The Atkins Schmaltz Diet

[Received from a correspondent.]

The Atkins Schmaltz Diet: If you get this and you are not Jewish - It is difficult to explain.

This actually goes back 2 generations - or 3 if you are under 50! cholesterol.
The Atkins Schmaltz Diet.

There are some variations in ingredients because of the various types of Jewish taste. (Polack, Litvack and Gallicianer). Just as we Jews have six seasons of the year (winter, spring, summer, fall, the slack season, and the busy season), we all focus on a main ingredient which, unfortunately and undeservedly, has disappeared from our diet. I'm talking, of course, about SCHMALTZ (chicken fat).SCHMALTZ has, for centuries, been the prime ingredient in almost every Jewish dish, and I feel it's time to revive it to its rightful place in our homes. (I have plans to distribute it in a green glass Gucci bottle with a label clearly saying: "low fat, no cholesterol, Newman's Choice, extra virgin SCHMALTZ." (It can't miss!)

Then there are (grebenes -- pieces of chicken skin, deep fried in SCHMALTZ, onions and salt until crispy brown (Jewish bacon). This makes a great appetizer for the next cardiologist's convention.

There's also a nice chicken fricassee (stew) using the heart, gorgle (neck), pupick (a great delicacy, given to the favorite child, usually me), a fligle (wing) or two, some ayelech (little premature eggs) and other various chicken innards, in a broth of SCHMALTZ, water, paprika, etc.

We also have knishes (filled dough) and the eternal question, "Will that be liver, beef or potatoes, or all three?"

Other time-tested favorites are kishkeh, and its poor cousin, helzel (chicken or goose neck). Kishkeh is the gut of the cow, bought by the foot at the Kosher butcher. It is turned inside out, scalded and scraped. One end is sewn up and a mixture of flour, SCHMALTZ, onions, eggs, salt, pepper, etc., is spooned into the open end and squished down until it is full. The other end is sewn and the whole thing is boiled. Yummy!

My personal all-time favorite is watching my Zaida (grandpa) munch on boiled chicken feet.

For our next course we always had chicken soup with pieces of yellow-white, rubbery chicken skin floating in a greasy sea of lokshen (noodles), farfel (broken bits of matzah), tzibbeles (onions), mondlin (soup nuts), kneidlach(dumplings), kasha, (groats) kliskelech and marech (marrow bones)

The main course, as I recall, was either boiled chicken, flanken, kackletten (hockfleish--chopped meat), and sometimes rib steaks, which were served either well done, burned or cremated.

Occasionally we had barbecued liver done to a burned and hardened perfection in our own coal furnace.Since we couldn't have milk with our meat meals, beverages consisted of cheap soda (Kik, Dominion Dry, seltzer in the spritz bottles).

Growing up Jewish:

If you are Jewish, and grew up in city with a large Jewish population, or are gentile with Jewish friends or associates, the following will invoke heartfelt memories, so read on.........

The Yiddish word for Today is PULKES (PUHL-kees) Translation: THIGHS. Please note: this word has been traced back to the language of one of the original Tribes of Israel, the Cellulites.

The only good advice that your Jewish mother gave you was:"Go! You might meet somebody!"

You grew up thinking it was normal for someone to shout "Are you okay?" through the bathroom door when you were in there longer than 3 minutes.

Your family dog responded to commands in Yiddish.

Every Saturday morning your father went to the neighborhood deli (called an "appetitizing store") for whitefish salad, whitefish "chubs"), lox (nova if you were rich!), herring, corned beef, roast beef, cole slaw, potato salad, a 1/2-dozen huge barrel pickles which you reached into the brine for, a dozen assorted bagels, cream cheese and rye bread (sliced while he waited). All of which would be strictly off-limits until Sunday morning.

Every Sunday afternoon was spent visiting your grandparents and/or other relatives.

You experienced the phenomenon of 50 people fitting into a 10-foot-wide dining room hitting each other with plastic plates trying to get to a deli tray.

You had at least one female relative who penciled on eyebrows which were always asymmetrical.

You thought pasta was stuff used exclusively for Kugel and kasha with bowties.

You were as tall as your grandmother by the age of seven.

You were as tall as your grandfather by age seven and a half.

You never knew anyone whose last name didn't end in one of 5 standard suffixes (berg, baum , man, stein and witz).

You were surprised to discover that wine doesn't always taste like cranberry sauce.

You can look at gefilte fish and not turn green.

When your mother smacked you really hard, she continued to make you feel bad for hurting her hand.

You can understand Yiddish but you can't speak it.

You know how to pronounce numerous Yiddish words and use them correctly in context, yet you don't know exactly what they mean. Kaynahurra.

You're still angry at your parents for not speaking both Yiddish and English to you when you were a baby.

You have at least one ancestor who is somehow related to your spouse's ancestor.

Your grandparents' newly washed linoleum floor was covered with the NY Times, which your grandparents couldn't read.

You thought speaking loud was normal.

You considered your Bar or Bat Mitzvah a "Get Out of Hebrew School Free" card.

You think eating half a jar of dill pickles is a wholesome snack.

You're compelled to mention your grandmother's "steel cannonballs" upon seeing fluffy matzo balls served at restaurants.

You buy 3 shopping bags worth of hot bagels on every trip to NYC and ship them home via FedEx. (Or, if you live near NYC or Philadelphia or another Jewish city hub, you drive 3 hours just to buy a dozen "real"
bagels.)

Your mother or grandmother took personal pride when a Jew was noted for some accomplishment (showbiz, medicine, politics, etc.) and was ashamed and embarrassed when a Jew was accused of a crime .. as if they were relatives.

You thought only non-Jews went to sleep away colleges. Jews went to city schools ... unless they had scholarships or made an Ivy League school.
And finally, you knew that Sunday night and the night after any Jewish holiday was designated for Chinese food.

Zei gezunt!!

Secret Hebrew Culture

THINGS I DIDN'T LEARN IN HEBREW SCHOOL

1. The High Holidays have absolutely nothing to do with marijuana.
2. Where there's smoke, there may be salmon.
3. No meal is complete without leftovers.
4. According to Jewish dietary law, pork and shellfish may be eaten only in Chinese restaurants.
5. A schmata is a dress that your husband's ex is wearing.
6. You need ten men for a minion, but only four in polyester pants and white shoes for pinochle.
7. One mitzvah can change the world; two will just make you tired.
8. After the destruction of the Second Temple, God created Nordstroms.
9. Anything worth saying is worth repeating a thousand times.
10. Never take a front row seat at a Bris.
11. Next year in Jerusalem. The year after that, how about a nice cruise?
12. Never leave a restaurant empty handed.
13. Spring ahead; fall back - winters in Boca.
14. WASP's leave and never say good-bye; Jews say good-bye and never leave.
15. Always whisper the names of diseases.
16. If it tastes good, it's probably not kosher.
17. The important Jewish holidays are the ones on which alternate side of the street parking is suspended.
18. Without Jewish mothers, who would need therapy?
19. If you have to ask the price, you can't afford it. But if you can afford it, make sure to tell everybody what you paid.
20. Laugh now, but one day you'll be driving a Lexus and eating dinner at 4:00 PM in Florida.

SIGNS ON SYNAGOGUE BULLETIN BOARDS
1. Under same management for over 5763 years.
2. Don't give up. Moses was once a basket case.
3. What part of "Thou shalt not" don't you understand?
4. Shul committees should be made up of three members, two of whom should be absent at every meeting.
5. Sign over the urinal in a bathroom at Hebrew University: "The future of the Jewish people is in your hands."

MORE JEWISH STUFF
1. My mother is a typical Jewish mother. Once she was on jury duty. They sent her home. She insisted SHE was guilty.
2. Any time a person goes into a delicatessen and orders pastrami on white bread, somewhere a Jew dies.
3. It was meal time during a flight on El Al. "Would you like dinner?" the flight attendant asked Moshe, seated in front. "What are my choices?" Moshe asked. "Yes or no," she replied.
4. An elderly Jewish man is knocked down by a car and is brought to the local hospital. A pretty nurse tucks him into bed and says, "Mr. Gevarter, are you comfortable?" Gevarter replies, "I make aliving. ..."
5. A rabbi was opening his mail one morning. Taking a single sheet of paper from an envelope he found written on it only one word: "shmuck." At the next Friday night service, the Rabbi announced, "I have known many people who have written letters and forgot to sign their names, but this week I received a letter from someone who signed his name ... and forgot to write a letter.
6. Three Jewish women get together for lunch. As they are being seated in the restaurant, one takes a deep breath and gives a long, slow "oy." The second takes a deep breath as well and lets out a long, slow "oy" The third takes a deep breath and says impatiently, "Girls, I thought we agreed that we weren't going to talk about our children."
7. And one final favorite: A waiter comes over to a table full of Jewish women and asks, "Is anything alright?!"

History of Delicatessens

HISTORY of DELI's

It is worth noting the shuttering of two kosher New York landmarks: 2nd Avenue Deli, a 50-year-old institution in the East Village whose neon sign was taken down last January; and the dairy restaurant Ratner's, open from 1905 to 2002, which proudly served cheese blintzes to Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Robert Kennedy. Mobsters Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky held court in the back, and Ratner's served as the watering hole for celebrities such as Al Jolson, Walter Matthau and Groucho Marx. What drew in the mostly lunch crowd to its Delancey Street location were the mouthwatering onion rolls, vegetarian chopped liver and vegetable cutlets. Ratner's traditional soups and blintzes (as well as deep-dish pizza) live on in the supermarket freezer case.

There is history in the kosher-style New York triumvirate of the Carnegie Delicatessen & Restaurant, Stage Deli and Lindy's, all on Seventh Avenue. At Carnegie, which opened in 1937, there are super-size sandwiches that draw such a crowd you can wait on line for an hour to get a seat. Their cheesecake, now in stores across the United States, is legend (but so are Lindy's and Junior's in Brooklyn). At Lindy's, which opened in 1921, you can reminisce about Damon Runyon writing Guys and Dolls in his private booth; at Stage Deli (also opened in 1937) you can see where The Beatles sat the night they first performed on The Ed Sullivan Show. And, of course, Walter Winchell wrote his columns while sitting in each of these delis.

To get to Junior's you have to cross the bridge to Brooklyn to the store that was founded by Harry Rosen and is today being tended by the family's third generation.

Some of the oldest establishments in downtown Chicago, San Francisco and Detroit closed their doors when the Jewish population moved to the suburbs. But even as some places closed retiring waiters and waitresses who worked for 30, 40 or 50 years, new ones open.

In California, the most recent is D.Z. Akin's Delicatessen, which serves kosher-style fare to San Diego's burgeoning Jewish community. Opened in 1985, this deli and restaurant with Formica booths and a noisy, busy atmosphere has great chopped liver.

Another relative newcomer is Zingerman's Delicatessen in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which opened in the mid-1980's; their breads and meats are renowned not just in the Midwest but throughout the United States. For a college town, the kosher-style Zingerman's run by Ari Weinzweig and Paul Saginaw stands out as the place for local University of Michigan students to get their pastrami fix.

Then there are the other two guys Jay Brown and Mark Jay Katzenberg who started out with a small deli in Palm Beach, Florida, in 1981, and fittingly name their eatery TooJay's Original Gourmet Deli. Today this versatile restaurant has grown and is dispensing delicious kosher-style comfort food (deli, brisket, pot roast, liver and onions and matzo ball soup) in 23 outlets throughout the state.

One cannot speak of Jewish gastronomy without mentioning the products that were, and still are, a part of the lure and lore. There would be no egg cream without Herman Fox's U-bet Chocolate Flavor Syrup. When Louis Auster created the egg cream at his candy shop in Brooklyn in 1890, the name was his witty way of describing the richness of his drink, which has neither eggs nor cream, at a time when few could afford the luxury of either. So popular was this cocktail of chocolate syrup, seltzer and milk in the 1920's that syrup wars broke out among competing brands that wanted to be associated with the sweet drink.

Then there is Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray soda. Originally called Celery Tonic, it is made with celery seeds, sugar and seltzer. It was developed in 1869 by a physician and used to treat immigrant children's stomach upsets (the word tonic was dropped when the government objected to the medicinal implications). An acquired taste, some people swear it helps digest fat-laden salami sandwiches.

We owe the existence of Gold's horseradish to Tillie Gold, who in 1930 saved the grinder her cousin was using to grind horseradish root after he got hauled off to jail during an altercation. Tillie and her husband took up the enterprise of mixing the root with vinegar (the beets were added later) now a staple alongside gefilte fish.

Whether it is a new dill, half sour or full sour, a deli meal wouldn't be complete without the pickle. The notion of pickling for preservation began around 4000 B.C.E. but it wasn't until 2030 B.C.E. that the practice of pickling cucumbers came about. Julius Caesar and Napoleon both fed pickles to their armies because it was believed to provide physical and spiritual strength. It is also related that Cleopatra ate a great amount of pickles to preserve her beauty.

At one time, the Lower East Side had the largest concentration of pickle stores in the United States. But now, commercial companies such as Heinz and Vlasic have learned how to speed up the pickling process though no self-respecting deli will serve them. Barrel-cured pickles can still be found on the streets of the Lower East Side at Guss' Pickles (800-620-GUSS; www.gusspickle.com ) or from The Pickle Guys (888-4- PICKLE;www.nycpickleguys.com ).

Finally, let's not forget the sweet sold off the block: halvah. Its origins may be Middle Eastern, but thanks to Joyva, owner Nathan Radutzky's recipe, it became a best seller in the United States.

The dishes and environment in today's deli-restaurant still satisfy the cravings for Jewish ethnic cuisine. Once a sanctuary for lonely immigrants, these establishments remain a destination where families can take their children to enjoy good food and the comfort of community.



Have a Grrrrrrrreat Day