Christians have Christmas Carols; Here’s a Hannukah Sadie

How the Intersection of Professorial Promenade and Bourgeois Boulevard Destroyed Holiday Food

By

David Gottfried

A song about Christmas is termed a Christmas Carol. Since songs about Christmas are graced with the female name Carol, I have decided to grace this song (If I knew how to read and write music, this might be a song.) about Hannukah with the good female, Jewish name Sadie.

Food from Hannukahs Past:

I was a proletarian pipsqueak from Brooklyn whose staff of life was Kasha Varnishkas and Cream Soda. I only knew the food one ate at a ball game; on a crowded subway where a neighboring fat woman’s fart might provide an interesting, if unkosher lactic counterpoint to one’s pastrami sandwich; at Coney Island, where the bleakness of the boardwalk in November (It was very bleak by the early 1970’s) somehow made the Sweetness of an Apple Strudel from Shotzkin’s Knishes so much brighter.

The food may have been served by a waitress with a sneer, it may have been eaten in a rush, and half the contents of a sandwich may have fallen onto the subway tracks below as you were jostled by the crowd. But it was food that was not afraid of salt and pepper and above all GARLIC. It was food that may have been burnt, which bore browned and frayed edges like the perimeter of a photo of eastern European immigrants; it was food that may have given you gastritis, gout or diabetes; and it was food that may have gotten up and danced a hora in your stomach, inducing all manner of acute abdominal conniptions, but it was food that made you want to dance too. It was Jewish food and it was Italian food and it was color and sweetness and spice. It was the solidity and the “good head on his shoulders” sensibility of a piece of square potato kugel giving you confidence and security in times of uncertainty. It was the succulent, roundness of a Motherly Matza ball letting you be three again and washing away your tears. It was the eye-opening, spicy saltiness of lox and whitefish that seemed to crash across your tongue like fresh ocean waves, enlivening your intellect and giving you a Jewish “noggin” (brain).

Food from the Somnolescent Pseudo Scholars of Hannukah Present:

Academic windbags who specialize in gastronomy have merged the prissiness of Professorial Promenade with Bourgeois Boulevard. With mincing affectations, they adulate and lionize the culinary customs and rituals of chic sheisters who glare at you from the cover page of “New York” Magazine. It’s Sort of like Gore Vidal telling us that Steve Rubell, all dolled-up, exudes the supposed saintliness of Lee Radziwill and Jackie Kennedy.

They taught us that a meal was terrible if it was not prepared with Pots and Pans purchased from Bloomingdales for 500 dollars or if the recipe had not been written in iambic pentameter.

Food began to taste like a television set glaring at me with images from “Judge Judy” when a bitch on the “Food Network,” who professed to know all about Italian food, said that good pasta was always made on a marble surface. She was the sort of cow who always used shallots when onions packed more punch and whose spaghetti sauces were always inferior to the sauce I learned how to cook while watching “The Godfather.”

I certainly knew that food had been yuppified and distilled into its essence of pure yuckiness when the lords and ladies of the pretentious and petty got their panties into a snag over a common condiment, black pepper.

When I was young, black pepper came in very small cases, looked like miniature packs of cigarettes and had all the haute appeal of Jackie Gleason playing the part of Ralph Cramden on the “Honeymooners,” (A situation comedy about working-class people in Bensonhurst, in Brooklyn, New York) In its spunkiness and dark, satanic flavor, like the stuff in William Blake’s poem about “dark, satanic mills,” it came on like a tough guy, belting you with soot from the last coal furnace in New York City.

But then rich neurotic children decided to spend countless Saturday afternoons “antiquing” and looking for fancy fucking pepper grinders. Pepper, they solemnly intoned on their pompous cooking shows, was only decent if it were ground at your plate. If a peppercorn, or whatever it is that black pepper comes from, is ground an hour before one ate, it will have been tainted by the common air of these common times and will have lost the treasured elegance of Tiramisu, Italia, where Dante
waxed poetic about his love for Beatrice.

So they put their high class culinary sensibilities in sync with their Maggie-Thatcher-Donald-Trump-Ronald-Reagan economics, in which a large mass of poor people keeps wages suppressed, and restaurants hired guys to do one thing and one thing only: Look like a douchebag, mince to a customer’s table and grind one’s big stiff dick of a pepper grinder over the plates of one’s social superiors. Some restaurants also hired water sommeliers to make H2O as fussy and fastidious as fine wines. They ejaculated water all over your dinner jacket as you coughed up the water when they told you it was 20 dollars a bottle.

In their inimitable goofiness, the food barons decided to put flakes of gold in their alcohol and hiked the price of a bottle of wine from one hundred dollars to 150 bucks. They knew that with these bejeweled beverages their small intestines were destined to gleam like a necklace worn by Jackie Kennedy and their colons would glitter like a sash adorning a beauty queen at the Academy Awards.

However, if you really want to see rich “scholars” at their dopiest you have to travel to food shops within a 10-block radius of a storied, high-status college. You will find every gastronomic abomination a high IQ, a conformist mind, and zilch in an aesthetic sensibility can produce. You will find health food stores where the people invariably are too pale, or too thin or look like they have a wee bit of progeria (An exceedingly rare disease in which one ages at a terrifyingly fast pace and is gray, hobbled and near death at puberty.) They have concocted delicacies whose names even sound sick. For example, “refried” beans sounds like farting beans fried in fetid oil, left to rot on the stove overnight so roaches can nibble on them, and then fried again to make them “Refried beans.” In addition to health food stores, universities sport a wide variety of dietary dives that seek to deepen our appreciation for Third World culture.

Basically, they spice everything to death because third world cooking is very spicy. By eating super spicey food, they feel a sense of “oneness” with the toiling masses.

They forget that the West used to eat very spicy food – Don’t you remember Elementary School and all that boring talk about Columbus going to Asia to look for spices – and gravitated to spicy food because of a problem that is now moot.

Raw meat, if not refrigerated, is soon creeping and crawling with bacteria and other microbial baddies. In the days before refrigeration, raw meat was salted and/or spiced to prevent microbial growth. For example, in “The Grapes of Wrath,” a pig is slaughtered before the protagonist and his family drive to California, and the pork is lathered in layers of salt to prevent the growth of germs. Now that we have refrigeration there is no need to salt and spice food to the precipice of hypertension or gastritis, and clinging to this ancient custom makes as much sense as continuing the feudal Chinese tradition of binding a young girl’s feet.

Finally, the truly grossest foodstuff must be the broccoli knish. Knishes are sort of like perfectly spiced mashed potatoes fried until they have a very thick, crackling crust. They combine the very best of French fries, and the very best of the all too often mediocre stuffed potato, and exalt it to the fifth power of gastronomic greatness.

I have never eaten a broccoli knish. To a Jew who does not observe Jewish law, the thought of eating a broccoli knish seems as sacrilegious as eating pork sausages on the Sabbath. What I know about broccoli knishes is more than enough to make me wretch. They have eschewed the plenty and protectiveness of a potato in favor of broccoli, damned stringy stuff which to me, a guy who has suffered decades of boiled, bland, aesthetically bereft broccoli, is the quintessence of the nauseating.

The Foods of Hannukah Future

Medicines and Computer Programs to enable one to hallucinate the sounds, sights, smells and tastes of eating lasagna, roast beef, whatever.