Rhapsody in Schmaltz by Michael Wex

Author:Michael Wex
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466882652
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Hot er fin ir tsures.

Who gives him trouble.

Kon zi nisht kayn kigel makhn,

She can’t make a kugel,

Toyg zi af kapures.

And is good for nothing at all.

A good kugel covers a multitude of faults.

INNARDS, OUTARDS, AND A GREAT BIG TSIMMES

Kishka today is usually thought of as one of those dishes loosely classed as deli, and is often served à la carte in restaurants that specialize in corned beef, pastrami, smoked meat, and the like, generally in gravy, with rye bread on the side. While restaurant kishka is either baked or, less frequently, boiled, kishka was originally another shabbes dish that was left to cook in a cholent or in the fruit or vegetable stew known as tsimmes.

As its unapologetically Slavic name makes clear, the Jewish kishka is an adaptation of a non-Jewish dish; kishka means intestine, and the standard Polish kishka is made of pigs’ blood and grains (usually barley or buckwheat) encased in a pig’s intestine. Its Jewish problem needs no comment. Both kosher and kosher-style cooks replace blood with schmaltz, a substitution on which you could almost found a religion. They use bread crumbs, cracker crumbs, or matzoh meal instead of barley or buckwheat, toss in a chopped onion for tang, and shove it all into a casing that tends nowadays to be made of cellulose—sometimes edible, sometimes not—but was originally a well-cleaned beef intestine.

After the better part of a day inside a simmering cholent, the kishka would have absorbed flavor and, more importantly, moisture from the surrounding mess, while imparting some of its own taste to the cholent. It was a bit of a pain to make, especially because the casings needed to be cleaned. The kishka recipe in 1956’s Love and Knishes starts off with “9 feet of clean beef casings”—that’s a lot of scrubbing.

Popular as kishka has always been, it doesn’t seem to have captured the popular imagination in the same way as kugel, cholent, or tsimmes. Yiddish is full of proverbs and idioms about kishkes, but the guts in question belong to people. Walter Solek’s “Who Stole the Keeshka,” which charted in the early ’50s and was revived by Frankie Yankovic in the early ’60s, concerns the pigs’ blood variety—a technicality that didn’t keep it from the Hebrew-school hit parade. The Jewish kishka, sometimes “translated” into English as “stuffed derma,” surfaced briefly and covertly in the mid-’60s, when one of the supporting cartoons on The Milton the Monster Show featured a hobo named Stuffy Derma. Earlier, during and immediately after World War II, entertainers working in the Catskills borscht belt sometimes referred to it as the “Derma Road.”

Such legend as kishka still has lives on on every box of Manischewitz Tam Tams crackers, all of which feature a widely popular recipe for mock kishka. Tam Tams, which date back to 1941, were Manischewitz’s first non-Passover product. The company’s Web site describes them as “addictively crispy, unbelievably tasty, and cholesterol and trans-fat free”; pros know that Tam Tam is really pronounced Tum Tum, tum—usually transliterated confusingly

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.