food – From Under the Fig Tree

Let all who are hungry, come and eat

joselitApril 13, 2014November 16, 2017Leave a comment

In Messages from My Father, Calvin Trillin’s celebrated account of growing up an American Jewish child in St. Joseph, Missouri, he wisely noted that upbringings have themes. Much the same can be said of the ways in which American Jews celebrate Passover. Every year, there seems to be a different theme, a different approach, to the age-old holiday.

Manischewitz American Matzos/frumsatire.net

A couple of seasons ago, American Jews were all agog about a spate of new hagadot and inundated the blogosphere with comments about their content, physical appearance and, most especially, their authoritativeness. Another year, they turned their collective attention to Passover’s digitization, venting away on whether the latest app might diminish or augment the meaningfulness of the holiday.

This year, American Jewry’s thematic embrace of Passover centers on food. Whether online or in print, stories about what to eat are all the rage, eclipsing virtually everything else. Recipes trump ritual.

Some of these stories have to do with the adaptation of traditional standbys like matzoh balls or gefilte fish. Others reflect the globalization of Jewish cuisine, calling on readers to expand their repertoire of holiday fare: Think Turkish, not Polish! Still other accounts, their tongues firmly planted in their cheeks (at least I hope that’s the case), encourage readers to fill their glasses in the course of the Seder with the likes of Red Nile, a fiery cocktail of potato vodka, tomato juice, Arak and horseradish.

This year’s gastronomic commotion was sparked, I suspect, by the decision of the Orthodox Union, one of the nation’s leading kashruth authorities, to certify quinoa as a Kosher-for-Pesach product. For years, rabbis were reluctant to do so, arguing that even though quinoa was an herb, not a grain, it looked like a grain -- and tasted like one, too – rendering it unfit for Passover consumption. But in 5774, after much study and contemplation, they reversed their position, prompting consumers to cheer “Hooray” at the prospect of banishing what an earlier generation of American Jews had once called “matzoh monotony.” Out with farfel and potatoes, in with quinoa!

A testament to its pliability, the food-centric perspective on Passover also makes sense when considered historically. American Jews have a long and distinguished tradition of culinary innovation. After all, they’re responsible for giving the world that singular invention: Chocolate-covered matzoh.

A sweet Pesach to one and all.

À la carte

joselitApril 7, 2013November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Much of what we read about the modern university -- the endless faculty squabbles, the pitfalls of digital education, bored undergrads -- leave most of us with a giant headache.

But were we to look beyond the headlines and more squarely at the day to day business of the university, a decidedly more heartening portrait might emerge, one in which college education complicates and enlarges our sense of the world.

A case in point is the Frieda Kobernick Fleischman Lecture in Judaic Studies, which is presented annually by GW’s Program in Judaic Studies. A high point of the program’s calendar, this lecture brings to campus celebrated scholars of the Jewish experience to reflect on one or another of its varied manifestations.

This year’s Fleischman Lecture, which is scheduled to take place on Monday evening, April 15th, at the French Embassy in Washington, D.C., features Professor Pierre Birnbaum, one of France’s leading political sociologists and historians. His talk, Sur la table: Food, Identity and the Jews in Modern France, casts a searching eye on the often surprising ways in which gastronomy has as much to do with citizenship as it does with the palate.

Making its way through a dazzling array of sources -- menus, official pronouncements, news clips, Jewish communal records, even song -- Professor Birnbaum’s presentation promises to enrich our understanding of what it means to be a citizen and, in the process, to reveal the university at its very best.

Peas in a pod

joselitFebruary 3, 2013November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Within the contemporary academy, the topic du jour is globalization and its twin, trans-nationalism. Whatever the subject -- film, music, politics -- you can hardly have a conversation without dutifully acknowledging its presence.

Some references to globalization seem hard won, more a matter of theory than of practice. Not so when it comes to food, where, in both theory and practice, globalization is most truly at home.

Consider, for instance, the humble chickpea, a global food if ever there were one -- the stuff of stews, snacks and street food like falafel, deep-fried little balls of chickpeas. In German, the chickpea is known as kichererbse; in Spanish, it’s called garbanzo, and in the Arab world, it’s known as hummus, where it also does double-duty as the name of the popular spread.

In Yiddish, the chickpea goes by two appellations, depending on the geographical origins of the Yiddish speaker. Those whose Yiddish was shaped by its contiguity to Russia and Ukraine call it nahit; those whose Yiddish grows from Polish soil call it arbes. By whatever name, the Ashkenazic Jewish preparation for chickpeas serves them whole and heavily peppered rather than mashed and spiced with cumin.

An inexpensive, tasty and filling snack, chickpeas were once sold on the yidishe gas, the Jewish street, by itinerant vendors who piled them high in a paper cone. Later still, arbes/nahit became one of the staples commonly found at the kiddish, the post Sabbath service repast, where they would be arrayed in all their glory in a glass bowl. Hungry worshipers would grab a handful and pop them into their mouth: the Jewish equivalent of popcorn.

Recently, the kiddush was the subject of an incisive and affectionately rendered article by Leah Koenig. Though she trained her sights on herring, egg kichel and schnapps rather than on arbes, Koenig’s account sheds light on how and why we come by our culinary predilections, highlighting the ways in which food orients us as we make our way in this increasingly globalized world of ours.

Tasty Morsels

joselitFebruary 13, 2012November 16, 2017Leave a comment

I’ve been to many a conference in my day, but until this weekend I’ve never attended one that was devoted entirely to cookbooks: how to create them, how to market them, how to publicize them and how to understand them.

Many of the people in attendance at the Roger Smith Cookbook Conference, which was held in midtown Manhattan, had, in fact, successfully published, marketed, and distributed a cookbook. Other members of the audience were eager to learn how to go about publishing, marketing and distributing one. And still others, like me, were on hand to talk about its history.

Perched rather precariously on a narrow platform that barely contained four panelists, four chairs, three microphones, four glass bottles of water, and an assorted array of show & tell, Gil Marks, Joan Nathan, Mitchell Davis and yours truly talked about Jewish cookbooks: how and why they came into being, their impact on Jewish food practices and what they tell us about the Jewish encounter with modernity.

We had a lot to say. So did the audience, which peppered the panel with questions, most of them on the order of ‘When did the first recipe for bagels appear’, or ‘Could you, would you, explain why wine needs to be kosher?

Informational rather than evaluative, focused on a detail rather than on a concept, the questions were of an entirely different order than those customarily encountered at an academic conference. I can’t speak for my fellow panelists but I, for one, confess to having been taken aback, even a tad disappointed, at first by the audience’s collective response. We had showered them with so much and here all they wanted to know were the basics.

But after mulling things over (and over and over), I’ve come to the conclusion that the kinds of questions the audience posed were entirely appropriate to the occasion. As any good cookbook author knows, what really counts are the ingredients.

In the round 1

joselitJune 26, 2011November 16, 20171 Comment

As an historian, my stock in trade is change. Chronicling and analyzing how one thing gives way to another is what I do for a living, day in and day out. But taking the measure of Clio’s slings and arrows is one thing; actually experiencing them is quite another. When the forces of change affect me personally, dispassion goes out the window.

What prompts this confession is the news that a beloved New York City neighborhood institution, H & H Bagels, called it a day and closed its doors. As long as I can remember, the store hugged the corner at 80th Street and Broadway, the smell of onions and yeast wafting through the air.

Bagel cognoscenti might debate the merits of H & H’s offerings -- some palates fond them far too doughy, others just right -- but for me, the modest little storefront stood for something larger than a rounded piece of dough heaped with “everything.”

It represented the multiple ways in which a certain kind of Jewishness -- a decidedly vernacular, easy-going and undemanding form of Jewishness, at that -- found a place for itself within the urban landscape and within the deeper reaches of American culture.

Along with appetizing stores and kosher (or kosher-style) delicatessens and other Jewish food purveyors that once peppered the city street, the bagel shop brought about a sea change in what Americans ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Bagels became common fare. Expanding the American diet, the bagel also helped to expand, deepen and round out America’s relationship to its Jewish citizens.

I’ll miss my occasional bagel from H & H. But what I’ll miss even more is the history nestled within its little circular frame.

Tidbits

joselitMay 22, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

When I think of Jewish cuisine, D.C. does not immediately spring to mind. But that’s about to change. Well, sort of.

For starters, Sixth and I just launched its very own food truck, cleverly called “Sixth and Rye,” which will purvey a kosher corned beef sandwich, a black and white cookie and other longtime staples of the American Jewish diet on Fridays, just in time for lunch.

Years ago, in his luminous memoir, A Walker in the City, Alfred Kazin observed that a family visit to the local deli on a Saturday night marked the conclusion of the Jewish Sabbath and the start of the work week.

These days, things have been turned around. If “Sixth and Rye” is any indication, not only does the deli come to us. Its arrival in the ‘hood -- and only on a Friday -- also heralds the advent of the Sabbath, symbolically linking Jewish food to the Jewish calendar.

Speaking of which, every Friday, Trader Joe’s bins are stocked with challah. What a lovely gesture, I thought as I bought one: a gastronomic salute to, and acknowledgement of, the Jewish Sabbath. That may well the case, but Trader Joe’s also makes a point of saluting challah’s potential as weekend brunch fare, cheering that the ritual bread makes “killer French toast.”

Only in America!

Here, there and everywhere

joselitFebruary 21, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Princeton’s Cotsen Children’s Library is justly celebrated for the range of its holdings, the imaginative reach of its curators and its stimulating conferences, like the one I had the good fortune to attend just the other day, which explored the ephemera -- the stuff -- of childhood.

Alice in Wonderland — Credit: Wikipedia.

From its title, “Enduring Trifles,” to the fascinating constellation of its presentations, which encompassed such “trifles” as toy theater, writing sheets, paper and rag dolls, grammar books, Girl Guide badges and Moses action figures (my contribution to the proceedings), I knew I was in for a treat.

What I didn’t anticipate was the degree to which references to the Jews would surface time and again -- and in the most curious ways, leaving me feeling a bit like Alice in Wonderland.

For starters, our packet of informational materials included a brochure, playfully titled “More Tigers Spotted in the Cotsen Children’s Library,” -- an allusion to Princeton’s mascot -- which featured an illustration of a fierce, red-eyed tiger by El Lissitsky. The illustration accompanied Bentsiyon Raskin’s 1919 Yiddish children’s book, Di hun vas gevolt hobn a kam (The Hen Who Wanted a Comb).

Another Cotsen find was Aunt Fanny’s Junior Jewish Cookbook. This 1950s childrens’ cookbook was the subject of an insightful paper by my student Rachel Gross, who looked at the ways in which draydel salad and other fanciful postwar delights of the table placed culinary fun rather than filial responsibility at the center of young Jewish lives.

By far the biggest, and most eye-opening, revelation came from Matthew Grenby of Newcastle University. His inquiry into the ways in which politics informed 18th century children’s literature drew on an adventure story published in the Lilliputian Magazine, a periodical intended for young readers. In this yarn, citizens of the 18th century escape the ills of modern-day Britain by establishing a utopian society in faraway Madascagar.

In many respects, this tale resembled any number of island stories then popular with the reading public. (Think Robinson Crusoe.) Yet, as Prof. Grenby astutely pointed out, all sorts of coded and not-so-coded references to the controversial ‘Jew Bill’ of 1752, which dangled the possibility of granting the Jews civil rights, were embedded in this seemingly lighthearted narrative.

We tend to look for observations about the Jewish historical experience in the usual places. What I took away from the Cotsen conference was that they are just as likely to pop up where we least expect them.

Hanukkah humbug

joselitDecember 3, 2010November 16, 2017Leave a comment

In this season of good will and holiday cheer, Howard Jacobson, the Booker Prize-winning author of The FInkler Question and a guest last term of GW’s English Department, has made mincemeat of Hanukkah. Taking to The New York Times to make his case, he suggests that this Jewish holiday has outlived its usefulness — if, in fact, it had any in the first place.

Hanukkah, argues the British novelist in a cascading procession of paragraphs, simply fails to engage the contemporary imagination. Nothing about it — the food, the ritual, the music — can hold a candle to Christmas. "The cruel truth is that Hanukkah is a seasonal festival of light in search of a pretext," he writes, sidestepping history in favor of sociology. The best Jacobson can say of the holiday is that its name is "lovely." Really now.

As I made my way through the piece, I couldn't help but wonder whether Jacobson actually meant what he said or whether, his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, he was making light — and sport — of those who continually fault Hanukkah for not being Christmas.

Honestly, I couldn't tell. And I suspect other New York Times readers couldn't, either. Are we meant to chuckle at Jacobson's drollery, at his faux ho-ho-ho attitude towards Hanukkah? Or are we to take his thoughts to heart and give up on this age-old festival?

I, for one, hope that Jacobson is up to his usual tricks and is toying with us. If he isn't, well, some things are best left unsaid.

Can pigs fly?

joselitOctober 3, 2010November 16, 2017Leave a comment

What's kosher -- and what's not -- has been the subject of intense discussion ever since the dietary laws were first promulgated in Leviticus, way back when.

The fault line along which the Jews have defined themselves vis-a-vis the outside world, kashruth in the modern era has also divided the Jews among themselves. With the advent of modernity, growing numbers of Jews began to jettison the dietary laws, insisting that conscience rather than cuisine, ethics rather than ritual behavior, should inspire them.

Others, however, rejected this position out of hand and resolutely kept on keeping kosher, while still others (the majority, perhaps?) sought a middle ground, choosing, as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has so evocatively put it, to be "selectively treyf."

Under the confusing circumstances, one might think that kashruth would eventually have gone the way of so many other biblically-mandated practices: into the dustbin of history. But, in this instance, as in so many others that have to do with religion's surprisingly resilient encounter with modernity, not only has keeping kosher not withered away but, as Kosher Nation, Sue Fishkoff's new book vividly points out, it has emerged in the 21st century with renewed vigor, especially among a younger generation of Jews for whom kashruth affords an authentically Jewish response to the ethics and practices of responsible eating.

What, then, are we to make of the recent news that a cookbook roundly celebrating the delights of pork, an animal historically anathematized by the Jews, has recently been published, and in Israel of all places?

Eli Landau's The White Book is hardly the first cookbook whose Jewish author advocated the use of unkosher items. Aunt Babette's Cook Book, which was first released in the United States in 1889 by Bloch Publishing and Printing Company, has it beat by more than a century. But Landau's compendium is surely the first to thrust pork loin front and center and with no sign of apologetics to sweeten the dish.

Could this represent a watershed in the history of the Jewish people, or is it merely a tempest in a teapot?

For some, a pork cookbook sold in Israel makes as much sense as the above sign. Credit: joeventures, creative commons licensed on Flickr.

Juice

joselitSeptember 13, 2010November 16, 2017Leave a comment

I was casting about for a couple of food-related posters with which to decorate the kitchen at 2142 G Street, home to the Program in Judaic Studies, when I stumbled across a number of advertisements that touted the merits of oranges from Israel and, by extension, those of Zionism as well.

Dating from the era of the yishuv or, in some instances, from the early days of the state, some promotional gambits were sweet and sappy, like the fruit itself. "Visit Palestine. See Ancient Beauty Revived," trilled a poster produced by the Tourist Office of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, which featured a trio of beautifully rounded oranges adorned by a crown of sparkling white orange blossoms.

Other posters, mixing their metaphors right and left, drew both on Orientalist imagery and the modern preoccupation with physical well-being. Summoning the "genie of Jaffa," who magically materialized from the inside of a Jaffa orange, this advertisement also summoned up the potent word "vitamins," and with it, the promise of good health.

Photographers, too, were beguiled by the potential of the orange and took countless shots of Jewish settlers cultivating the citrus fruit through the most modern methods of irrigation and mechanized farming. They also trained their sights and their cameras on Arab orange growers, many of them from Jaffa, sharply contrasting their traditional methods of farming and distribution with those practiced by the yishuvniks.

Many of these archival images appear in Eyal Sivan's new documentary, Jaffa: The Orange's Clockwork, which explores what happened to the Palestinian population of orange groves and to those who had for years carefully tended to them once the State of Israel came into being and oranges became one of the country's leading exports. It's not a happy story. If, for the Israelis, the orange spoke of possibility, for the Palestinians, it spoke of loss.

Ultimately, Israelis and Palestinians alike freighted the humble orange with profound symbolic importance, linking it to two conflicting national narratives. Along the way, the orange, bursting with juice and color, became a veritable hot potato.

Image: Orange trees loaded with fruit in an orchard, Matson Photo Service. Source: LOC.