisturbed and diligent, bring about the change I desire.

Sometimes the change they bring is not the wine we expect, but vinegar we can use–if we have the courage to taste it and the wisdom to recognize it when it appears.

Freedom Smells Like My Mother’s Kitchen

January 19, 2014 by 4 Comments

A Note from your host Bobbie Lewis: Today we welcome Desiree Cooper, who describes herself on her “Detroit Snob” website this way: “As the editor of the alternative newsweekly, the Metro Times, and a columnist with the Detroit Free Press for 11 years, Cooper was well-regarded as a compassionate writer who gave voice to the city’s everyday heroes. ​In 2009, she reinvented herself as a blogger, author and content specialist for non-profit organizations.” (And she has the cutest grandson in the world!)

By DESIREE COOPER

My mother’s mind is quickly slipping away. At 80, she’s often agitated and confused. She has problems executing simple tasks like showering and getting dressed in the morning. Her conversation is limited to a few repetitive topics, and now it’s dappled with confounding non-sequitors.

But there are moments when I can still glimpse the amazing woman she used to be. The memories that come spilling out as she looks at old photos. The smell of her perfume. The glint of the earrings she is never seen without. The way she lights up around her great-grandson.

And when she takes over the kitchen to bake her sweet potato pies.

A sacred ritual

For my mother—and now for me—cooking is a sacred ritual, a nod to our heritage, a practice of love. Her greens, skillet corn cakes, butter beans and fried chicken were staples of my childhood. Now those recipes feel like what tethers us to each other, to our history and to the generations yet to come.

My parents were so good at providing a wonderful home that I sometimes forget that, for them, “home” was not always a place of sanctity. In their day, black women cooked “high on the hog” for their employers but served scraps to their children. Black men swallowed the shame of not being able to protect their wives and children in their own living rooms. Black children were robbed of their dreams as they slept in their own beds.

But if there was one thing that spoke of prosperity, hope and human dignity, it was the smell of food wafting from a warm kitchen. It was the sound of pots clanking and catfish frying. It was the ancient scents of cinnamon and nutmeg. It was the African worship of the yam.

A fight for peace in the home

I risk simplifying one of history’s seminal movements by saying it was all about a pie browning in the oven. But I will stand by this contention: The Civil Rights Movement was not only a fight for equality in public spaces, it also was about the ability to live peacefully at home. And nothing symbolizes the sanctity of home more than sharing a prayer and a meal around the dinner table.

It is said that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s favorite dessert was pecan pie. But there are stories on the Internet about the role that the sweet potato pie played in sustaining him during the struggle.  His sister-in-law claims to have baked him a sweet potato pie to speed his convalescence after he was stabbed in Harlem in 1958. A family friend had purportedly prepared King a soul food dinner including a sweet potato pie for the evening of April 4, 1968—the day he was assassinated.

This Martin Luther King Day, I will remember the courage of all of those who fought for my human dignity. And I will taste the gratitude in each delectable bite of my mother’s sweet potato pie.

Celebrate Tu B’Shevat with an Israeli salad

January 12, 2014 by Leave a Comment

 

Thursday on the Hebrew calendar is Tu B’Shevat, the 15th day of the Hebrew month of Shevat. It’s generally known as “the new year of trees.” As you can read elsewhere in Read the Spirit, it’s a celebration of all things botanical in connection with the land of Israel.

It’s a minor holiday–not a holy day when work is prohibited and special prayers are recited. When I went to Hebrew school as a child, the only thing I can remember about Tu B’Shevat is being given a piece of “bokser”–a dried carob pod–to celebrate the day. The “bokser” (also known as St. John’s bread) was disgusting; it had the texture of shoe leather and tasted like old sweat socks. None of the kids would eat it.

A seder to celebrate

These days, the holiday is being celebrated more and more often with a special Tu B’Shevat seder. Everyone thinks of Passover when they hear the word “seder,” but all that term really means is: a meal incorporating a certain order of foods and wine (the word “seder” means “order”).

At a Tu B’Shevat seder, like at a Passover seder, celebrants drink four cups of wine, but they start with a cup of all white wine (or grape juice), then add a little red to the cup, then a little more so it’s half and half, and finally drink a cup of all red.

The four cups symbolize the four seasons and also four mystical dimensions: emanation, formation and birth, creation and fire (the “divine spark” within every human being).

The foods include the “seven species” mentioned in the Bible. Deuteronomy 8:7-8 says, “For the Lord your God is bringing you to a rich land, a land of streams, of springs and underground waters gushing out in hill and valley, a land of wheat and barley, of vines, fig-trees, and pomegranates, a land of olives, oil and honey.” (Note: That’s the New English Bible translation. You may count eight things there. The translation in Jewish tradition is “olive oil” not “olives”-comma-“oil.”)

Fruits with mystical meanings

In addition, celebrants eat fruits of different types: those with a hard inedible shell, such as nuts; those with a pit in the center, such as dates, apricots or peaches; those that are completely edible, such as berries and grapes; and those that have a tough skin on the outside but are sweet and soft inside, such as bananas, mangoes or pineapple. Like the cups of wine, each has a symbolic or mystical meaning.

Here is a script and explanation for a Tu B’Shevat seder.  The Tu B’Shevat seder has its roots in Kabbalah, the mystical branch of Jewish study that developed in S’fat, in northern Israel in the medieval period. Here is a script for a more Kabbalistic version of a Tu B’Shevat seder.

Since the 1970s, some modern Jews have given an ecological twist to the Tu B’Shevat seder, using it as a form to advance the idea of sustainable agriculture.  “Trees are so important in Jewish thought that the Torah itself is called ‘a tree of life.’ Perhaps this Torah wisdom can help us think more wisely about using these resources carefully and living in a more sustainable way,” write Dr. Akiva Wolff and Rabbi Yonatan Neri in their article “Trees, Torah, and Caring for the Earth” as part of Jewcology’s “Year of Jewish Learning on the Environment.”

In honor of Tu B’Shevat, I offer a recipe for a delicious spinach salad that uses dates, almonds, wheat (in the form of pita) and olives (in the form of oil), all of which are used to celebrate the holiday. It’s from Jerusalem: A Cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, which I wrote about a few weeks ago.

“God’s Cook Book” with a bulghur pilaf recipe

January 5, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Note to readers: If you have a favorite recipe that comes with a good story about family, friendship, faith or tradition, consider doing a guest blog for Feed the Spirit! Contact Bobbie Lewis at [email protected] with your ideas.

It takes a certain amount of hubris to call one’s literary creation God’s Cook Book. To author Jamie d’Antioc’s credit, the subtitle is Tracing the Cultinary Traditions of the Levant.

What is “the Levant” anyway? I had a general idea  of the meaning of this quaint, somewhat Victorian-sounding term, but just to be sure I looked it up. It means the region bordering the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, from northern Egypt to Turkey more or less – and therefore includes the lands of the Bible.

A gorgeous book

This is one gorgeous book, but I don’t find it really useful as a cookbook. For one thing, it’s huge, measuring 9 x 12 inches and weighing more than 4.8 pounds. But it can be a useful resource for anyone studying ancient Middle Eastern civilizations.

God’s Cook Book is lavishly illustrated with watercolors of plants, fruits and vegetables mentioned in the book as well as some showing scenes of life in the ancient Levant: camel caravans, harvesting, goat herding and more. The author thanks his mother for her choice of illustrations from the family archives.

Jamie d’Antioc, an engineer by training, served as chairman of several major financial institutions. Even though he ate in some of the world’s best restaurants, he was drawn back to the food prepared by his grandmother, who lived to be 108. He says her ideas about cuisine and its links to spirituality and longevity inspired this book.

That’s what his publisher says anyway. I found very little other information online about the author, who I’d never heard of before.

Foods “sent by God”

In his introduction, d’Antioc says he wanted to recapture his grandmother’s recipes and link them with an understanding of the foods we have eaten throughout history, “the foods sent to us by God.”

Abraham, Jesus and Muhammad, founders of the world’s principal monotheistic faiths, led similar lives, ate similar food and led their lives guided by God, says d’Antioc. He finds ample evidence in the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, Quran and Hadith (the recording sayings and act of Muhammad) about the kinds of food we should eat as well as how and when to eat them.

The book avoids any foods that are prohibited by any of the three faiths so that the recipes can be used by anyone who follows the dietary rules of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Before getting into the recipes, d’Antioc provides a short history of the Levant and an overview of ancient cooking methods and eating habits.

The book is divided into sections including Herbs, spices and other flavors; Bread; Dairy; Simple & side dishes (mostly salads); Soups & stews; Grain; Vegetables; Fish; Poultry; Meat; and more. Each section has its own introduction, followed by recipes. But the rationale for the organization of recipes isn’t always clear and you’ll find some in each section that seem like they belong elsewhere.

Quotations from scripture

Each section is also accompanied by verses from one of the holy books. At the start of the Grain section, where I found today’s recipe, is this, from Deuteronomy (24:19): “When you reap your harvest in your field, and have forgotten a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it; it shall be for the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow; that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands.”

Subsections also have explanations and quotations from the scriptures.

At the end of the book is a section on Inspired Eating, which includes subsections on Fasting, Digestion, Cleanliness, Prayer and more. There are lists of good recipes for weight loss, for vegetarians, for feasting and for children.

In all honesty, I didn’t find too many recipes I’m eager to try. Many use grains, herbs or other ingredients that aren’t easy to procure. How often have you seen melokhia in a store!?! But this one, for a pilaf of burghul (aka bulgar, aka cracked wheat), looked good and gave me an opportunity to use the pomegranate concentrate I’d made a few weeks ago by boiling down a quart-and-a-half of pomegranate juice (on sale at Costco) to one cup.

One change: I didn’t want to bother making clarified butter so I used olive oil instead.

It was a very tasty side dish and, aside from having to make the pomegranate concentrate, very easy.

While I wouldn’t recommend this as a cookbook, it’s a lovely coffee-table tome, and it would make a nice gift for a cookbook collector or anyone interested in Middle Eastern culture.

Celebrate the New Year Scots Style (With Haggis)

December 29, 2013 by 1 Comment

Think “Scottish food” and haggis immediately comes to mind.

It’s a savory concoction of “sheep’s pluck” (the heart, liver and lungs of a sheep) mixed with minced onion, oatmeal, suet, and spices. Traditionally haggis was stuffed into the sheep’s stomach and simmered for several hours. Nowadays, haggis sold commercially is prepared in sausage casing instead.

Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns, immortalized the haggis in his 1787 poem “To a Haggis.” And so Scots serve it up on Robbie Burns Day, the poet’s birthday, January 25, with a formal reading of the poem and lots of Scotch whisky. I guess with enough of the Scottish national drink, even Scottish food can be appealing!

I think of haggis at New Year’s, because several years ago my husband and I were in Kilbarchan, a small town near Glasgow, visiting friends of our son’s after Christmas. We were leaving on New Year’s Eve. Our hosts wanted to introduce us to some traditional Scottish fare so they made a haggis dinner on December 30.

(In deference to our dietary needs, they procured a packaged vegetarian version to serve us. It was quite tasty — but it wasn’t really haggis.)

I had thought haggis would be similar to Jewish kishka, a concoction made from beef scraps, fat and matzoh meal that was traditionally stuffed into a cow’s intestines. Nowadays, like haggis, it’s made in a plastic sausage casing.

But kishka is served in slices. Haggis has a looser consistency, more like sloppy joes. It’s usually served with “neeps and tatties” – mashed turnips and potatoes.

Making cheap meat palatable

Both developed out of the same need to use the least expensive parts of the animal in a palatable way.

Perhaps the haggis meat was the portion given to the peasants after the local lord took all the good cuts from the sheep. Other historians suggest haggis was a convenient way for the highland men to take a meal with them on their long journey down to Edinburgh to sell their cattle.

During our haggis dinner, one of the family’s daughters read the Burns poem. It starts out “Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face / Great Chieftan o’ the Puddin-race! / Aboon them a’ ye tak your place / Painch, tripe, or thairm / Weel are ye wordy of a grace / As lang’s my arm.”

You can get a general sense of the meaning in print, but when we heard it read in a genuine Scottish brogue we could barely understand a word. Here is the full poem, with an English translation, from the website of the Alexandria Burns Club. And here it is read on video by David Sibbald.

You can’t get it in the U.S.!

Since 1971, it has been illegal to import haggis into the United States from the Scotland due to a ban on food containing sheep lung. Then all meat from the United Kingdom was banned in 1989 because of the risk of BSE (bovine spongiform encephalitis, AKA mad cow disease). The general ban was lifted in 2010 – but not the ban on lungs. In fact, you can’t even buy American-grown animal lungs. Since sheep lung is a key ingredient, it’s still impossible to import Scottish haggis.

If you’d like to try your hand at actually cooking a haggis, here is a recipe from Alton Brown on the Food Network’s website. It looks pretty authentic except that it substitutes sheep tongue for sheep lung (to the horror of some Scottish reviewers). If you have a full-service butcher, you can probably get all the ingredients. (And the final snarky comment in the recipe is from the author, not from me!)

The bottom line, though, is that if you want to experience true Scottish haggis, plan a trip to Scotland!

What Jews Do on Christmas

December 23, 2013 by 6 Comments

On Christmas Eve this year, my husband and I will do what American Jews all over the country do on Christmas: eat Chinese.

There’s a simple reason why so many Jews eat at Chinese restaurants on Christmas: when almost everything else is closed up tight, Chinese restaurants are open and welcoming.

But the love affair between Jews and Chinese food is deeper than that.

Chinese immigrants arrived in the United States in the mid-1800s via the West Coast, where they worked on building the transcontinental railroad. By the late 19th century, there was a thriving Chinatown in New York City, adjacent to the Lower East Side which housed the city’s largest Jewish population.

A number of reasons have been put forth about why Jews latched on to Chinese food. It had to be more than proximity, because the Lower East Side was also adjacent to Little Italy. But the most popular day for Jewish families to eat out was Sunday, and for Italian immigrants, Sunday was typically a family day when restaurants were closed.

Welcoming and inexpensive

The Chinese and the Jews were the largest non-Christian immigrant groups in New York. Chinese restaurants were open all the time and welcoming of everyone, no matter what their religion or color. And they were inexpensive.

Chinese food was familiar to Jews in some ways – the use of onions, garlic and rice, and serving family-style, with everyone sharing a number of large dishes, rather that each person eating a separate meal.

But it was also very different from the food most Eastern European Jews were used to. In the 1920s and 1930s, eating Chinese food was seen as urban and sophisticated. To the sons and daughters of Eastern European immigrants, it was a way to demonstrate their American identity.

“Safe Treyf”

One interesting theory is that Chinese food was “safe treyf” – treyf meaning food that was forbidden by the Jewish dietary laws. If pork was in wontons (which looked very much like Jewish kreplach) or in tiny pieces in chop suey, it didn’t seem as bad as chowing down on a ham sandwich. And the Chinese typically don’t cook with dairy products, so no one had to worry about mixing milk and meat.

A couple of scholars, Gaye Tuchman and Harry G. Levine even wrote a paper on the topic for the journal Contemporary Ethnography (1992: Vol 22 No 3. pp. 382-407). The article also appears in The Taste of American Place: A Reader on Regional and Ethnic Foods edited by Barbara G. Shortridge & James R. Shortridge (Roman & Littlefield, 1997). And you can read it online here.

For many Jews, Chinese food was the first non-kosher food they ate. It’s not uncommon for Jews who keep a kosher home to eat non-kosher food when they are away. I’ve even known a few who bring Chinese takeout home – but eat it only on paper plates so as not to sully their kosher kitchen dishes.

When I was growing up in Philadelphia, if my family “ate out” it was most often at the Jade Palace, our local Cantonese restaurant. My family didn’t keep kosher, and I grew up loving wonton soup, shrimp in lobster sauce, and other Chinese delicacies (but not barbecued spareribs: “All bone, no meat,” my mother would sniff.)

My eating habits may have changed, but my love of Chinese food has not diminished. Luckily, it’s usually easy to get vegetarian dishes at a Chinese restaurant.

Some major metropolitan areas with large Jewish populations even have kosher Chinese restaurants. The first of these was Bernstein’s-on-Essex-Street, at 135 Essex Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

A pioneer in kosher Chinese food

Bernstein’s, which started as a deli and catering hall, has a special place in my heart because it’s where my parents were married on March 25, 1945. It was then known by its original name, Schmulka Bernstein’s. In 1959, owner Sol Bernstein began serving Chinese food. He substituted beef and veal for pork and avoided dishes that used shellfish.

My husband and I were in New York for a conference in the mid-1970s and trekked down to Bernstein’s-on-Essex-Street. The waiters wore black Chinese skullcaps with red tassels, and even the Chinese ones spoke a decent Yiddish. The food wasn’t as good as what I remembered from the Jade Palace, but for us it was a real treat to be able to eat meat at a Chinese restaurant.

Unfortunately, the Bernstein family sold the restaurant in 1989 and it closed a year later.

Jennifer 8. Lee, a Chinese-American woman who wrote a book about Chinese food called The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, has what may be the final word on why Jews love Chinese food.

“I sought out the Chinese Jews in Kaifeng, on the Silk Road, for more profound insight (these are like not like European Jews who escaped to Shanghai, they look like me but are Chosen like the Jews),” she says. “When I asked the sole Jewish Chinese woman there ‘Why do American Jews like Chinese food?’ She answered me with koan-like simplicity: ‘It tastes good.’”

Here is a recipe for eggrolls that I clipped many, many years ago from the Jewish Exponent newspaper in Philadelphia. It includes the eggroll wrappers, which I confess I have never made since it’s so easy these days to buy eggroll skins in grocery stores.

You can easily make this dish vegetarian by omitting the chicken and adding an extra cup of vegetables.