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| Monday, September 3, 2007 |
The Essayist: Bringing Home the Bacon
This is part of our Sep/Oct 2007 issue.
I'm cheating on my husband. It's not sex, although it might as well be. It's still a love affair -- passionate, forbidden, conducted in secret. I sneak out and conduct my dirty business in a frisson of illicit excitement, and then skulk back home, the scent of my beloved lingering on my skin, ashamed, addicted, eager for more.
For the past decade, I've kept a kosher kitchen. To fully understand my situation, you have to know that I didn't grow up in a kosher household, loathed every minute of my formal Jewish education, and couldn't wait to flee the coop and leave the cloister of suburban, community-centered life behind. So I grew up, moved into Manhattan, into a studio apartment with a teeny kitchenette. I even learned how to make shrimp scampi on my two-burner stove.
And then I fell in love. Hard.
The courtship period was brief, even whirlwind, full of sweet nothings and surprise gifts and dinners out where I didn't notice that my boyfriend never ordered meat. We went to jazz clubs and read the Sunday papers together and touched electric fingertips like we invented the concept.
I soon learned that this man -- now my fiancée -- had grown up in a kosher home, and that he continued to observe kosher dietary laws wherever he went. At first, the interior monologue went something like this: Oh, crap. And later: What am I getting myself into?
But I decided he was worth it, and so we were married in a shiny glatt-kosher catering hall. We moved in together, and set up a life, and an apartment, and a kitchen together.
I wanted to please my new husband, and I wanted him to feel comfortable living and eating in our new home together. So I volunteered to keep our kitchen kosher. In shorthand, this meant I was committing myself to not bringing non-kosher food into our home; never mixing milk and meat; and certainly no more shrimp scampi since pork and shellfish are strictly trayfe.
I'm hardly the first person to adopt a kosher lifestyle. Between 25 and 30 percent of the nearly six million Jewish people living in the U.S. keep kosher to some extent, according to a study funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. If 1.7 million people across the country can do this, I can too, I figured.
As we unwrapped the dishes we received as wedding gifts, we asked each time -- is this milk or meat, or pareve, neither milk nor meat? Some of it was logical: the wedding china would be reserved for meat, as I envisioned Thanksgiving turkey dinners on our brand-new china platters; the espresso maker would be dairy, so I could steam milk for my daily cappuccino. But we needed two sets of flatware, two sets of everyday dishes, two sets of pots and pans. And a third set for Passover, too.
Our tiny New York kitchen felt filled to overflowing before we'd properly begun, a sad turn of events for someone obsessed with food. Imagine keeping three wardrobes in a tiny closet. Now imagine that pint-sized closet is owned by a Prada-loving clotheshorse. I'm sure you see where this is going.
There's an old euphemistic saying that a man won't go out for a hamburger if he's getting steak at home. But what about a woman who's craving a trayfe cheeseburger, even if she's bringing home sirloin from the kosher butcher?
Like so many illicit affairs, mine began in small and innocent ways. At first, I tried to bring my husband into my pre-kosher world, lugging home bags of soy bacon (affectionately referred to in our kitchen as "fakin'") for soy BLTs, gardenburgers to top with cheese, and frozen pollock, a kosher fish that can be prepared to approximate the texture and taste of crabmeat.
"Is this really what it tastes like?" my husband would ask, two game forkfuls into a mock crabmeat salad.
"Kind of," would be my inevitable reply. The truth is that it tended to resemble bacon or crabmeat or whatever in appearance, aroma, or taste, but rarely all three, and never enough to truly satisfy a craving. It's akin to closing your eyes during a kiss and fantasizing about Brad Pitt -- for a moment, you might fool yourself, but deep down you always know that it's not the real thing.
So I began to sneak around behind my husband's back. It started small -- the occasional Cobb salad garnished with Niman ranch bacon, or chicken wings with a luscious dollop of blue-cheese dressing on the side. As my addiction grew, restaurants became my cheap motels, where I would go for sweet-and-sour shrimp or Italian prosciutto sandwiches. The rich silken texture of a pork-belly appetizer thrilled me as much as any satin sheets.
So now, I'm in the thick of this torrid affair. Lunchtime trysts are easy -- I can grab Chinese takeout at midday and no one is the wiser about the pork-studded egg roll I consume, hunched over the countertop, in greedy, happy haste. But satisfying a late-day craving is difficult. After such a binge, I creep home, reeking of McDonald's quarter-pounder-with-cheese fumes like a floozy's perfume on my clothes, and I suffer double pangs of Jewish guilt when my husband greets me cheerfully, innocently, at the door.
"So, what do you want to do for dinner?"
"Um, nothing. I already ate."
To be honest, I think he's on to me. I can tell that he's grown suspicious, that he knows I'm not always telling the truth about where I've been and what I've been doing. I can almost see him now, standing in the doorway, bristling for confrontation, brandishing the ladle we use to stir the matzah-ball soup.
I just hope a cheeseburger isn't grounds for divorce.
-- Text by Kara Newman
This is part of our Sep/Oct 2007 issue.
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