Hors d'oeuvre
by Reb Chef Lemeil
As the Master Chef and freelance Rabbi at Jeffu's prestigious Chez Witz restaurant, it has been my pleasure to prepare this series of strictly kosher style dishes for your gastronominal and comedietary pleasure. I hope that these recipe cut-ups keep you in and out of stitches as you sautee yourself along the line dividing kosher and treyf, the line of strictly kosher style.
The demarcation line is not so clear, hazily slapsticked out by language, and easily broken in turn by language trickery; it is a border whose guards are often schlemeils, spilling their own and others' soup from one side to the other, and allowing members of both camps to slip past unnoticed or with purim-esque accompaniment.
Oy, Bon Appetit!
It is clear that keeping kosher has been a way of distinguishing Jewish throughout the ages making the maxim "we are what we eat" especially relevant for Jews. But there is a long-standing tradition of Jewish humor which takes the dietary laws (whether mixing up milk and meat or the prohibition against pork and shellfish) as its point of departure. These jokes and witticisms poke fun at how difficult it is to maintain the strictures of the stringent dietary laws which are deemed to be too repressive, restrictive, and even unbearable. Strictly Kosher Style must be understood as mining this transgressive site of Jewish humor in order to interrogate and play with the border of the kosher and its other, the treyf.
From Harpo and Groucho to Weegee and Woody, Jewish humor as an American pop cultural discourse has been the most formative element in shaping Warmouth's aesthetic and his identity. Thus, Warmouth raises the question of "distinguishing Jewish" in his own person as a non-Jew who has absorbed the Jewish comedic sensibility to the point where he is constructed Jewish. We can also say that it is this comic dimension which has become a means by which many American Jews distinguish themselves as Jewish (Jewish humor as a mode of Jewish identity). However, this mode of "identification" is quite complex (and even convoluted) when we consider that Jewish humor is often a means of self-disparagement and self-deprecation (but in jest, of course...). Thus, Jeff Warmouth's self-identification with this comic mode of discourse as "distinguishably Jewish" generates a Jewish subject position that is self-critical and transgressive of the Jewish in its essence.
In this cookbook, Warmouth puts on his chef's hat as his skull cap and he demonstrates that he is well versed in the ancient arts of pilpul (peppering), and of mixing and cutting things up. This project is in a sense an extension of other explorations of ethnic cuisines such as his Kung-fu Kitchen. Strictly Kosher Style provides us with a number of imaginative and highly unorthodox recipes like Matzoh Men, Bagel Belly, and Knife Drop Soup. Some of the recipes like the Levi-tating Aero-Cheese Burger draw upon the impossibilities of conceptual and Fluxus humor. In reading Reb Chef Lemeil's recipes, it is as if someone had allowed George Maciunas and Yoko Ono to become the guest editors of an issue of Kashrus Magazine.
Other recipes are specific homages or variations upon Warmouth's favorite Jewish jokes. Indeed, Soup with Rabbi's Seal of Approval is a direct quotation of the classic joke called "Butter" in Immanuel Olswanger's Royte Pomerantsen where the Yiddish jokesters get a kick out of a Rabbinical judgement of a "strictly kosher style" stew that would allow dirt, lice, and scabs (but not butter). This joke recipe performs an elegant twist or a drey (comic inversion) when it makes the "strictly kosher" version of the stew a lot less appetizing and appealing than its "kosher style" buttered up counterpart. With its recipes spiced with Jewish humor, Jeff Warmouth's Strictly Kosher Style offers the highest quality food for thought.
|
