INTERSTITIAL
SKINNY TOMATO QUICHE FROM THE KOSHER GOURMET
This recipe is guaranteed to please even the pickiest eater. Glatt kosher and calorie-conscious, it suits any diet. It’s a real palate-pleaser too. B’tayavon!
PREPARATION TIME: 6 hours
Serves: 4
You will need:
Paper towels (4 rolls)
Store-bought frozen piecrust
4 dozen eggs
Plastic fork
¾ cup milk
12 plastic cups
8 ounces grated cheese
4 tomatoes
1 teaspoon salt
Aluminum foil
Paper napkins
Plastic knife
Begin with a thorough hand-washing using plenty of hot water (see page 21 for technique). Once your hands are clean and dry, you’ll prepare your work area. Lay down eight layers of paper towels. If possible, start with a brand-new roll (previously opened rolls may be contaminated). Be sure to discard the first few sheets, as the glue that seals the roll may contain unkosher ingredients. You will probably need to repeat the washing procedure after disposing of these first few sheets, as accidental contact with the glued parts may occur. It may take a few tries to get everything right. Take your time.
Remove store-bought piecrust from freezer. No problem here: it’s certified kosher with a good hecksher and it’s well-sealed. Oh. But it’s been sitting next to an unkosher pot roast. It may have absorbed some juices. Better play it safe. Return piecrust to freezer, wash hands, then drive to the grocery store and buy a new one. On the way home, circle the same block five times to make sure you didn’t hit a pedestrian. When you get home, rewash your hands and place new piecrust, still sealed, on a paper towel. While it thaws, proceed to Step 3.
Remove eggs, milk, and cheese from the refrigerator, being careful not to touch the door handle, as it is contaminated. Place items on paper towels. But wait. Maybe you accidentally touched the door handle without noticing. You don’t remember touching it, but it’s certainly possible. Better wash your hands again. Then break eggs one by one into the plastic cups and carefully inspect for blood spots before transferring to a new disposable mixing bowl. Don’t hesitate to toss an egg if there’s any speck of anything or if it just doesn’t feel right. You only need three eggs. Surely with four dozen to sort through, you can find three good ones. Beat lightly with a disposable plastic fork.
Pour approximately ¾ cup milk into a plastic cup. Oh, look at that. The carton was sealed with glue. There’s no way that glue is kosher, either. The milk is contaminated. Throw out the milk and the plastic cup and wash hands thoroughly. It’s okay; you can substitute water instead. Measure out ¾ cup water into a new plastic cup, being sure not to let the cup touch the spigot, which is contaminated. This may take a few tries. Once you’ve got your water, add to beaten egg mixture.
Open package of grated cheese and carefully measure out 8 ounces using a plastic cup. Before you add to egg mixture, question the validity of the hecksher. Cheese is tricky, and maybe this brand is not as kosher as it says it is. It probably isn’t. Skip the cheese. The quiche will be both more kosher and more dietetic without it. Carefully seal cheese and return to refrigerator, again being sure not to touch the door handle. Be careful not to place it on or near a meat item, or even near a dairy item, as the cheese is now a suspected meat⁄dairy hybrid. Wash hands thoroughly.
Carefully wash four tomatoes in cold water and dry on paper towels. Next, inspect but do not touch the tomatoes. Do they really seem properly clean? No. They just don’t ‘feel’ clean. Perhaps they’ve been coated in an unkosher wax. You’ll need to wash them in hot water to melt it off. But wait. If you do that, the heat will render the entire tomato unkosher. Instead, rewash tomatoes in cold water and dry on new paper towels. Then carefully peel off tomato skin, washing knife between each cut. Be sure to use the grapefruit knife rather than the small paring knife, as it’s the only one you know for sure doesn’t get used on meat. Once tomatoes are peeled, wash knife again, and slice tomatoes into rounds. Add tomatoes to egg mixture. Stir in one teaspoon salt, if an unopened canister of salt is available. If not, skip altogether. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
Now you’re ready to assemble your quiche. Carefully pour egg mixture into piecrust. Place the egg bowl in the sink to wash later, but wash your hands now. Then tear off several sheets of aluminum foil from a brand-new roll. Place quiche on the aluminum foil nest. Transport this whole unit to the oven. The top rack is preferable, as it rarely gets used and seems cleaner. When you open and close the oven, you’ll want to use a paper towel on the handle, because it’s contaminated. Bake for 45 minutes – just enough time to wash the bowl really thoroughly. 8. When quiche is golden brown, remove from oven, using a stack of napkins as an oven mitt. Place quiche on eight paper towels and allow to set for five minutes. Cut with a plastic knife and serve. Oh, look at them, making a mess out of all your hard work. Look at that. Look at that. Someone got quiche on the counter. You’re going to be up cleaning that all night.
∨ Devil in the Details ∧
Today I Am a Manic
There are many things I like about Judaism. I like that it encourages napping and the liberal consumption of saturated fats, that it requires you to wear new clothes on some holidays and to eat cheesecake on others. But what I like best is that it endorses catered affairs for middle-schoolers. Judaism is normally a fairly sensible religion, but bar and bat mitzvahs are just lunacy. At thirteen everyone is at their worst, as unattractive and vulgar as they’ll ever be. In a rational society, thirteen-year-olds would be sequestered until they were properly socialized and good-looking enough to circulate among the general public. But in Judaism, we declare you an adult, buy you a suit, then hire a photographer and a DJ to mark the occasion.
It’s a recipe for disaster. Thirteen-year-olds pick themes like “Stacy’s Sex and the City Soiree.” It’s institutionalized insanity, and everyone goes along with it. Give out souvenir sweatshirts embossed with the bat mitzvah girl’s face? Sounds great! Put the pimply kid with the cracking voice and the uncontrollable erections on the podium? Yes, please! And why not record the whole thing for posterity? It’ll be great!
It’s a fabulous idea, the bat mitzvah. I knew by age eleven that I had to have one. I was motivated partly by a commitment to my faith and partly by a desire for formalwear. My Hebrew school friends had started having them, and it looked like a pretty good deal.
There is a two-year-long period in every Jewish preteen’s life during which every Saturday morning is spent at a bar or bat mitzvah. It becomes a routine, giving the identical gift of a multifunction digital watch each time, evaluating the caterer’s performance from one week to the next, debating the merits of Dan Dan the Party Man versus J.P. McGoodtimes. During the ceremony itself, when you got bored, you’d plan how to outdo them all with yours.
Because our Jewish community was so small, I had only a six-week bar mitzvathon, but it was enough to get me thinking. I’d also heard some stories. My cousins had recently gone to the bar mitzvah of one very rich and, apparently, racist young man who was carried into his reception in a paladin resting on the shoulders of four black men dressed as Nubian slaves. Another acquaintance had attended a bat mitzvah that featured a performance by actual Solid Gold Dancers and ice sculptures of the bat mitzvah girl in dance poses.
My mother warned me not to get ideas. I had ideas. Besides the bar mitzvahs, I’d been to a few big weddings, and they’d made an impression. So had several quinceaneras, the ceremony marking a girl’s transition to womanhood, which were common among the fifteen-year-old Latinas in my hometown. Quinceaneras featured scores of attendants, with damas in hoop skirts and chambeldnes in bolero jackets. We called them Mexican bat mitzvahs, but they were much more than that. They were like a religious ceremony, a beauty pageant, and a debutante ball rolled into one and held together by Aqua Net.
What I had in mind wasn’t so fancy,
really. It would be black tie optional. I wanted an hour of cocktails and passed hors d’oeuvres, followed by a sit-down lunch for three hundred. Naturally there would be a postprandial cheese course, and some sort of flaming dessert, if we could find a way to make it Shabbat-appropriate.
Nothing fancy. As for hair, I was thinking a three-tiered updo with French braids running up the sides. My dress would be easy. Any simple gown would do, as long as it had a four-foot train. I would also need a dozen attendants in periwinkle satin. I realized that this was not traditional, bridesmaids at bar or bat mitzvahs, but I thought it was a great idea and was sure to catch on. You could call them barmaids, or batgirls.
The next day we’d get a big write-up in the society pages. “Local Girl Becomes a Woman in Front of 300, Earns Jewelry,” it would say.
Yes, it was going to be perfect. But it wasn’t going to be easy. There were obstacles. There was the tiny matter of my father forbidding the whole thing. Bar mitzvahs were fine, but the bats rankled him. It wasn’t really an anti-feminist impulse. He simply thought bar mitzvahs were a gender-specific thing that proved unflattering on the other sex, like sandals on men.
My mother had been dreading the prospect of permitting me a platform and a budget, but this got her on my side, and after months of relentless badgering we wore my father down. I was going to have a bat mitzvah. Shortly after my twelfth birthday we made an appointment at our synagogue to get the ball rolling, just a formality, to arrange the date and the religious instruction.
The meeting didn’t go as I’d imagined. I’d expected the rabbi would ask if I’d chosen a color scheme and a party theme and send me on my way. She stopped me before I could pull out my fabric swatches.
“We have a problem,” she announced. “You’re not Jewish.”
Jewishness, it turned out, was passed down matrilineally. Since my mother wasn’t Jewish, I wasn’t either, despite my distinctly Semitic short-waistedness. Fortunately my religious status, unlike my proportions, was fixable. I would simply have to have a conversion, the rabbi explained. She went on to describe what this would entail – it turned out to be a fairly complicated procedure that would have to be coordinated through a more observant synagogue and that would, at some point, require nudity – but by then I’d tuned her out to concentrate on a daydream in which I accepted a standing ovation from my awestruck bat mitzvah guests.
“So are you up for it?” she asked.
Now the congregants were throwing roses. They were weeping, they were so moved. If it was going to take a conversion to get me to this moment, then so be it. I nodded. I was in.
My parents were less enthusiastic. My father was furious; my mother, hurt. It felt like an indictment of their interfaith union and, in fact, it was. But we’d already made a deposit for the caterer, so they acquiesced.
And so began my journey to Jewishness. My guide would be a kindly grandfather named Mr. Stein, who would serve as conversion coach and bat mitzvah tutor. I liked him right away. He had a very soothing presence, with his tidy gray goatee, crocheted yarmulke, and the enormous glasses that are standard issue for Jews over seventy. I was also very fond of his wife, a small, round, affectionate woman who was perpetually short of breath, with fluffy hair the color of circus peanuts. They were like Bubbe and Zayde, like fairy jewparents, sent to teach me how to live a proper Jewish life.
I took to it immediately. Mr. Stein presented a practical Judaism, not so much of ideas, but of actions. Not: here’s what you should believe, but: here’s what you should do. I found this tremendously appealing. This was exactly the kind of peer pressure I’d been looking for – come on, all the Yids are doing it.
It was just what I wanted. For some time now I’d been having these impulses to wash and check and eat funny, and now here was a channel, a vessel to give them shape. It gave me an identity. Now I wasn’t just a weird kid; I was a religious fanatic. It could have been worse. If, say, an athletic coach had taken me under wing as Mr. Stein had, giving outlet to my determined impulses, I might have become a maniacally driven gymnast or ice skater instead. That would have been much worse. The hours were longer, and you had to wear leotards.
Instead of tights, I had Torah. Twice a week, I met with Mr. Stein, and he handed down new laws and lessons. We started with the basics of kashrut. Because food was a subject that interested us both, and because a little snack fit nicely into the lesson plan, we spent months on the topic. Just learning which animals were kosher and which ones weren’t took weeks. In a less rural area we might have skipped or shortened the lesson, but living where we did, Mr. Stein knew it was likely I would encounter donkey meat and squirrel. These were out. Pigeon was fine, but not if you shot it yourself, as our neighbors often did.
Then there was the matter of separating milk and meat. This lesson, too, took weeks. There were so many substatutes and terms to learn. Mr. Stein brought in packages and taught me to read their codes, pointing out the Us and Ks that indicated kashrut, the problematic ingredients that rendered innocent-looking products inedible. Both meat and milk had aliases, it turned out. Milk could hide as ‘casein’, ‘sodium stearoyl lactylate,’ or ‘whey.’ Meat could be ‘mono- and diglycerides’ or ‘natural flavors.’ You had to watch out.
By the time we moved on to bigger things like commandments, I was hooked. This stuff was gold. Twice a week wasn’t enough. I began studying on my own, following a self-designed curriculum based mostly on the works of Herman Wouk and the encyclopedia entries on food additives. Mr. Stein and I hadn’t gotten to prayer yet, but I couldn’t wait, so I just started praying freestyle. Soon I was spending the bulk of my day in prayer. The rest of the time, I combed the pantry for new foods to stop eating.
Yes, I’d crossed a line. My parents blamed Mr. Stein. They’d liked him just fine until I started throwing out all their bacon. But now he was trouble. Now he was a bad influence. My parents didn’t understand that it wasn’t coming from him; it was coming from a dark, determined place inside me. They didn’t understand that this was inevitable. I was obsessive-compulsive. I had spent the last decade tapping bookshelves and frantically rearranging my stuffed animals. This couldn’t have come as a surprise.
It didn’t particularly surprise me. I had known for a long time that I would become observant when I turned thirteen. Thirteen is the age at which you’re expected to follow all the laws. Up until then, you’re not responsible; you can mainline lobster bisque on Yom Kippur and it’s technically permitted. I’m still not sure why I didn’t take more advantage of this by cramming in all the pork I could that twelfth year. Maybe it’s because I knew I would have to stop. I always knew I was going to become religious. I just didn’t know I was going to become crazy, too.
Mr. Stein didn’t know it, either, didn’t know he was handing me grenades that would continue to go off all over our house for years to come. He did not know what I was doing with his lessons, how I magnified and misinterpreted them to my scrupulous ends.
He did not know, when he casually mentioned that you had to watch out with yogurt, because it sometimes contained un-kosher gelatin, that I would go home and subject the contents of the refrigerator to a yogurt witch hunt, a dairy performance of The Crucible in which all the questionable cartons were accused and cast out. He did not know I would go on to conduct a cereal probe, a cracker tribunal, a canned-goods inquisition.
Mr. Stein did not know, when he taught me the prohibition against wearing a garment made of mingled linen and wool, that I would refuse to touch anyone wearing a different fiber than I. He did not know, when he taught me that milk and meat required separate dishes, that I would decide they required separate toilets as well. He did not know that my family was one mitzvah away from sending me to boarding school.
They’d had it. There was discussion of ending my lessons. But we were almost through, and besides, I’d started getting better. I just had. There was that business with the behavior modification contract, and then things improved. By the time Mr. Stein and
I were concluding our course of study with a brief tutorial on gleaning statutes, I was close to sane. I was still a little funny, all right, but I could get through a meal without inspecting the flatware first. I could get through a full day of school. I was stable, more or less.
This was good, because the next step in the conversion process was the most unsettling. I would have to go to the mikvah, the ritual bath. I was not looking forward to it. Despite my washing compulsions, I didn’t particularly enjoy bathing, and I certainly didn’t relish the thought of doing it in front of an audience. A witness would have to be present to verify that I did it properly.
The awkwardness of the situation, I hoped, would be mitigated by the luxury of it. The nearest mikvah was in San Francisco, a big city, and this conjured images of glamour for me. I figured the mikvah would be like a spa treatment, only slightly more spiritual. I would have a wrap and a massage, and then, when the spirit moved me, I’d take a dip in my gold Gottex one-piece.
In reality it went more like this: there was a vigorous pre-immersion hosing-down followed by a naked inspection from the mikvah attendant that was so thorough it resembled a girl-on-girl reenactment of Midnight Express. Then, still naked, I flopped around in a lukewarm Jacuzzi in front of people politely averting their eyes.
It was a very complicated process. Nothing can come between the body and the mikvah water – not nail polish, lint, dirt, stray hairs, or dental plaque – and the mikvah attendant was there to ensure I was perfectly clean and bare. This was my own personal nightmare. The last thing a thirteen-year-old girl wants is to have her naked body examined by a matter-of-fact Russian babushka. It’s just such an awkward time. I was so modest that I couldn’t even try on belts in the Loehmann’s shared dressing room. An inch-by-inch going-over was torture. It seemed to last forever. She investigated between my toes and under my nails, under my arms and in my navel. I had to lift up my hair and present my neck. I had to open my mouth and stick out my tongue. I was just about to bend over for the cavity search I figured was next when she pronounced me clean enough and pointed me toward the water.
Devil in the Details Page 9