Michael Wex.com

Growth of a Tiny Mind

2012-04-30T12:54:52Z

In order to relieve the tedium induced by weeks of reading nothing but the Bible, the Talmud, and sundry commentaries on tractates Avoyde Zoro and Khulin, including some fairly complicated sections of the Shulkhan Orukh and its successors, I've had to pick up the pace of my non-work-related reading. Science fiction has acquired a new allure for me, as have mysteries, westerns and a Yiddish translation of Romain Rolland's Jean Christophe that I found in the Robarts library.

I've been reading less genre-specific stuff as well and have just started Michael Dirda's memoir, An Open Book. Although Dirda is half-a-dozen years older than I am, the lower-middle and working class life he describes in the book was still pretty much intact during my own childhood. Ohio isn't Alberta and Dirda isn't Jewish, but "You think we're made of money?" sounds the same to any kid in every language and Sky King is still Sky King; like the Cisco Kid, Turok, Son of Stone, and Funk & Wagnall's Universal Standard-buy-the-first-couple-of-volumes-in-the-supermarket-until-the-price-goes-back-to-normal-Encyclopedia, he cruises far above the local.

Dirda mentions his mixed feelings about Classics Illustrated, those "worthy" comics that introduced so many of us to culture with a capital C. I still remember learning the word "miscreant" from the Classics version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and though Dirda didn't much like these comics, I already had the feeling that if any of my parents' predictions came true, Classics comics would probably be as close to higher education as I was ever likely to come.

Although Dirda mentions a couple of his favourite titles, he skips the one that's stayed with me all these years. I've never read the book in any but comic form and have never felt the need to do so: nothing could live up to this cover. The day that I bought this Classics Illustrated comic was the day that I decided to become a writer; I just wanted to produce something good enough to deserve a cover like this.

I hope the Scribner art department is paying attention. I'm sure it'd be cheap to licence. And what could be more suitable for a fresh take on Ashkenazi food?

Growth of a Tiny Mind is a post from: Michael Wex.com

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And We Owe It All To Income Tax…

2012-04-15T21:20:01Z

So...much...sponge cake...

Passover's done, Bob Hope's on the TV, serenading Jane Russell with "Buttons and Bows," it's overcast and slightly rainy in Toronto, but Jane Russell has just taken over the whole of my fifty-one inch television screen–my ancestors thought that they got manna from heaven?–and life is pretty much back to normal. First thing Monday morning, I'll take another step on my long, long road to the poorhouse.

I've got a bit of a disappointment for those readers who wanted my opinion of Farfelroons: Mrs. Wex, who made sponge cake, apple cake, chocolate chip cookies, chicken, kugel, brisket, and some fancy vegetable dishes within the first forty-eight hours of the festival and then decided to do some cooking, drew a line in the matzoh meal and refused to make Farfelroons. Refused to let me make them. Would have refused to let our daughter make them had said daughter reacted to the recipe with something other than the "yuck" and the "gross" that it provoked. The Farfelroon is still as remote from my own experience as the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, or anything else mentioned in Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings.

Fred and his slightly more famous brother.

Peysakh was far from barren, though. Our accountant, Fred Levy, introduced us to a kosher-for-Passover delicacy that renders the mere thought of Farfelroons as prosaic, as stale, as arousing as the matzoh-brei d'antan. "Except at a seder," Fred told us, "I haven't eaten matzoh since I was in high school." He had a friend back then, and the friend had a housekeeper who made an egg salad, as Fred put it, "to die for." She was no slouch as a baker, either. Come Peysakh, when the boys still had to go to school on khol ha-moyed, the intermediate days of the festival, Fred's friend would show up at school with egg-salad sandwiches–not two pieces of ever-slackening matzoh that weren't doing the egg-salad any more favours than it was doing them, but a pair of rich, fluffy pieces of sponge cake, united by the housekeeper's egg salad in a marriage made in heaven but consummated in Hamilton, ON.

Soon as we heard this, Mrs. Wex baked another sponge cake. Then she made an egg-salad...If I had a broker, I'd buy a few more shares of Lipitor.

And We Owe It All To Income Tax… is a post from: Michael Wex.com

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Shnortnin’ Bread for Pesach

2012-03-26T18:51:51Z

I'd like to blame Pesach shopping for my failure to write a blog post last week, but Mrs. Wex, a berye of the very first order, has long since had all the makings of kosher-for Passover Farfelroons safely stowed in knotted plastic bags in a corner of our basement, directly beneath a photo of the Strettiner Rebbe in his kitchen ha-kadosh, circa 1977.

Pesach shopping takes care of itself, it's the shnorring that's been getting me down. Not the wheedling per se so much as where it's been coming from. I've been deluged with e-mails lately, all of them beginning with some variant of, "With the approach of Passover, a celebration of freedom and renewal, when the voice of the potato syrup-based fruit slice is heard through the land, our thoughts naturally turn" not so much to people, as to the cash-strapped Jewish cultural organizations who have sent them, virtually all of which either employ my friends and me on occasion or else serve as resources for those of us working in Yiddish. Their e-mails are full of talk about "heritage," "preservation," "legacy," and "generations," Jewish-English code for material with no direct connection to either yeshiva study or the State of Israel, stuff for which the bulk of the Jewish community couldn't give a shitas Rabbeynu Tam.

Now, maybe it takes a guy like me, yet to taste a Farfelroon but still bursting with money and indigestion (and if you can identify the source of that phrase, treat yourself to an extra Farfelroon) to come right out and say, "Enough with banging our heads against the wall." If there's one thing I'm learning from working on a book about Jewish food in North America, it's that Jewish-Jewish doesn't hold a Chanukah candle to Jewish-style. We need a new culture, one free of difficult technicalities and languages that aren't even English, not this outmoded mockie crap with one foot in the past and the other already in the grave. We know what the Jewish people wants, so why don't we give it to them?

Am Yisroel duas tantum res anxius optat
chalam et farfelroones.

Who needs bread and circuses when you can have chala and farfelroons? And a hot bulke with butter every non-Passover morning.

At first I thought "Farfelroons" was a misprint, or perhaps a now-obscure racist term, something along the lines of "quadroon" or "octoroon," for someone judged to be only one-thirty-second black, but then I found the recipe, Yiddish and English versions yet, in the third edition of Batamte Yidishe Maykholim/Tempting Kosher Dishes, published by the B. Manischewitz Company in 1941:

2 egg whites
2/3 cup Manischewitz [Matzo] Farfel
3/4 cup confectioner's sugar
1 cup cocoanut
1/8 tsp.salt

Beat egg whites stiff, add sugar, and beat again. Add farfel, cocoanut, and salt. Grease a pan and dust it with Manischewitz Matzo Meal. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture on it, allowing a little room between cakes. Bake in a hot oven (400⁰) for 10-15 minutes, changing the pan from the bottom of the oven to the top, in order to brown cakes all over. Let cakes cool before removing from pan.

And remember, moms: These bite-sized nuggets of hearty, nut-like goodness are just bursting with Yidishkayt.

Shnortnin’ Bread for Pesach is a post from: Michael Wex.com

Kosher for passover breakfast recipes As you know I like to provide our readers with...

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Kosher for passover breakfast recipes

2012-03-23T21:07:43Z

As you know I like to provide our readers with ideas for great recipes on Passover.

Well our dear friend and Jewish cooking maven Leah Koenig has come up with three fabulous breakfast recipes on Chow.com.

I'm especially excited about the cherry matzo brei - it looks completely delicious. Leah managed to find kosherle pesach pure vanilla essence. I always thought that you couldn't have it because of the vanilla bean, but Wex confirmed that it's the grain alcohol that's the issue. Leah said if you can't find kosherle pesach vanilla essence then you can omit that from the recipe.

You can see all three fabulous recipes here at Chow.com. You can also buy Leah's excellent book The Hadassah Everyday Cookbook: Daily Meals for the Contemporary Jewish Kitchen.

Kosher for passover breakfast recipes is a post from: Michael Wex.com

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Let’s Just Say Hors D’Oeuvre

2012-03-12T16:09:16Z

Barth Gimble makes everything better.

"I spent Purim at a shiva" is just further proof that phrases that sound great as Country & Western titles are a lot less fun when they describe your life. Four people I know died in the past week, among them an uncle for whom "beloved" was a lot more than a term in an obituary.

And we've got Pesach cleaning to look forward to.

So praise the Lord for YouTube, which not only lets me watch Manfred Mann and his band do "My Name Is Jack" the three times a week that I'm in the mood to do so, but also features this, by Manfred's brother-in-initials, Martin Mull, who wouldn't care that Manfred's real name is Lubowitz. Now that I seem to have become a food writer ("not so much a cholent, as a meditation on tummy upsets"), I find that Mull's song sums up my own attitude to the reaper in one little phrase. (YouTube wouldn't let me embed the video here - but please go look. You won't regret it.)

Let’s Just Say Hors D’Oeuvre is a post from: Michael Wex.com

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Homentash

2012-03-04T21:23:26Z

It's not too late to buy a Purim shirt. Click on the image above.

With Purim almost here, it's time for me to recall the observations about homentashn that I made a few years ago in Just Say Nu.

In writing about certain types of Yiddish slang, I remarked that pirge (think "perogie") and knish (think beef) can both be used rather vulgarly to refer to those parts of the female anatomy that respectable ladies call nothing but dortn, a word that simply means there. I should note that while homentash still means homentash, the three-year old mentioned below is now a licensed driver.

I pointed out that the homentash is:

a triangle-shaped piece of dough stuffed variously with poppy seed, prunes, or walnuts that’s eaten on Purim. Its shape and the contrasting colors of the dough and the fillings have led to its being used as a Yiddish counterpart of “hair pie.” Homentash is less vulgar than pirge or knish, and its festive associations lend it the kind of jovial, even jaunty air that explains the smiles on the faces of my relatives when my three-year old daughter gave an impromptu performance of the Spice Girls’ hit, “Stop,” and, instead of “I need somebody with a human touch,” sang, “I need somebody with a hamentash.”

At least she didn’t ask for a Yule log.

A freylekhn pirim.

Homentash is a post from: Michael Wex.com

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From Top to Tukhes

2012-02-26T22:49:31Z

Rob Ford - no brainiac

If you don't believe that brains are strictly a special-order item in Toronto these days, just take a look at our mayor. I haven't been able to find a single retail butcher who stocks them on a regular basis (though I have to admit that I haven't yet ventured into any of our city's more colourfully "ethnic" enclaves), and the counterwoman at the butcher shop at Eglinton and Avenue Road told me that worries about bovine spongiform encephalopathy have caused brains to become illegal. They're like bags of weed: o.k. to own, very bad to sell.

Like Diogenes, though, I'll keep looking, but in the meantime I've decided to go to the other extreme. I'd known for a long time that sheep's tails were kosher, but hadn't given the matter much thought until I came across a passage in Der Vunder-Oytser fun der Yidisher Shprakh, A Treasury of Wonders of the Yiddish Language by Yehuda Elzet (the name that Rabbi Y.L. Zlotnick used when writing about Yiddish language and folklore) that describes kodeh, the fat of a sheep's tail (cf. Rumanian coada, tail, ultimately from the Latin cauda), and mentions that the sheep in Bessarabia "shlep their tails behind them on wheels, yet." Soon as I realized that I had, indeed, read the passage correctly, I went hunting—and give a look at what I found. Could someone in Israel please send me a tub?

From Top to Tukhes is a post from: Michael Wex.com

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If I only had a latke

2012-02-19T20:42:11Z

Calf brain latke anyone? Anyone?

Don't ask me how I ended up doing all this Yiddish; I started out as a hipster, the first kid on the block to have a Davy Crockett hat: my parents cut off the tail, used it to sweep up chometz on the night before Pesach, and called what was left a kinder-spodek. I owned a Purple People Eater t-shirt when the song was still new and dazzled my eighth-grade classmates at Milton Williams Junior High School with a pair of burgundy stovepipe trousers—they were way too gear to be pants— held up by a belt about three inches wide and topped, like a shmatte-based sundae, by a black and white polka dot shirt—shirt black, dots white—with a collar so high that my earlobes were chafed.

I was hip once, avant garde: at three years old I was shaking hands with Leo Carillo, who played Pancho on The Cisco Kid, and my sister's got the picture to prove it. And now? I sit here in a pair of platform shoes, deely-bobbers practically welded to my skull, researching a book about Jewish food (due out in Fall, 2013) and wondering what went wrong, when did I fall out of touch, when all of a sudden it gives me a knock in the door—opportunity. In the guise of a cookbook.

First published in Montreal in 1950, A Treasure For My Daughter was a fixture in virtually every mainstream Jewish home in Canada for at least a quarter of a century. Equal parts cookbook and catechism—if the term can be applied to an explanation of basic Jewish concepts and rituals presented in question-and-answer format—the book was the Shulchan Aruch, the Code of Jewish Law, for two, maybe three generations of Jewish Canadian homemakers, and by next Chanukah everyone who knows me is going to know why. Let my daughter mock me, let my wife shake her head at my on-going efforts to do the Hustle, I'm hopping onto the zombie bandwagon—I hope my agent's listening—only three years late. Forget about the milkhiks, the dairy foods with which Chanukah is traditionally associated; if we can eat a mixture of chopped apples, nuts, cinnamon and wine to remind us of the mortar that our forefathers used to make bricks in Egypt, we can eat the following, which I found in the Rosh Hashanah lunch section of the 1955 recension of A Treasure For My Daughter, to commemorate the Maccabees' conquest of the Zombies.

BRAIN LATKES

Scald one pair brains.
Remove outer skin.
Mash with wooden spoon.
Add 1 egg, 1 tsp. grated onion, salt and pepper to taste.
Add enough matza meal to hold mixture together.
Heat frying pan and add 2 tbsp. chicken fat.
Drop mixture, by spoonful, into hot fat.
Fry until golden brown on both sides.

I'll be trying the recipe out real soon, just as soon as this goyisher kop finds a pair of kosher brains.

If I only had a latke is a post from: Michael Wex.com

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A new book for 2013…

2012-02-19T22:47:14Z

We didn't want to tell you about this until we got the cheque.

Wearing his trusty lab coat and with Farfl the Wonderdog by his side Dr. Wex embarks on research

Wex is writing a book about Jewish food for Scribner. He's hoping that Mrs. Wex will cook him some of the extraordinary things he is discovering during his research. Mrs. Wex is a little alarmed.

You can follow Wex's research and findings in Daybooks of Dyspepsia - a special section of the website devoted to the culinary delights stumbled upon while writing his new book.

Enjoy!

A new book for 2013… is a post from: Michael Wex.com

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Adrienne Cooper’s memorial

2012-01-04T02:09:26Z

Picture by Marilla Wex.

Here's a link to Jon Kalish's audio report on the memorial service for Adrienne Cooper that was held on January 1st in New York.

It's a nice combination of excerpts from the official program of song and eulogy with less formal interviews with a few of the people in attendance who knew Adrienne.

I was honoured to be asked to contribute to Adrienne's memorial and an excerpt of my tribute is included in this recording.

Here's a link to my eulogy in full which is published on the Jewish Women's Archive.

Adrienne Cooper’s memorial is a post from: Michael Wex.com

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