Does This Taste Funny? A Half-Baked Look at Food and Foodies (27 page)

I really like
‘pish-posh,’ and it sorta
sounds
like a food item (
“I’ll have the
curried pish-posh”)
, but it’s a bit too snooty for the food
I like to cook.

I desperately wanted
the perfect phrase for my trademark exclamation, and I wanted it to have a
little worldly cachet.

I went online and found
a phrase I really liked: “Ahnaal Natrakh,” which was supposedly part of a
Merlin’s Charm of Making. That could work—it tells people, this guy is making
some magic!

Unfortunately, after
I’d rehearsed how I would use my new catchphrase, I learned that ‘Ahnaal
Natrakh’ is also the name of a death-metal band in the UK, known for songs such
as
Castigation and Betrayal
and
Screaming of the Unborn
off their
album
Hell Is Empty and All The Devils Are Here
. Not really the vibe I’m
going for.

I could turn to pop
culture, but all I could think of were sci-fi catchphrases like “Resistance is
futile!,” which would be dramatic but might be overly pushy
(“And now, you
garnish the soup, and
admit that
RESISTANCE IS
FUTILE!”)
.
 

What about something
more old school? Every time I add an ingredient I could say, “By the power of
Greystoke!”

Superheroes always have
catchphrases, so I could go that direction, but then I’d have to wear a cape
and a tights when I cook (
there
‘
s
a
mental image for you).

The Torch’s “Flame On!”
would work unless you’re dealing with an electric range, in which case you
would have to shout “Warm Up Gradually!,” which doesn’t really have the same
impact.

Eventually
I hit a wall and just started trying random phrases. How about “
Take the next
train to Tastyville
?” I could go edgy with
“Put that in your Dutch
oven!”
Or, taking the understated approach, my trademark could be “Now
THAT’S edible!”

In
the end, I found my catchphrase by turning back to music and my ‘cooking
playlist.’ In Nat ‘King’ Cole’s
Frim-Fram Sauce
, the singer lists the
foods he
doesn
‘t want, and ends each verse with
the same gibberish words:

I
want the frim-fram sauce with the ausen fay
With chafafah on the side.

Well, there’s
three
potential catchphrases nobody’s using. ‘Ausen fay’ isn’t terribly catchy, but
‘frim-fram is perfect, because it could refer to anything you throw into a
dish. “Now let’s add a little frim-fram!”

But even better is
chafafah
.
Not only does it sound like an exotic food (something you might have with a
side of tabouli), it’s just plain fun to say!

“Next you’ll
put in
your basil
and
,
chafafah!”

“Dredge the pork in th
e
flour and
,
chafafah!”

The best thing about it
is, since it’s a made-up word, you can even use it to swear:

“
I put in too much
salt
—
chafafah!”

Go ahead and laugh, but
by next year you’ll be flipping through your Williams-Sonoma catalog and see a
full line of CHAFAFAH
™
kitchenware. Aprons, cutting boards, meat mallets, you name it – I’ll put my
catchphrase on it.

Until Williams-Sonoma
decides to carry these,

you can get them
at MisterComedy.net.

Every so often you hear
about someone who claims to see a supernatural being in their food. Jesus in a
piece of toast. The Virgin Mary in a stack of pancakes. For some reason, deities
seem to gravitate toward breakfast foods.

Although I’ve had some meals
come out looking a little odd, I’ve never seen any signs of God in my scrambled
eggs. Bear in mind, my idea of God isn’t very mainstream.

I
can
say,
unequivocally, that I believe there is
some
sort
of vague,
nebulous energy source that’s involved
somehow
in the way the universe
works. An old bearded man smiting people? Probably not.

But sometimes, when
every part of a meal comes together, and the presentation is just right, I know
that I believe in . . . something. When I’m in the kitchen, I become
significantly more connected to The Great Whatever.

That’s because I’m
constantly either praying something won’t be overcooked, or begging for divine
intervention to thicken a sauce, or imploring the heavens to make my side
dishes come out at the same time as the main course. I figure, there may not be
a ‘god,’ but on the off chance that there is, why not ask for a little help?

Sometimes, I envy the
Hindus. Not so much for the finger cymbals, but for the polytheism. The way I
see it, if you’re gonna believe in what may well be a mythological being, why
not believe in a whole gang of them?

On those rare occasions
when I hit it out of the park when I’m cooking, I would like to be Hindu, just so
I could have a few more gods to thank.

The Chinese have a
dedicated Kitchen God, a fellow named
Zau Jun
. It literally means ‘Stove
God,’ but I’m guessing he handles the
entire
kitchen.

According to tradition,
he returns to Heaven just before Chinese New Year to report on the activities
of every household during the past year. Then the Jade Emperor either rewards
or punishes the family based on Zao Jun’s annual report. See, that’s the
problem I always have with gods. They’re so…judgy.

.

BY MY COMMAND, YOU SHALL HENCEFORTH

COOK POULTRY to an internal temperature

of at least 170 degrees

Roman Catholics don’t
have a
god
specifically assigned to kitchen duty, but they do have TWO
patron saints looking out for cooks.

First, consider Saint
Marta. The sister of Mary Magdalena, she is said to have cooked meals for
Jesus. Talk about your high-pressure catering gig! You
really
didn’t
want to mess up His appetizer order.

Then there’s St.
Lorenzo. Not only a patron saint of cooks, Lawrence is sometimes thought of as
a patron of comedians.

That’s because, when he
was being martyred on a bed of burning coals, the legend says that he quipped,
“Turn me over. This side is done.” Which I suppose would also make him the
patron saint of grilling.

My personal
spirituality is pretty eclectic. To put it in a food context, I tell people I’m
a Smorgasbordian. I sample a little bit from all the major faiths, but I try
not to fill up on any particular one.

 Some days I’m not hungry
at all, but other times I might have a craving for Eastern mysticism, or I’ll
go back for a second helping of Jewish angst.

If any culture really
gets
how important food is, it’s Jewish culture. Forget all the ephemeral, heavenly
symbolism and the learned scholarly debate about arcane theological points—most
Jewish gatherings are all about the here and now. And the food.

When I converted to
Judaism as an adult, one of the first things I learned was a saying that
explains every Jewish holiday:

“They
tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat.”

It always bothered me a
bit that I could never think of a way to connect my Judaism to my cooking. I
wasn’t raised Jewish, so I don’t have nostalgic memories of making latkes
standing next to my
Bubbe
.

Then I figured out a
way to bring together my Jewish faith with my cooking style, by way of the
Yiddish language.

First of all, I had
been using Yiddish words and phrases since well before I became ‘officially’
Jewish.

More importantly, it
occurred to me that Yiddish is the perfect language for cooking. Maybe not
everyone’s cooking, but definitely mine.

My cooking is
imprecise, and hard to define – just like Yiddish! Ask any two Jews what a
Yiddish word means, and you’re likely to get at least three different answers.

I got to thinking about
how various Yiddish words and phrases might apply to certain kitchen
situations, and then I realized I needed to call my rabbi.

By ‘my rabbi,’ I mean
the rabbi who taught my conversion class and then officiated while I recited
Hebrew, floating naked in a ritual bath (
I
was the one floating and
naked,
not
the rabbi).

Rabbi Alan
Shavit-Lonstein at Temple of Aaron in St. Paul is a great teacher, and since we
hadn’t chatted in a while, I thought it would be fun to get a more
learned
take on using Yiddish in the kitchen.

As he explained it, the
strong connection I feel between Yiddish and my approach to cooking is
something known in Hebrew as
tam v’reach
.

Literally meaning
‘
taste
and smell
,’
tam v’reach
refers to something that

“captures
the Yiddish spirit without having any Yiddish ingredients from history or
culture. It's got the taste and smell of it, without . . . It's like kosher-
style
,
like kosher dill pickles make it a Jewish event somehow. ”

I wanted to have the good
rabbi define some of the Yiddish I already knew in a cooking context. For
instance, could someone be
verklempt
over a meal?

"Absolutely,
and it can be both a positive and a negative. You can be so moved, and
awestruck, and blown away by a meal—you can be so thrilled by it . . .

Or
so disappointed by it, or so overworked from having to prepare it and then
nobody appreciates it. I think after
every
meal, a good Jewish response
could be “I’m
verklempt
.”