How to Run a Traditional Jewish Household

by Blu Greenberg

  Following shechitta, the animal is hung upside down so that the arterial blood can drain out. The shochet then searches the body for “signs.” Any sign of possible disease or discoloration of the lungs will render the animal trefeh, unfit for kosher use. Obviously, if the animal is truly diseased, then U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations and business practice would prohibit its use by everyone. But there are borderline situations where possible faults or ritual disqualification rule out use for kosher but not for non-kosher consumption. This is why many people who don’t keep kosher have come to associate kashrut with purity and quality control.

  The arteries and sinews of beef are removed, as are the intestines of fowl. The sinews in the hindquarters, which are hard to get at, are also prohibited; since these are too labor-intensive to remove economically, most kosher meat processors simply do not bother. Thus, the hindquarters of an animal, from which filet mignon is made, are usually separated and sent to a non-kosher meat market. There are some kosher meat processors who do make the effort, for there is a small market for filet mignon: some posh kosher restaurants and caterers want to serve these special meats and are willing to pay the extra costs.

  Still, the animal is not quite ready. It must be properly kashered, that is, made kosher for cooking by further eliminating the capillary blood. This applies to fowl and red meat alike. It is a process of soaking and salting:

  Rinse the meat well under cold water.

  Soak a half hour in cold water, with the meat completely immersed. The pail used for soaking should not be used for anything else.

  Salt the meat lightly but thoroughly with coarse salt; place the salted meat on a perforated or slanted drainboard and let the blood drain off. The meat should drain for an hour.

  Rinse off the meat thoroughly.

  The meat, or fowl, is now ready for cooking.

  There is another way to kasher meat, and that is by broiling it on a rack so that the blood drains onto the pan below. This is always done with liver, because liver is so rich in blood it cannot be kashered by soaking and salting. Broiling can also be used to kasher other meats, such as steaks and chicken quarters. This is fine for people who are restricted to salt-free diets. A separate broiling rack is used for any of these meats or poultry that have not been soak/salt kashered. You would not use the same broiling rack for hamburgers made of kashered ground meat as you would for unkashered ground meat. The concern is that the kashered meat may reabsorb some flavor of blood from the rack that has been used to broil unkashered meat (meat not previously drained of capillary blood).

  It is ironic that, over the course of history, anti-Semites invented the “blood libel,” claiming that religious Jews have used blood of Christian children to bake their matzot. It is a classic case of lying—or should I say, projection. Kashrut stringently prohibits blood in any form. Even a blood spot on a raw egg is forbidden, so we buy eggs that are candled, and we crack them one by one into a clear glass to make sure they have no blood spot in them. Blood is a symbol of life and it seems inhuman to partake of it in any form or fashion. For the same reason, traditional Jews tend to cook or broil meat to the point where people think of kosher meat as automatically well done or overcooked. (In actual fact, kosher meat can be prepared rarer than most people realize, but the tradition of removing blood is so well established that even many observant people don’t know this.) It only proves that the humane aspects of kashrut are not well known.

  Few Jews do their own kashering anymore. Most kosher butchers will kasher the meat and poultry as a routine service. But it wasn’t that way twenty-odd years ago.

  Shortly after Yitz and I were married we moved to Waltham, Massachusetts. I ordered from a kosher butcher in Roxbury, twenty miles away. He agreed to deliver, but only if it were a large order. When my order arrived on a Friday afternoon, all thirty pounds of it, I thought I would just cook one chicken and efficiently pop the rest into the freezer. But the chicken looked a little pinker than the ones my mother used to prepare. A nervous phone call to Roxbury ensued. “But you didn’t ask me to kasher your order,” he said. I tried to pull the new bride routine on him, but to no avail. I didn’t even have kosher (coarse) salt in the house. I can’t recall now how I handled it; all I remember is that it was a minor disaster. (The law suggests that I could have washed off the meat, held it until after Shabbat, and then kashered it within the next day or two, but, in retrospect, that seems too simple.)

  The saying goes, once you establish a relationship with a kosher butcher it’s like being married to him. So it pays to shop around a bit before settling down to one lasting relationship; that is, if there is a choice. The local rabbi can supply information on kosher butchers. One relies heavily on a kosher butcher. He must be a man of reliability and integrity and, like the shochet, he, too, must be knowledgeable in the laws of kashrut and must be personally observant of halacha.

  SEPARATION OF MEAT AND MILK

  Laws of Kashrut require total separation of meat and milk products. This means not only separating foods in cooking and eating, but separating everything that is used in the process: a completely separate set of dishes, flatware, knives, pots, pans—one for meat and another for dairy. It’s like outfitting two separate kitchens.

  Jews who keep kosher often have six sets of dishes, none of which are there just for show: an everyday set of meat, an everyday set of dairy, a good set of meat, a good set of dairy, a set of dairy Passover, a set of meat Passover. That’s a lot of cupboard space.

  Where it is possible, a kosher kitchen will contain two sinks: one for meat and one for dairy. Where there is only one sink, the dishes are never put directly into the sink. Instead, separate racks are used for meat or dairy, likewise, separate sponges, scouring pads, dish towels, counter drain racks, and so forth. For convenience, everything is color-coded—for example, red for meat, blue for dairy. Counters made of Formica can be used for meat or dairy as long as the food is cold and the counter is perfectly clean. However, many Jewish housewives set aside special counter sections for meat or dairy.

  Stove burners can be used for either meat or dairy, as can an oven. However, meat and dairy foods should not be cooked simultaneously in an oven. Refrigerators, where everything is cold, can be used to store both meat and dairy as long as the foods are sealed and are kept separate; one would not stack, say, a salami on top of a container of butter.

  Dishwashers are an interesting story, part of the “politics” of kashrut. Depending on which rabbi one asks, dishwashers may or may not be used consecutively for meat and dairy. If the interior basin is metal, some rabbis will say the dishwasher can be used for meat and dairy (consecutively), as long as it is cleaned by running a full cycle before each use. Most require that different racks be used. For a decade now, individual Israeli rabbis have ruled that not only metal-interior dishwashers but porcelain enamel ones as well may be used for meat and for dairy if there has been an interim cleaning cycle and a change of racks. However, one is required to ask a rabbi. And having asked, one must abide by his decision.

  Should a mishap occur, under certain conditions Jewish law provides a remedy. Restoring something to its kosher state is not magical. The general principle is that the flavor of meat or dairy is absorbed in utensils or surfaces only when the contact is through heat but not through cold. For example, if cold dairy food is placed inadvertently on a meat plate, all that is required is to wash the plate very clean in cold water and to rinse it well; it can then be used immediately. If, on the other hand, hot dairy foods were involved, and the utensil is porous, such as china or pottery or earthenware, it is assumed that because of the heat, some of the dairy flavor has been absorbed into a dish that has previously been saturated with meat flavor. Since meat and milk are now mixed in this porous dish, it cannot be kashered, and therefore can no longer be used. If the dish is not porous, such as glassware, it is assumed that no flavors have been absorbed; therefore, it needn’t be kashered. In fact, glassware, as long as it is perf
ectly clean, can be used for meat or dairy since it is non-porous. However, if it were to be used continuously for both types of food, the Rabbis were concerned that people might get sloppy. So they prohibited routine use of glass utensils for both meat and milk. Water glasses, however, may be used for both.

  If a pot was inadvertently made trefeh—such as using a meat pot for dairy—in certain instances it can be kashered. Pots not made of one piece, and which therefore are impossible to clean perfectly at all points of joining, cannot be kashered. Most pots with soldered handles cannot be kashered.

  If a pot qualifies for kashering, it must first be completely cleaned so there is no macroscopic mixing of meat and milk. Next, the absorbed flavor of the forbidden ingredient must be removed by heat. There are two heat kashering processes for utensils: hagalah and libun.

  In hagalah, an oversize pot or vessel is filled with water and heated to boiling. The trefeh pot is completely submerged in the water. Since the addition of the pot will often cool the water to below the boiling point, two things can be done: (1) Keep the pot in the larger vessel until the water has boiled up again. (2) Heat a rock or stone to a very high heat on another burner and toss it into the large vessel. This superheats the water and immediately causes it to boil in the presence of the pot. Through this process, any absorbed flavors are assumed to be removed and the trefeh pot becomes kosher. There is no minimum time limit for the boiling. All it takes is a second for the trefeh pot to be completely submerged in boiling water.

  A further requirement is that the volume of water used to boil the trefeh utensil be at least sixty times the volume of the actual metal to be kashered. (This can be measured carefully through displacement, but most people make a reasonably generous estimate.) This ensures that any flavor of meat or dairy present will be so diluted (a one-to-sixty solution maximum) that it becomes too insignificant to make the large kashering pot trefeh.

  Libun is a firing process, using a blowtorch, the kind that can be purchased in a hardware store for ten or fifteen dollars. The flame is passed over the entire pot or utensil. At times, libun and hagalah are used in combination to kasher an item, for example, a pot with a certain kind of handle that can be cleaned only by libun while its insides are best kashered by hagalah.

  Although technically one could switch something on a permanent basis from meat to dairy using these processes, this is not permitted. Repairing mistakes, okay, but not switching.

  In general, a rabbi is always reading and willing to answer questions of kashrut. Rabbis don’t have as much opportunity to use their expert knowledge of kashrut these days, since things are more clearly labeled, more easily available. It used to be quite different. A rabbi would get ten, fifteen, twenty questions about kashrut in an average week. As a matter of fact, a great proportion of his rabbinic training dealt with the laws of kashrut—practical preparation for meeting the needs of his constituency. Today if he gets one question a week it’s a lot.

  TEVILAH

  In addition to kashering, there is a process called tevilah, ritual immersion for utensils. Technically, it has nothing to do with kashrut, but rather with sanctification of vessels as ownership passes to a Jew. It is based on the Biblical passage (NUM. 31:23) describing how the vessels the Jews captured from Midianites had to be purified in the ritual waters. Dishes or pots or flatware that are made of metal or of glass require this tevilah in the mikvah (ritual bath), or in a body of moving water such as ocean or river. Immediately before the tevilah, this blessing is recited:

  Baruch ata Adonai Elohainu melech ha’olam asher kidshanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu al tevilat kelim.

  Blessed are You, Lord our God, Ruler of the universe, Who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us on the immersion of vessels.

  Chinaware or ceramic doesn’t require tevilah, but some Orthodox Jews “tovel” these items anyhow. However, they do not say the blessing. Interestingly, utensils that had not previously been immersed are not considered non-kosher, which explains why it’s never too late to immerse a vessel that wasn’t ritually immersed before. Tevilah is done during the day at the mikvah; one must call ahead for an appointment.

  WAITING BETWEEN MEALS

  Not only are foods separated in preparation and eating, but also in “digesting.” After a dairy meal, you wait thirty minutes before eating meat. Some people wait several hours after eating hard cheeses, since these take longer to digest, but most authorities say all dairy is the same and rule half an hour wait after hard cheeses too.

  After a meat meal, it’s a different story altogether. Most traditional Jews wait six hours before eating a dairy product. Nevertheless, there is some variation in custom. Some Jews of German origin wait three hours after eating meat. Many Dutch Jews wait one hour, as was the custom in that community.

  The origin of these variations has its source in the Talmud. One Rabbi states that after eating meat, one waits “from one meal to another” before eating dairy foods. Other Rabbis interpreted this to mean a six-hour wait, since in those days people typically ate two meals a day, about six hours apart. The communities that followed these interpretations wait six hours. Later, other rabbis ruled that “one meal to another” denotes a three-hour wait, approximately the time we wait from breakfast to lunch. Still others ruled that “one meal to another” means finish one meal, wait a decent interval (that is, one hour) so your mouth will not be full of meat or its flavor, and then you may eat another (dairy) meal. However, other rabbis emphasized that the flavor of meat remains longer in one’s mouth and thus one should wait a full six hours. This latter custom has always been the most widespread one among Orthodox Jews. Interestingly, recent nutrition studies have shown that it takes the digestive tract approximately five and one-half hours to digest animal protein.

  When J.J. was thirteen, he decided to become a vegetarian. Not only did he want to emulate an older brother and sister, but he also couldn’t stand having to wait six hours after lunch on Shabbat for ice cream or a glass of milk. Now, the rest of the family carnivores envy him as he finishes Shabbat lunch and goes off to help himself to a big bowl of ice cream.

  HOUSEHOLD HELP AND KASHRUT

  The laws, though they seem complex to the uninitiated, are really quite simple. Some years ago I discovered the factor that makes the difference between complex and simple. That factor is the seriousness with which one takes the whole thing. That is truly all there is to it. Since the time I discovered this secret I have applied it several times and invariably it works. Here’s what happened. Years ago, I had a woman working for me in my home. She had received no education beyond the eighth grade, but she was a very decent woman with an average level of common sense. Her tasks involved preparation of food. I explained to her the laws of kashrut, and worked with her for several days, explaining and repeating and watching to make sure that there would be no mistakes. Everything was labeled and in its proper cabinets. She seemed to be catching on, but there were one or two slipups that I caught just in time. One evening as I came in to supervise how things were proceeding, I saw that she had taken a meat pot to cook string beans for a dairy meal and had put some butter in the pot. Again, I explained to her that we couldn’t cook in a meat pot anything that was to be used for a dairy meal. Moreover, putting butter in the pot had now made the pot trefeh. This particular pot could not be kashered either. Therefore, if she didn’t mind, she should take the pot home with her on her day off, for I could no longer use it in my home. She felt awful. “I’m sorry,” I said, “please don’t feel bad about the pot. I can replace it, but these are my laws.” That’s all it took for her to understand. Suddenly, she knew I meant business; she grasped the seriousness with which we approach halacha. The notion of separation became absolutely clear to her, and she never made another mistake. I don’t panic anymore when I think of having to train household help in the laws of kashrut. All it takes is one dish or pot, irreversibly trefehed and banished from my kitchen forever, to uncomplicate these laws. But it wo
n’t work unless everything is labeled clearly.

  PARVE

  In addition to classifications of meat and dairy which must be completely separate, there is a large category called parve—foods that are neither meat nor dairy and can therefore be used in conjunction with either of them. All fruits, vegetables, nuts, and grains are parve (pronounced pahr’vuh, but also spelled pareve), as are eggs and fish, and staples such as flour, sugar, tea, coffee, and spices; most condiments and relishes such as ketchup, mustard, jams and jellies; most oils and juices. Many of these parve items, however, need rabbinic supervision to determine whether they are really parve or even kosher, which brings us to the subject of how we shop.

  BUYING KOSHER

  What we bring into our homes in addition to kosher meat is as important as how we prepare it. Oddly enough, the more sophisticated and extensive the prepared-food industry becomes, the more cautious an Orthodox Jew must be about reading labels. Not only must we ascertain if a food is meat or dairy, but nowadays there are preservatives and additives used in almost every type of prepared food that is on the market. Some of these additives are made of dairy or meat or non-kosher by-products such as gelatin from a non-kosher animal. A seemingly harmless little olive thrown casually into a salad could disqualify that salad for a meat meal: olives are often prepared with lactic acid, which makes them dairy, and therefore unusable with a meat meal; or shortening marked pure vegetable shortening can contain stearic acid, which is derived from non-kosher animals; or peanut butter, which might include a glyceride of non-kosher origin.