Rhapsody in Schmaltz by Michael Wex and how to Make it and what to do with it after all that effort

Rhapsody in Schmaltz: Yiddish Food and Why We Can't Stop Eating It Hardcover – April 12, 2016 by Michael Wex ,St Martins Press

Schmaltz 
Food: from Yiddish, shmalts, meaning rendered (melted) animal fat; usually chicken fat. Schmaltz is used to make matzo balls. 
That old Jewish guy at the next table is spreading schmaltz on his bread. It's so yummy
Figuratively: a work of art that is excessively sentimental, sappy or cheesy. 
Gone With the Wind?! Why would you want to see that piece of 1930's schmaltz? Let's rent and do a 12 hour with the  Rocky  instead! 



Michael Wex is not a chef. He’s not a lifelong challah baker, an avid cookbook collector, or even, by his own admission, much of a home cook. But his new book, Rhapsody in Schmaltz: Yiddish Food and Why We Can’t Stop Eating It, might just be the most important Jewish food book published this year.

As a novelist and author of Born to Kvetch, a New York Times best-selling book on Yiddish language and culture, Wex has established himself as one of the field’s few public intellectuals—the Malcolm Gladwell of the Yiddish world, minus the controversy. In Rhapsody in Schmaltz, he turns his attention to food, specifically the nostalgic brand of cooking served forth from the hardscrabble kitchens of Eastern Europe.

Wex covers all the bases, devoting a chapter to the sacred triumvirate of Yiddish cooking (garlic, onions, and schmaltz) and another to the centerpiece and primary gut bomb of the traditional Shabbat table, cholent. Cholent, he writes, is “ground zero—the big bang, if you ask those who eat it—of East European Jewish food, the primal ooze form which many of the best-known, most characteristic Yiddish dishes emerged.”

With a delicate mix of scholarship, insight, and humor, Wex addresses the borderline masochistic relationship Ashkenazi Jews have with their cuisine, and the overwhelming nostalgia that, despite the indigestion, keeps us coming back for more. He also digs up curious and fascinating tidbits, like the fact that for centuries, pashtet (meat pies encased in dough) and cow udder (rendered kosher if the remaining milk inside was drained out) were part of a typical Jewish menu. This is not a book about the nouveau, artisanally enhanced Ashkenazi cuisine that is currently enjoying a cultural renaissance. But it is a book that everyone interested in that cuisine should familiarize themselves with.

Wex, 61, grew up in Alberta, Canada, in an Orthodox family that spoke both Yiddish and English at home. Later in life he shed his religious observance and went to graduate school for literature, concentrating on Old and Middle English, Old Norse, and German philology. A career in anything Jewish or Yiddish was not on the agenda. But when he was in his early 30s, an advertisement for a klezmer concert playing in Toronto piqued his interest. “My family had been disconnected from the world of secular Yiddish culture,” he said. “I had no exposure to The Workmen’s Circle and all of that organized stuff.”

Before long, he tapped into the then-budding klezmer revival movement. A musician friend told him about KlezKamp, a (recently discontinued) annual festival for Yiddish and klezmer music that launched in 1984. It was something of a revelation. “These were people roughly my age who were playing real klezmer music. Not always particularly well, but actually doing it.” Wex realized that with his background as a native Yiddish speaker and his interest in studying language, he had something to add to the conversation. “The first year I went as a paying customer, not knowing anyone,” he said. “I walked out with a career.” Flash forward three decades and he still has it.

Wex was kind enough to answer some questions put to him in an email correspondence to find out why he was keen on writing a book about food. It turns out, he wasn’t. But his methodical and humorous-without-falling-back-on-kitsch approach to the subject—and his ability to seamlessly weave between Maimonides, Crisco, and The Big Bang Theory, and reference Caroline Kennedy and a carrot tsimmes in the same sentence—makes me glad he did it anyway.

What was your inspiration for writing a book about food?

Honestly, it was my agent who first suggested it. At first I was not all that keen on the idea, because food wasn’t my area of expertise. I asked a few other people who I thought might do a better job if they would be interested. But when I couldn’t pawn it off on someone, I began to think about how I might approach it. I started from the idea that, unlike almost all other cuisines, Jewish food is determined by religious demands that might not have anything to do with geography. When it comes to Ashkenazi food, there is a kind of uniformity that stretches across a large continent, and that has to do with religious underpinnings.

You mean like kashrut.

Yes, kashrut is crucial and not just for the avoidance of pork, which was the main meat in Ashkenazi areas of Europe. There are other aspects, like the prohibition against eating an animal’s sciatic nerve. You can remove it, a practice that is more common in Sephardic communities, but it is very labor intensive and expensive. It renders the back part of the cow, which is considered to be the tastier end, essentially off limits. Kosher beef is confined to the tougher front cuts like the iconic brisket. These are cuts that benefit from a long, slow cooking in some kind of liquid. So, that is an example of how a religious prohibition determines what people eat and how they cook it.

You write in the book that “Saturday is the most important ingredient to Ashkenazi cuisine.” Can you explain that?

Except for the delicatessen, which is a category unto itself, all of the significant Ashkenazi dishes have a connection with Shabbat or the various holidays. Many of them tie back to cholent, the slow-simmered, generally legume-based stew eaten on Shabbat. Kugel, kishke, and so many other emblematic Jewish foods quite literally come out of the cholent pot. The stand-alone kugel is relatively recent. Before that, kugel was cooked in a special pot that was submerged in the cholent as it simmered. These are foods that have to be able to sit over a slow flame for almost the entirety of Shabbat, so you end up with a lot of very brown, soft foods.

Yeah, Ashkenazi cuisine isn’t exactly known for its freshness and crunch.

I remember my parents making fun of how nobody ate fresh vegetables in the old country. The old timers didn’t understand why anyone would eat a raw carrot—that was for horses. One of the Yiddish cookbooks I came across actually stated that human beings were not meant to eat raw vegetables. Reading that explained so much to me—they are actually doing this on purpose! One exception was radishes, which were commonly dipped in schmaltz. But as far as green vegetables go, they tended to avoid them.

With all the focus on Shabbat and holidays, is it fair to say that Yiddish cuisine isn’t really a weekday cuisine?

The rest of the cuisine was largely indistinguishable from the day-to-day foods eaten in each given country. There is an inexplicable popularity of onions and garlic in Jewish cuisine that traces back to the Talmud. Other than that, once you subtract lard and pork products, Jewish food looks like what was eaten around it. For example, Lithuanian Jewish weekday cuisine was heavy on dairy because Lithuanian cuisine is generally heavy on dairy.

People often get nostalgic about how amazing Jewish food is, but with all the indigestion and heaviness associated with it, our relationship with this cuisine can actually be borderline abusive. Can you talk about the line between pleasure and pain with Jewish food?

A lot of the rhapsodizing comes from people who don’t actually eat Jewish food very often. For the most part, though, the actual level of traditional Jewish cooking was quite low. And so much of it was stereotyped. It’s Shabbat so you have to have chicken, or you have to have kugel. After a while it becomes so rote. If Shabbat happened once a year, most Jews would keep it, but it is every damn week. You sit around singing songs about how great it is. It is like you have to convince yourself you’re enjoying it.

So, why do people love the food so much?

That was one of my big questions with this book. I wanted to figure out why people attach such an aura to a cuisine that is not haute by any stretch of the imagination. You can raise grave questions about its health benefits, and yet it has retained something that makes people go on eating it. With gefilte fish, for example, most American Jews know the stuff from the supermarket and it doesn’t taste good. Relatively few people have had real homemade or artisan versions. But yet it has a status that even if you don’t like it, it has to be on your holiday table. It wouldn’t feel right if it wasn’t there to complain about.

A lot of Jewish food’s appeal, I have found, has more to do with fond memories of growing up than the food itself. Your early sensations are the ones that stay with you. You similarly always remember your first kiss. Technically speaking it probably wasn’t your best kiss, but it is the one that gave you the taste.

Also, as a person’s religious observance declines, these emblematic foods tend to take on more meaning. They become the expression of who or what someone is as a Jew. Eating them is an outward symbol and a way of affirming something about yourself. The food becomes the stand-in for so much of the other stuff.

What surprised you most while working on this book?

Two things. The first is the prevalence of jellies and aspics in earlier Ashkenazi cooking. They were once considered a standard part of Jewish cuisine, but all we have now is the gel in the gefilte fish jars and ptcha. Growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, I always thought Jell-O was the most goyish thing on two feet. But it actually has a Jewish history, we just didn’t know that. The other thing that amazed me was the pashtet, or meat pies encased in pastry dough. Up until the 16th and 17th century, they were the main Shabbat dish, but you don’t really see them anymore.

Were there any foods you purposefully left out of your book?

I left out a lot of the fish, mostly because they weren’t Jewish in the sense I was talking about in the book. A lot of the smoked fish that we think of as Jewish, like belly lox, wasn’t particularly Jewish before Jews settled in America and caught on to them. I remember asking my parents if they saw it in the old country and they said, “Absolutely not.”

I also attempted not to write about any food that I hadn’t personally tried. I failed on the meat pies because I could not find any 16th-century recipes. I was really amazed by the recipes I found for brain latkes, but they are impossible to get now.

Why did you specify “Yiddish” food on your cover instead of Jewish food?

The Jewish community is a lot more pluralistic today than it was at one time. I wanted to make it clear from the beginning that I was not going to be talking about falafel or shakshuka, or any of that stuff. Forty years ago you would never see hummus in an Ashkenazi cookbook—now it would unusual not to find it. Putting the word “Yiddish” on the cover separated what I was trying to accomplish.

What would be your last Yiddish meal?

I’d go for the three courses of kugel. I’d start with a nice flanken with Polish lokshen kugel with raisins and lots of sugar. And then I’d have potato kugel followed by Yerushalmi kugel. And maybe, if a boiled chicken should magically fall from heaven, even a litvishe kugel, with lots of salt and pepper. That and brain latkes, which I’m still dying to try.

How to Make Schmaltz
(and What To Do With It Afterwards)

Nothing says Jewish home cooking more than schmaltz and its scrumptious by-product, gribenes. (Disclaimer: There isn't a line in the U'netaneh Tokef, "Who by rendered chicken fat," but this stuff is seriously bad for you. How have we survived this long?) Making it is not difficult—actually kinda fun—and it adds immeasurably to the richness of the recipes in which it's used.

Start with a pile of raw chicken fat. Yum!



I use two kinds. The larger pile is a half-pound from the butcher. Nice ones give it to you for free, but this year I went to a place that charged 40 shekels a kg ($10 a kg)  for, basically, their trash. Grr. The smaller pile is the result of my best effort at trimming the chicken I used for my matzo ball soup. There never is much fat on the chickens you buy in stores these days, so you pretty much have to seek outside help. (My grandmother z"l cooked chicken frequently enough that whenever it came time for her to make schmaltz, she had her fat supply at the ready in the form of a large baggy containing the accumulated trimmings from many chicken dinners past.)

Chop the chicken fat into small pieces. Throw in a frying pan with slices of onion on top.

Cook over low heat. Almost immediately the fat begins to melt. Fun! Keep stirring as it continues to melt over the next 20+ minutes.

Eventually the fat begins to brown. You're done when the fat is golden-brown and no white fat is left.

Use a slotted spoon to remove the crispy gribenes. (If you follow my family's tradition, you must then hide the gribenes from the children. They are too young to eat it!) What's left in your pan is the precious schmaltz!




Here is the finished schmaltz. Technically you are supposed to strain it so it is clear and golden (like the schmaltz in the inset, which is opaque because it was chilled), but I never bother. (Please note: The logo on the glass implies no endorsement of this product by Pom Wonderful, the Antioxidant Superpower that helps you Cheat Death.)

So—now that you have produced the sacred elixir of Jewish continuity, what do you do with it? The truth is, there isn't an authentic Ashkenazi recipe that doesn't call for schmaltz, but, like, are you really going to serve your family homemade kishka (stuffed cow's intestines) or p'tcha (jellied calves' feet)? Below are a few more mainstream ideas.

The first is my grandmother's salt & pepper kugel. I've never seen a recipe quite like it anywhere else—it's delicious and unique.

Boil, drain, and cool a pound of fine noodles. Stir in six egg yolks and salt & pepper to taste—be generous! Add a half-cup of the sacred schmaltz.

Take a couple raw chicken livers. Broil first to kasher. Or, save time by buying already-kashered livers. Sautee with an onion.

Chop the liver and onions. Add to the noodle mixture. Finally, fold in six egg whites (beaten).

Here is the kugel ready to go into the oven. And here it is after an hour at 350 degrees. The noodles at the top should be crispy, and the edges of the kugel should be nice and brown. (Various members of my family, myself included, prefer it with the edges burnt.)


A couple other easy ways to have fun with schmaltz:
Make chopped liver—the perfect way to get rid of the rest of your chicken livers and even some gribenes!
Use as the fat in your matzo balls! I have never done this (my grandmother taught me with vegetable oil), but this way is more authentic.

Schmaltz is grandma's way of saying, "I miss you. Come visit." Shana tovah, and don't overindulge unless you are anxious to visit her in the hereafter!