Of all the things I like about being Jewish, schmalz herring isn’t one if them. You can also add in pickled cucumbers — or rather, take them away. The whiff of a gherkin makes me shriek and run. Lokshen pudding is not really for eating, but for stuffing into cavity walls.
My unfortunate distaste for traditional Ashkenazi food has tempted more than one acquaintance to ask: are you really Jewish at all?
I mention the Ashkenazis here, because I’m well aware that Sephardi food is an entirely different branch of cuisine —and I’m all for a chick-pea or a pomegranate seed. But given that Eastern Europe is my background, I do sometimes wonder how I’d have fared in my ancestral Latvia or Ukraine. Very hungrily, perhaps.
Apparently, we have our ancient scriptures to blame for all the briny, vinegary stuff. The Talmud says, “Salting is like healing and marinating is like cooking”. Pickling foods by marinating in vinegar or salt seems to have been so fundamental in talmudic times that the text even records a spat between two sages, Rabbi bar Rav Huna and Rava, over whether sprinkling salt on foods while sitting at the Shabbat table can be considered pickling, or not.
But the pickle story took off in earnest in 18th century Eastern Europe, when Jews lived through long, cold winters in conditions that were often insanitary. The only real solution was to pickle: and pickle we did — everything, in fact — from cucumbers to onions, from lemons to carrots, with varying degrees of culinary success. Jews became known among their gentile neighbours for making tasty pickles, taking them in barrels to the market.
While we’re here, we can’t forget pickled herring, for which we must mainly blame the Dutch. Dutch fishing fleets would trawl the Baltic Sea for herring, passing it on to the Jews of the Netherlands who would pickle the fish in a marinade of vinegar, sugar and onion, before exporting it. Schmaltz herrings are larger, fatty fish, compared with ‘maatjes’, or soused herring, which are younger and smaller ones.
Then there’s lokshen pudding — or ‘kugel’, as they call it in the US. This was originally a savoury dish, originating in 12th century Germany. The noodles were steamed in a pot and cooks would add onions to it for extra flavour: the Poles — for reasons best known to themselves —later switched it to a sweet dish with cinnamon and raisins.
Pickles and schmickles are as much Polish or Russian as singularly Jewish, but even when our ancestors moved out to Britain and America, they brought them with them — as they did bagels and chicken soup, which incidentally I like very much, and which can stay.
I spent my childhood Friday nights staring gloomily at Mrs Elswood on the chraine jar. Did you know that the name Mrs Elswood is actually a combination of two areas where the founders grew up; Elstree and St John’s Wood?
If you were to stack all the Mrs Elswood jars sold in a day on top of each other it would measure at the same height as almost ten Gherkin buildings! That’s over 13,500 jars sold every day!
These foods also pitched up on the tables of Bloom’s in 70s London — and maybe it’s these childhood memories that colour my feelings about Ashkenazi food.
My brother and I would be dragged there — unwillingly — every other Sunday for a ‘treat’. The menu of weird things such as ‘kishkes’ and ‘calves foot jelly’ freaked us out. The general ambience was not helped by the way the food was frisbeed on to the borscht-stained tablecloths by seemingly resentful Eastern European waiters.
I get that many of my co-religionists love this food. That for most people, pickles and their ilk are ‘haimish’. But I’m afraid these tangy comestibles will never be for me. Gefilte fish? I’d rather leave it in the wild, swimming around with a carrot on its head.
