Goys try Jewish food for the first time, are not impressed

October 1, 2014 • 2:33 pm

According to Professor Ceiling Cat (who has wide nomming experience), the three best cuisines in the world are, in no particular order, French, Indian, and Chinese (especially of the Szechuan/Hunan variety). And there are few cuisines that I don’t admire in general. Sadly, in the bottom tier of ethnic cuisine rests the food of my own culture: Jewish.  While it has its highlights—an onion bagel with belly lox and a schmear, corned beef and pastrami sandwiches with hot mustard, a half-sour pickle and a can of Dr. Brown’s Cel-ray Tonic, a nice chopped liver sandwich heavy with schmalz, a plate of latkes with sour cream or applesauce (preferably both), and, of course, cheesecake—by and large Jewish food is not inspiring.

And that’s the conclusion these goys reach as they try Jewish food for the first time.  Unfortunately, they’re presented with some of the dregs of Jewish curisine: gefilte fish (I cannot abide this malodorous dish), Manischewitz wine (close to Robitussin cough syrup), and noodle kugel (which can sometimes be ok). No pastrami or corned beef, no brisket, no pickles, no knishes, and no blintzes.  But they scorn two items that at their best can be very good: matzo ball soup (the broth shown here looks suspiciously thin, with nary a chicken chunk or carrot slice to be seen) and chopped liver. At least they like the rugelach, the one tolerable Jewish dessert item besides cheesecake (not counting rice pudding, which is claimed by many cultures).

All in all, these people seem to have leaden palates. Imagine equating chopped liver with Fancy Feast cat food!  They’d probably ask for white bread and mayo on their pastrami sandwich.

Someone should have taken them to Katz’s Deli on Houston Street.

 

97 thoughts on “Goys try Jewish food for the first time, are not impressed”

      2. Odd. I watched a documentary recently about the “hummus war”, the battle over whether it’s an Israeli dish or a Lebanese dish. One of the people on there tried to make the case that Hummus is Israeli because the mention of the food is in the old testament.

        Either way, hummus is delicious.

        1. Either way, hummus is delicious.

          Bowfing, I’d say. On the basis of one sample, when I was working in Israel.

        1. “Jewish food” typically refers to Yiddish-speaking European Jewish food. There are Jews in China and Africa…but, despite their great popularity with American Jews, Dim Sum and Ethiopian haute cuisine aren’t considered Jewish food per se.

          Jews in Israel are going to eat lots of traditional Mediterranean foods, including hummus and falafel and the rest. But that’s Mediterranean food, not Jewish food.

          b&

          1. Yeah, just from Jerry’s description of what he considers the standard dishes, there is a lot of overlap with Eastern Europe. I had a Prof who was Polish/non-Jewish, invited us over for parties with food from his mom flown in from Poland, and several of the things Jerry mentions could’ve come from her kitchen.

          3. Know what they don’t eat? Cobbler apparently. My friend in Israel, who grew up in Canada, made one and no one in her family would eat it. They had no idea what it was and she actually offered it up on Facebook for anyone to come get it. 🙂

    1. Thank you! Thank you for this! I love jewish chopped liver but it is very hard to find here in Mexico City. I used to eat it at a New York style Deli that is now gone. I will definitely attempt to make this and eat it with good rye bread. Yum!

      1. My pleasure! It’s a pretty easy and foolproof recipe, fortunately…at least, I haven’t had any trouble with it.

        As for the rye bread…well, you may well have to bake that, yourself. You can make a good rye bread by starting with a good whole wheat bread recipe and substituting about half the wheat flour for rye flour, and adding caraway seeds. If you want something more traditional, I’m sure there’ve got to be lots of recipes online, but I’m afraid I can’t offer any suggestions from personal experience…I usually just do as I described….

        b&

  4. While teaching in South Korea I tried kimchi about ten times in all manner of establishment. After it reversed direction the second time I felt confident that my sample size was large enough to support my claim that kimchi is terrible. And I don’t want to hear “oh, you just haven’t had GOOD kimchi!” I tried it in restaurants, homes and from street vendors. Korea had some delights but kimchi was not one of them. I worked in China for a while and the grub there was far, far superior. That’s all I have to say about that.

      1. I love kimchi but I ate it all the time and couldn’t figure out why all the headaches. Then I noticed the MSG. 🙁

        1. You could always try making your own. It’s not too difficult, and you can suit it to your tastes.

      2. Huge kimchi fan here. Can’t get enough of the stuff, and supposedly it promotes good stomach biota — what’s not to love?

    1. Traditional is probably a better word than authentic. Authenticity is a selling point for restaurants and cookbooks. In those contexts it is usually meaningless.

      If you want traditional Mexican recipes and read Spanish, save up your small monetary units and buy all 32 volumes of Conaculta’s Cocina Familiar en los Estados de Mexico and all 58 (so far) volumes of Conaculta’s series Cocina Indigena y Popular. They’ll surprise you.

      1. You could also look into Diana Kennedy’s books. They are the best ones written in English. She lived and did extensive research on tradidional foods in Mexico, and the mexican government actually awarded her with the Order of the Aztec Eagle for it.

        1. DK’s books are wonderful and she is to Mexican cooking by anglophones in the US as Julia Child is to French cooking by anglophones in the US.

          That said, her books reflect her concept of traditional Mexican cooking and the fact that she hasn’t eaten and collected recipes everywhere in Mexico.

  6. I like Manischewitz wine. It’s like fermented Welches. 🙂

    When I was younger I used to eat pickled herring (which is probably just as gross as gefilte fish) but I don’t like it anymore.

    1. Yuck- Manischewitz! I don’t even like regular Welches. My non-Jewish Polish friend makes amazing pickled herring, and various other pickled fishes. Probably quite similar to the Jewish version. I’m probably the only person who is not mad for smoked salmon/lox. Love regulsr salmon and gravadkax, and also smoked trout. Do like rugelach.

    3. I like it too. I understand that this wine has far less tannin than other reds and is therefore agreeable for people who get migraines from too much tannin.

  8. Why should Goys eat Jewish food – even Jews avoid it. Actually there is great Jewish food out there – it is called Chinese. Jews just welcomed in year 5775 in their calendar. For China, it is 4713. The question is what did Jews eat for 1,062 years?

    There was an academic paper on the subject -“Safe Treyf”, New York Jews and Chinese Food by Gaye Tuchman and Harry G. Levine
    http://qcpages.qc.cuny.edu/~hlevine/SAFE-TREYF.pdf

    1. That may explain why tere is a fast food restaurant in Montreal (chez Benny/benny’s) that serve burgers, middle-east and chinese meats, all kosher.

      BTW, we also have some good smoked-meat and bagel places. (My favorite bagels are from Fairmount Bagel Factory.)

      Desnes

  10. Jerry, I have a little piece on my bl*g on the English language about the bagel/beigel controversy (it’s a controversy in London, anyway). Would you mind if I posted a link to it?

    1. I lived in Clapton (East London) for many years and have fond memories of early Sunday morning trips to Stamford hill for beigels with lox and cream cheese. I and my BH could enjoy a couple of hours of peace in our garden before the local scum crawled out of their pits and decided we all had to endure the noise they called music.

  11. I think it’s all in the memories. I used to love gefilte fish, because it was the best thing my grandmother made during the holidays – and it didn’t have that jelly. Then matzoh-brai…and…

    I got nothing. Yeah – other than the usual deli stuff – jewish food is an acquired taste.

    1. I tried gefilte fish once – at a Jewish restaurant in Atlantic City – and liked it. I’d have it again if I ever ran across it.

      But absolutely agree with jac about kugel. An abomination before Yahweh or some goddam thing.

  12. I loved matzah ball soup until I ate a bunch and then was sick the next day with morning sickness. Totally unrelated, but now I can’t even smell it without wanting to vomit. I notice the video didn’t include Sephardic recipes.

  15. As a kid, my family was the most adventurous of any of my friends and of most of my (six) brothers’ friends. My mother and five of the brothers (myself included) have worked for more than a few years in the restaurant business – 3 of them for most or all of their working lives. In short, we like food. As a kid though, there were three things I could not get down: clams, oysters, and liver. I now like clams OK, like oysters a lot, but I still loathe liver. I like the smell of it cooking, but it still turns my stomach when I try to eat it.

    1. I love good liverwurst, properly fried chicken livers, goose liver pate and foie gras. But beef liver? Like “liver and onions?” Makes me nearly gag thinking about it, and almost certainly will if I smell it.

      1. Liver and onions is possibly the worst dish of all time. When my parents set out a container of liver in the morning I would make an excuse to eat dinner somewhere else. I was 40 when they told me they did it to get some alone time.

    1. By Ceiling Cat and Basement Cat and all else that is (un)holy, I do miss Katz’s Deli.

  19. Couldn’t agree more about the matzoh ball soup. Hard matzoh balls are a sure sign that they’re not homemade. Try going to a real New York (or, in a pinch, New Jersey) deli for some. Matzoh balls fluffy like cotton candy, hearty broth… Damn. Now I want to go to Harold’s New York Deli.

      2. I was unaware that the two could even theoretically be separated. Dad, at least, always finishes cooking the matzoh balls in the soup….

        b&

        1. Yeah I’ve had them by themselves. I like them and I wonder if I’m just peculiar for my culinary tastes.

  20. Not all of the Jews alive now are descendants of eastern European Jews, whose cuisine is, as Jerry wrote, terrible. Some of us have Sephardic ancestors, others ancestors who never passed through eastern Europe or Iberia. Our traditional Jewish dishes are much better than those of poverty-stricken shtetl dwellers. I still remember feasts with Serbian, Greek, and Egyptian Jews very fondly.

    1. I was hoping someone would point this out. What one thinks of as Jewish cuisine is really only the traditional Ashkenazy diet which overlaps considerably with Eastern European gentile food, also not one of the world’s favourite cuisines, to put it mildly.

      The full, rich panoply of Jewish food across the diaspora is best explored in Claudia Roden’s “Book of Jewish Food” which is full of wonderful anecdotes, history and jokes as well as thousands of delicious recipes.

      Here’s a taste of Jewish food humour from the book:

      A test of ‘who is a Jew’ is supposed to be whether you like cholent. One of my Israeli friends found himself eating it with friends in Jerusalem. When he complained that it was not very good, one of his companions replied, “It’s not supposed to be.”

      1. D. T. Hayden wrote: “What one thinks of as Jewish cuisine is really only the traditional Ashkenazy diet which overlaps considerably with Eastern European gentile food.”

        Good point, but it is probably true everywhere. My mother is a romaniote Jew who was taught to cook by her mother. Nouna was born in what is not Greece.

        I and a party of friends once had the tasting menu in a Serbian restaurant in Milwaukee. Sorry, can’t recall its name. The owner’s brother owns Stari Grad, another one. All but one of the dishes were versions of dishes I grew up on with slightly different spicing. The exception was — remember Serbia’s history — goulash.

        The recipes my mother learned from my grandmother are all, I think, of Turkish origin. Unitedstatesians aren’t well acquainted with Turkish cuisine. Their loss.

        The recipes Ashkenazim know and that many unitedstatesians think are all there is to “Jewish cooking” were taken from a cuisine much less rich than the Turkish.

  21. Jewish delis are some of my favorite places to eat. Carnegie’s in New York…no words.

    I love a lot of different food. If I were pressed, I would choose (in no particular order) Italian, Indian, Mexican…but what about Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Thai? And French and Greek and Spanish and Moroccan, and, and, and. Humans have done well in my estimation when it comes to food. One of the highlights and points of optimism of our many civilizations. Too bad religion didn’t turn out as grand as our collective culinary achievements.

  22. the three best cuisines in the world are, in no particular order, French, Indian, and Chinese

    Thai is definitely top 3 for me. Not sure yet what I’d pick for the others. Good old fashioned southern bbq ribs has gotta be up there. German potato salad + sauerkraut (warm, you heathens) + brats is also somewhere in the running. Bulgogi. Chili (not a Texas fan, I like it with beans). Indian is also good.

    Oh man. Time for second dinner…

    1. Oh man, I forgot seafood. Maryland crab, served in the shell, covered with old bay, of course – I can’t abide the uber-rich butter and garlic that is used on the west coast. There is nothing better than ordering a bucket of whole crabs with a bunch of friends, and having them realize you can rip through four of ’em before they figure out how to open their first. 🙂
      I’ve also had the pleasure of eating a fresh salmon dip…caught that morning and prepared by my host. That was pretty hard to beat.

        1. I grew up in Baltimore with blue crab. I caught them as a boy, from a little row boat at my grandparents place on the Bay, with a trot line baited with chicken necks and backs. You pull the line in slowly, the crab follows the bait up, you net it and put it in a basket, and repeat. Females with eggs are released. Be careful not to upset the basket because your feet are bare. (Done that.) They were cooked alive in a pressure cooker, pathetically tapping on the sides. Served by the dozen on newspaper with mallets, nutcrackers, picks, pitchers of National Bohemian, good bread, and crab soup with oyster crackers for a starter. Homemade peach ice cream for desert. Don’t get me started about soft shell.

          1. Arggh, Mid-Atlantic homesickness…blue crab, hardshell clams, James River oysters, Spanish mackerel, smoked bluefish, hushpuppies, and fresh scuppernongs…and a moonlight walk on the beach with ghost crabs.

          2. “National Beer, National Beer,
            You’ll love the taste of National Beer
            And while we’re singing we’re proud to say
            That it’s brewed on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay.”

            Possibly before your time…

          3. With Chester Peake!

            “And if this oyster could talk, he’d say…”
            “I’m a clam.”

    2. Thai has got to be one of the top ones, just amazing flavours. I’d probably add Japanese and Italian to round out the top 3.

  23. The only gefilte fish this goy has ever had was made at home by my PhD supervisor’s husband (usually, for (Canadian) Thanksgiving), and I quite liked it.

  24. Oooooh! Big idea: Your next book could be about food and include recipes. No? And after that one’s written, a book on cowboy boots; their history, and how they’re made. Then a cat book. (ok, I’ll quit planning your life now) 🙂

  25. Regret I did not put mustard on my pastrami sandwich at Kat’z Deli, referenced by bad Jew Steven Pinker’s twitter. Pastrami is indeed delicious. I like bagel, specially poppy bagel.

    :)) What if someone who is talented at cook, but in her life, she never has much chance to showoff her talent? How sad
    the story is! I used to practice at home but my mom was upset, she couldn’t settled down, then I realized I occupied her place. Knowing by myself and flattered by others, the dishes I cooked naturally came with a restaurant presentation… It only takes me 5 to 10 minutes to cook a ma po tofu dish… In my opinion, a talent cook is not the one who can cut meat quickly, but the one who has subtle feeling for food and who can forsea & create delicious mouth watering dishes.

  26. Is it fair that I have never cooked a turkey in my life on Thanksgiving day? Not fair. 🙂

  27. The young chef at my favorite Indian restaurant, to whom I am almost an aunt, asked me to critique his first effort at turkey Indian style. The flavors were great, but he had overcooked it a little bit.

  28. I love Jewish foods (yes, even gefilte fish), but only eat it on holidays.
    And it’s funny for me that bagel is a Jewish food in America. In Israel it’s an American thing.

  29. I am only a little less contemptuous of Jewish food than my wife (she’s Jewish; I’m not).

    She assures me that nothing, absolutely nothing, can be done with matza to turn it from a kind of cardboard into a kind of food. Frying it, coating it in chocolate, even adding cheese or dips, somehow only accentuate the product’s essential dry flavourlessness. So, although I’ve never tried it, I’m sceptical about the soup. But maybe I’ll give it a try…

    (Matza aside, I think the Jews do well with bread: bagels and challah – Jewish brioche, I think of it – are great.)

    1. As a rule I’ve never even heard of being broken, matzohs that come from boxes are indistinguishable from the packaging material.

      However, they’re just flour and water and not at all difficult to make at home. Get the proportions right, roll them out, cook them quickly on an iron skillet and dry them for a bit in a warm oven. With fresh flour, ideally ground right before baking, they’re as delicious and wholesome a bread as you’re going to get.

      When Mom and Dad make them, they generally do at least a few kinds — plain, of course, and ones with sesame or onion or the like. They never last long. Not because they spoil, of course; they’re the perfect waybread. They just get eaten so damned fast….

      Cheers,

      b&

  30. At the risk of being exposed as a goyishe kopf, I think latkes taste great with horseradish. I’ll meet you at Manny’s. ;–)

  32. I strong agree with the cat’s views on the wonders of Chinese food, szechuanese and hunanese in particular. Chinese regional cuisine has really started to take off here in London. Szechuanese restaurants led this, but recently we’ve also seen dongbei and xinjiang places open. Very exciting. Can highly recommend if the cat hasn’t already tried.

  33. I sometimes wonder if my final rejection of Judaism as a belief system was solely a rational choice or was it really a reaction to the food I was being given.

  36. Sorry Prof Ceiling Cat, but the best cuisine in the world is Italian, with Greek and Indian fighting for a distant second. French is way overrated and only makes it to the top 10 if you limit it to pastry.

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