#kugel discourse

[edenfenixblogs]

Look what Google just recommended to me!!!!

I already own (and love) Shabbat and Portico.

But I am OBSESSED with the rest and must acquire them immediately.

Top of my list is Love Japan because LOOK AT THIS BEAUITFUL BOWL OF MATZO BALL RAMEN!!!!!

We hear a lot about Jewish people in Europe and MENA, but we do not hear a lot about Jewish culture as it blends with East Asian cultures, and that’s a shame. Not just because it erases the centuries of Jewish populations there, but also because there are plenty of people of mixed decent. People who may not have come directly from Jewish communities in East Asia, but people who have a Japanese Father and a Jewish Mother, for example. Or people in intercultural marriages. These are all real and valuable members of the Jewish community, and we should be celebrating them more. This cookbook focuses on Jewish Japanese American cuisine and I am delighted to learn more as soon as possible. The people who wrote this book run the restaurant Shalom Japan, which is the most adorable name I’ve ever heard. Everything about this book excites and delights me.

And of course, after that, I’m most interested in “Kugels and Collards” (as if you had any doubts about that after the #kugel discourse, if you were following me then).

This is actually written in conjunction with an organization of the same name devoted to preserving the food and culture of Jews in South Carolina!

I’m especially excited to read this one, because I have recently acquired the book Kosher Soul by the fantastic, inimitable Michael J. Twitty, which famously explores faith and food in African American Jewish culture. I’m excited to see how Jewish soul food and traditions in South Carolina specifically compare and contrast with Twitty’s writings.

I’m also excited for all the other books on this list!

A while ago, someone inboxed me privately to ask what I recommended for people to read in order to learn more about Jewish culture. I wrote out a long list of historical resources attempting to cover all the intricate details and historic pressure points that molded Jewish culture into what it is today. After a while I wrote back a second message that was much shorter. I said:

Actually, no. Scratch everything I just said. Read that other stuff if you want to know Jewish history.

But if you want to know Jewish culture? Cookbooks.

Read every Jewish cookbook you can find.

Even if you don’t cook, Jewish cookbooks contain our culture in a tangible form. They often explain not only the physical processes by which we make our meals, but also the culture and conditions that give rise to them. The food is often linked to specific times and places and events in diaspora. Or they explain the biblical root or the meaning behind the holidays associated with a given food.

I cannot speak for all Jews. No one can. But in my personal observation and experience—outside of actual religious tradition—food has often been the primary means of passing Jewish culture and history from generation to generation.

It is a way to commune with our ancestors. I made a recipe for chicken soup or stuffed cabbage and I know that my great grandmother and her own mother in their little Hungarian shtetl. I’ll never know the relatives of theirs who died in the Holocaust and I’ll never meet the cousins I should have had if they were allowed to live. But I can make the same food and know that their mother also made it for them. I have dishes I make that connect me to my lost ancestors in France and Mongolia and Russia and Latvia and Lithuania and, yes, Israel—where my relatives have lived continuously since the Roman occupation even after the expulsions. (They were Levites and Cohens and caretakers of synagogues and tradition and we have a pretty detailed family tree of their presence going back quite a long time. No idea how they managed to stay/hide for so long. That info is lost to history.)

I think there’s a strong tendency—aided by modern recipe bloggers—to view anything besides the actual recipe and procedures as fluff. There is an urge for many people to press “jump to recipe” and just start cooking. And I get that. We are all busy and when we want to make dinner we just want to make dinner.

But if your goal isn’t just to make dinner. If your goal is to actually develop an understanding of and empathy for Jewish people and our culture, then that’s my advice:

Read cookbooks.

[riveracheron]

american-ashkenazi jewish food poll!

i had said in the tags of one of my other posts that a good way to break jewish stereotypes and antisemitism away from the current. political situation is to uplift diaspora jewish culture and so!! starting off with an american-ashkenazi food poll! i am american-ashkenazi and this is the food i ate growing up. some ashkenazi food is gross so this is the only good one (fwiw i dont support the israeli govt and if i see any support on my blog thats a block <3) (also if i see discourse in the comments ur speaking privileges are revoked.)

[payaliyaaaaaa]

fruit in kugel yes or no (jumblr kugel discourse my beloved)

um I'm gonna go no

actively nope nopity noping away from the fruit in kugel (the mix of flavours does not comprehend in my head)

is this a normal thing?? do people generally put fruits in kugel?? am I missing out on something??

[fictionkinfessionsarchived]

Happy Rosh Hashanah everyone! Thank you to Mod Party Cat for acknowledging the holiday. I hope all fictionkin have a sweet and beautiful New Year's, full of love and surrounded by people who love you. This goes double for you, Tony Stark. No conflict allowed on the High Holy Days. Civil War/Team Tony vs. Team Cap is out, kugel vs. brisket discourse is in. - Steve Rogers

[theremharths]

@sootonthecarpet replied to your post: Discourse:

the other month i made a kugel with cottage cheese instead of ricotta (not my fault, was given cottage cheese to make it with and didn’t have enough milk to make my own ricotta which genuinely would have been preferable) and it was terrible terrible terrible

Cottage cheese just doesn’t belong in sweet dishes

[aparrotandaqrow]

Kugel: this is an insane take. You haven't had my step-bubbe's kugel.

Sim shalom: you must use a different melody than either the shabbat melody or the high holidays melody my shul uses (both slap super hard and neither have part splitting) and I am desperately curious what it is.

Purim: I'm not engaging with Purim discourse again. Personally I prefer Yom Kippur to Purim.

Matzoh: yeah but not the whole wheat crap.

Matzoh ball soup: the most correct thing you've said.

Matzoh brei: there is Torah everywhere you look but not in this take

Recent Jewish foods: did you forget fish and chips???

Enough posts arguing with antisemites, we need to return to our roots and argue with each other. Here are some opinions I have, prove me wrong

Sweet kugel is gross and a food crime

Sim shalom is the best blessing/prayer like tune wise - goes fucking hard at shul when everyone does like the split lyric thing and we met up at the end

Purim is the best holiday

Matzoh fucking slaps

Matzoh ball soup is a year round dish, shouldn't only be eaten on pesach

Matzoh brei should not have eggs and should be cooked in a shit ton of butter

The reuben sandwich is the best recent food invented by a jew

[lodessa]

Non-Fandom Post: Passover 2017

So I hosted my 7th consecutive Seder for our mishmash group of family and friends Jews and Goyim.   It went pretty well, despite the “Egypt Discourse” being brought up again and the fact that I totally failed at my mission to put together a new Haggadah since everyone (myself included) feels dissatisfied with both of the published ones I own.  

I suppose this would be the place to talk about why this year the Passover narrative feels a little more immediate and dire, with anti-semitism more virulently surfacing along with all the other persecution and bigotry that’s suddenly something people are willing to act on openly.  There’s a lot to say, but right now I (like so many of us) want to find comfort instead, so I’m going to talk about food. More specifically, this year’s Seder menu.

Multiple things made me veer away from our usual Ashkenazi fare this year: 

1) My first decision this year was that I was going to keep it simple and cut down on the number of dishes I set out to prepare.  This meant not making brisket as some of the members of our group don’t eat red meat so I was going to be making chicken either way. 

2)I had a concept of doing a Moroccan type chicken with fruit... which wasn’t going to go with the onion potato kugel I usually make.

3) While trying to figure out how to make Butterscotch Pudding okay for Passover, I discovered that Sephardic Jews have a much more forgiving interpretation on that front and allow corn since it wasn’t on the official list originally.

I also ended up eschewing a five year tradition of doing a reinterpreted Seder plate with different types of hummus to represent the traditional items (largely because my brother usually takes the lead on that and he barely made it to attend the Seder this year due to grad school busyness). 

Anyway, my main problem was that everything that sounded good with the chicken dish I wanted to make was definitely not for Passover (rice, couscous, etc)... Until I remembered cauliflower rice and then suddenly I felt like a genius and the whole meal came together.

So here’s this years (Sephardic inspired but not accurate and largely inadvertently Paleo) Seder Menu:

Charoset Tuffles (made with dried fruit and nuts and rolled in cinnamon sugar)

Simplified Matzoh Ball Soup (seriously I cut up onions, celery and carrots, sauted the onion in olive oil, added: carrots, celery, pre-made chicken stock, and some fresh parsley and dropped in the matzoh balls... the end)

Fennel Salad (shaved fennel and romaine with pine nuts, goat cheese, and blood orange and dressed with lemon olive oil and raspberry white balsamic vinegar plus some salt and pepper)

 Moroccan Chicken with Dried Fruit and Almonds (Instead of using a whole chicken I used half boneless skinless breasts and half boneless skinless thighs. For the fruit I used 1 cup of dried apricots, 1/2 cup of golden raisins, and 1/4 each of dried tart cherries and prunes.)

Cauliflower Rice Pilaf (food process the cauliflower, saute onions in ghee, plump golden raisins in half a cup of chicken broth with turmeric, saffron, and garlic paste, cook the cauliflower and broth mixture with the onions and then add slivered almonds and green peas at the end)

Butterscotch Pudding (in order to make this Ashkenazi passover okay you substitute potato starch for the corn starch)

(and... of course) So Much Wine!

Next year in a less terrifying regime!

[rotzaprachim]

like we as Ashkenazi Jews need to clamp down on this shit so much harder. I keep seeing stuff about fighting ashkenormativity or “I recognize my privilege as a white Ashkenazi Jew” and then people going for the claim of “I identify solely as European and that’s why I’m one of the good ones,” “I speak Yiddish not Hebrew!!! Yiddish is better and purer than Hebrew!” “My family never ate hummus!!! We don’t do that sketchy Israeli stuff just kugel” and you need to lock that shit down fast like

a) doesn’t help with preserving Ashkenazi culture, a culture which, imho, was always fusionally European and Levantine. If you don’t like you at your modern Hebrew they won’t like you at your Yiddish either. Promise

b) is actively dangerous to mizrachim

c) imho requires some self reflection about true solidarity with other groups especially from American/canadian/european groups. Do you feel uncomfortable identifying as in any way related to or connected to the Middle East in these countries? Do you think these countries will accept your culture and your people if you do *not* identify as *solely European?* how does this game affect mizrachi and Sephardi Jews? How does it help modern middle eastern refugees from Syria, Palestine, Kurdistan, Egypt etc in an era of Europeans and westerners melting down about the foreign invasion?

the issue is not the problem with claiming that Israeli national actions are totally removed from the cultural scene of food/culture/art. They are not. And this is true of every country ever - food, language, culture, these are things that governments use to make sense of themselves, to project an image of themselves to the world and try to create unilateral ties. the issue is the idea that it is inherently bad, inherently sketchy and squirmy and thievey and even downright evil, for Jews to be middle eastern and/or “Arab” in culture, language, tradition. This is the total obliteration of mizrachi identity and existence from discourse and from the spaces being built as activists, and we get nowhere if we just buy into it because it’s an easier and more explicable narrative that fits more easily to simplistic American notions “I only read the first paragraph” notions of politics. It helps no one.

It’s kind of wild how a general set of internet stances at the moment combines an idea of ashkenormativity which is about how all the white Ashkenazim are oppressing the mizrachim of color with another idea that Yiddish was the real and true language of all Jews ever, unlike that evil modern Hebrew, and also it’s inherently appropriative for Jews to say yallah and sababa

[sayitwithsarcophilus]

There are many differences of opinion in the world that aren’t “genocide y/n?” or pineapple on pizza discourse.  

Questions like “what is the nature of God and how do we know?” or “is it okay to ship fictional African royalty with fictional white westerners of compatible ages and character alignments?” or “is it problematic for gentiles to make their own lokshen kugel for their personal consumption?  What about matzo ball soup?  What about hamantaschen?” may feel like questions of grave moral import with clear, objective right and wrong answers.  But letting the people who are Wrong about these issues continue being Wrong without calling them out or publicly distancing yourself is not going to threaten anyone’s life, liberty, personal safety, ability to earn a living, or access to community support structures.  

An opinion can be bad, in the sense that it violates a moral, political, or philosophical principle that’s important to you, without being harmful, in the sense of whether or not the person holding the opinion would do any direct, specific harm to others if they decided to act on it.

[maidservant-hecubus]

Oh are we dragging me out of the tags for this?

Do you also find no joy in cinnamon rasin bread? Toasted to perfection with a little butter or cream cheese?

Or maybe even a cinnamon rasin bagel? Is it really a bagel? No*. But it's is still very yummy.

If you like these then why not extend that joy to the humble kugel?

Unless you hate joy 🤔

Just a random thing I love about the Jewish community:

Jews talking to antisemites trying to twist our culture into something evil in order to justify eliminating us en masse: I understand your concern but that’s actually a harmful thing to say. Can I interest you in hundreds of sources I took the liberty of citing and fact checking and providing links for and thousands of years of history to back up my statement?

Jews talking to other Jews about opinions on Jewish food: I WILL BURN THIS ENTIRE HOUSE TO THE GROUND IF YOU DO NOT ADMIT THE INCONTROVERTIBLE TRUTH AND WISDOM IN MY STANCE ON KUGEL.

Exhibit A: A Perfect Food. Look at Her. She’s Beautiful!

Exhibit B: You absolute monster. What have you DONE TO HER?!

Is that cinnamon? And raisins??? Where is the crust???? This is somehow a disaster, a tragedy, and a crime all at once.

Unacceptable.

(งಠ_ಠ)ง

[edenfenixblogs]

WHAT CRUST! THOSE ARE JUST DRIED OUT NOODLES. CORN FLAKES OR IM BURNING DOWN THIS HOUSE.

Just a random thing I love about the Jewish community:

Jews talking to antisemites trying to twist our culture into something evil in order to justify eliminating us en masse: I understand your concern but that’s actually a harmful thing to say. Can I interest you in hundreds of sources I took the liberty of citing and fact checking and providing links for and thousands of years of history to back up my statement?

Jews talking to other Jews about opinions on Jewish food: I WILL BURN THIS ENTIRE HOUSE TO THE GROUND IF YOU DO NOT ADMIT THE INCONTROVERTIBLE TRUTH AND WISDOM IN MY STANCE ON KUGEL.

Exhibit A: A Perfect Food. Look at Her. She’s Beautiful!

Exhibit B: You absolute monster. What have you DONE TO HER?!

Is that cinnamon? And raisins??? Where is the crust???? This is somehow a disaster, a tragedy, and a crime all at once.

Unacceptable.

(งಠ_ಠ)ง

[edenfenixblogs]

Don’t hate us cuz you ain’t us.

1700s: invented

1896: perfected.

Fucking caramel??? And pepper???????

This house is fucking ash already.

Just a random thing I love about the Jewish community:

Jews talking to antisemites trying to twist our culture into something evil in order to justify eliminating us en masse: I understand your concern but that’s actually a harmful thing to say. Can I interest you in hundreds of sources I took the liberty of citing and fact checking and providing links for and thousands of years of history to back up my statement?

Jews talking to other Jews about opinions on Jewish food: I WILL BURN THIS ENTIRE HOUSE TO THE GROUND IF YOU DO NOT ADMIT THE INCONTROVERTIBLE TRUTH AND WISDOM IN MY STANCE ON KUGEL.

Exhibit A: A Perfect Food. Look at Her. She’s Beautiful!

Exhibit B: You absolute monster. What have you DONE TO HER?!

Is that cinnamon? And raisins??? Where is the crust???? This is somehow a disaster, a tragedy, and a crime all at once.

Unacceptable.

(งಠ_ಠ)ง

[maidservant-hecubus]

The planet of delicious fruit laden kugel. Population: me and all others with good taste and right thinking.

Just a random thing I love about the Jewish community:

Jews talking to antisemites trying to twist our culture into something evil in order to justify eliminating us en masse: I understand your concern but that’s actually a harmful thing to say. Can I interest you in hundreds of sources I took the liberty of citing and fact checking and providing links for and thousands of years of history to back up my statement?

Jews talking to other Jews about opinions on Jewish food: I WILL BURN THIS ENTIRE HOUSE TO THE GROUND IF YOU DO NOT ADMIT THE INCONTROVERTIBLE TRUTH AND WISDOM IN MY STANCE ON KUGEL.

Exhibit A: A Perfect Food. Look at Her. She’s Beautiful!

Exhibit B: You absolute monster. What have you DONE TO HER?!

Is that cinnamon? And raisins??? Where is the crust???? This is somehow a disaster, a tragedy, and a crime all at once.

Unacceptable.

(งಠ_ಠ)ง

[edenfenixblogs]

Hey. Hey, friend. Come closer. I gotta tell you something.

This is just an incorrect statement about raisins in general and I’m genuinely concerned that you would characterize them as delicious.

Just a random thing I love about the Jewish community:

Jews talking to antisemites trying to twist our culture into something evil in order to justify eliminating us en masse: I understand your concern but that’s actually a harmful thing to say. Can I interest you in hundreds of sources I took the liberty of citing and fact checking and providing links for and thousands of years of history to back up my statement?

Jews talking to other Jews about opinions on Jewish food: I WILL BURN THIS ENTIRE HOUSE TO THE GROUND IF YOU DO NOT ADMIT THE INCONTROVERTIBLE TRUTH AND WISDOM IN MY STANCE ON KUGEL.

Exhibit A: A Perfect Food. Look at Her. She’s Beautiful!

Exhibit B: You absolute monster. What have you DONE TO HER?!

Is that cinnamon? And raisins??? Where is the crust???? This is somehow a disaster, a tragedy, and a crime all at once.

Unacceptable.

(งಠ_ಠ)ง