What should I do with the schmaltz?

An introduction

I've been yearning for a new project. I used to cure lemons and ferment kimchi, but I couldn't keep it up. Now I mostly cook to feed myself, and rarely with the same flow that made me love doing it in the first place. I recycle the same recipes, with only flash moments of creativity. Okay, when I’m hosting, I often feel more motivated and get a little more ambitious, but something is missing. I have kitchen fatigue. 

I moved from Manchester to London for university in 2010. This was the first time I began cooking on a regular basis. My parents bought me the first Ottolenghi cookbook for my birthday, and I became, like many of us living on this island still suffering from the residual notoriety of its purportedly drab and stodgy cuisine, utterly compelled by its kaleidoscopic dishes. I was in fact being swept up in the same process as many Britons; the ‘Ottolenghi Effect,’ as Tim Hayward puts it in the Financial Times, would change the way many of us eat forever.  

Some complain about the excessive ingredients involved in an Ottolenghi recipe, but for me, it was a case of the more the merrier, for the other part of the cookbook’s appeal was the opportunity to gain an appreciation of another cuisine or flavour. 

Yotam Ottolenghi’s first cookbook was co-authored with Sami Tamimi and published in 2008. It was seminal. It taught me how to cook vegetables, confidently combine flavours, and make a dish look pretty. It was also where my journey to gain some intellectual insight into the vast foodways of the Levant began.

My main focus – both in my writing and in the kitchen – has been the diverse culinary cultures of the Levant. This is partly due to the time I’ve spent in that part of the world, mostly in Jaffa, where I spent 18 months doing my doctoral fieldwork. My research method was what anthropologists call ethnography. It is an opaque and contested idea, but crudely put, it means prolonged and deep immersion into a culture, and in my case, it was about grasping the spatial culture of the urban environment I found myself in. This mostly involved an intentional kind of flânerie – if that isn’t a contradiction – but I also saw it as an opportunity to know every available morsel of food the city had to offer. 

I have come to love that food deeply, and my death row meal would probably be a bowl of hummus at Abu Hassan in Jaffa. I’ve even gotten pretty good at cooking it, though without the intimate experience gained from long slogs in a restaurant kitchen, or the kind of ancestral knowledge I haven’t had consistent access to. 

With love comes fear, and I am sometimes irked by the ways it is watered down as it becomes increasingly popular in Britain, a phenomenon aptly described by food writer Diana Henry as the tendency to be pomegratuitous. This is why I did the deep dives for Eater on hummus, falafel, and shawarma, and why I’ll keep producing this kind of content. It is also why I continue to try and cook it sincerely. 

But whilst I still take pleasure in producing a spread of meze, my kitchen experience has been overwhelmed by more dulling and restrictive feelings. It occurred to me recently – during a phone call with my brother – that this may be bound up in an emotional craving I had not yet discovered. 

He was sitting with a bowl of chicken soup. Having always been fed on pasture, the home-reared birds it was made from were older than commercially reared chickens, meaning they had extra flavour and fat. As well as calling me to share the joy he was experiencing in consuming the liquid gold, the purpose of the phone call was to express a pressing question. 

“What should I do with the schmaltz?” 

Schmaltz is the Yiddish word for chicken fat, which was the basis of Ashkenazi cooking in Eastern Europe for generations. I didn’t have an answer. I hurriedly grabbed my copy of Claudia Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food which I had previously only consulted to look up Sephardic dishes – and sent through the options. Tzimmes, kugel, kasha, and more. 

This wasn’t the first time I’d felt like a bad Jew. I’d never made any of these dishes. I’d written them off. I’d barely thought about them, apart from my brain wondering – fleetingly – about the origins of quintessentially Ashkenazi foods like pastrami and smoked salmon.

That same afternoon, I typed ‘what to do with schmaltz’ into Notes, feeling the thrill of ingenuity, but knowing I may never return to that tab.

A few days later, I was looking in the fridge, and a plastic tub filled with schmaltz from a  recently roasted chicken was staring right at me. I’d totally forgotten about it until that moment. My eyes were affixed as my mind numbed. After about half a minute, the cloud opened up, realising that the cure to my kitchen fatigue may lie in that tub of schmaltz; in cooking cholent and kishke; pickling sauerkraut and preparing chrayne. To think that foods I once considered beige, foods I sought to escape, could now be  exotic,  still confounds me, but here we are. The schmaltz.

***

The estrangement between many Ashkenazi Jews and Eastern Europe has been growing for decades, even centuries. It began with a linguistic detachment. Yiddish is still spoken by hasidic Jews from Crown Heights to Stamford Hill, but for most second and third-generation Ashhenazi Jews, it remains in a set of phrases and words; schvitzing, schlepping, kvelling, and other, less savoury terms. The situation in North America is different, with Yiddish words more visible in American English. From chutzpah and spiel to lox and schmear, the Ashkenazic cultural influence on the US is more linguistically palpable. 

It is often said that with immigration to a new country, food is the last thing to stick. It is much easier to retain culinary patterns in an era of globalisation, though the lineage of most Jews on this island begins prior to the solidification of fast-paced global trade. Adaptation has been inevitable.  

Every family has a different set of traditions and recipes that are reproduced, but the idiosyncrasies of particular households point to broader patterns. Take my maternal grandmother, for example. Angella – or Grandma Angie, as she is known to her grandchildren– is the granddaughter of a Polish chazan called Isodore Freeman, who moved to the UK in the late 19th century. Her cooking represents the way in which Ashkenazi-Jewish food would be modified in Britain and the core dishes that clung like glue. Friday nights began with chopped liver and egg-and-onion on Ritz crackers and then a steaming bowl of irresistible chicken soup, followed by roast chicken that would vary, but always with skin that shone with a caramelised surface; a visual reminder of the occasion for me. Grandma Angie’s chicken with apricots is my favourite iteration, and I requested it on my last visit for passover. The apricots and onions had melted into the chicken juices. I further seasoned it with white pepper – one of the elemental tastes of her cooking, lifted out with a miniscule silver spoon from its precious receptacle, which I’ve always admired. The result was a wondrous melange of flavour.

Whilst many of my non-Jewish friends were tucking into roast beef, yorkshire puddings and gravy on a Sunday lunchtime, we’d be eating bagels from the north Manchester bakery State Fayre, spread with Samson Kosher cream cheese and Goldstein smoked salmon. Occasionally, there’d also be a plate of hot salt beef or cold sliced beef tongue. 

But what happened in between, during the holy day itself? Shabbat runs from Friday’s first three stars until Saturday night has begun to darken the skies, and for observant Jews, specific eating rituals are associated with that period. We were traditional, but not religious, so Saturday was more likely to involved a Pizza Express than anything yiddisher (sorry mum for outing you to the rabbi), but for the more pious in the community – and people we were occasionally invited to for shabbat lunch, the siesta-inducing cholent, accompanied by kugel, would often be on the table. 

In the US, where Ashkenazi Jewish food may have petered out and hybridised in the household, it found new life in the Jewish deli. For many fully-assimilated Ashkenazi Jews, the Jewish deli is the last place to experience the foods their great-bubbas cooked. It was also the first interface between the Jewish home kitchen and the non-Jewish, secular world. A lot of this food is now widely celebrated in the US, and ‘kosher-style’ versions that mostly serve non-Jewish customers are commonplace. But even they are fading out now. 

In Britain, a thriving, out-facing Ashkenazi culinary world didn’t develop to the same extent, but Beigel Shop, Beigel Bake Brick Lane Bakery and the Happening Bagel Bakery would be our London equivalent. Intriguingly, the latter two businesses have been owned by Mizrahi families for decades, and yet they are the last vestiges of East London’s more secular Ashkenazi pasts. There are of course plentiful places to eat Ashkenazi food (and Sephardic or hybrid Ashkenazi-Sephardic food too) in Golders Green, Stamford Hill, and Hendon but these are institutions serving a mostly Jewish clientele. There does seem to be some kind of revival emerging in recent years, with a surge in the opening of non-kosher Ashkenazi food concepts across the city (not limited to bagels) – but these businesses are often more influenced by American-Jewish deli culture than anything on these isles, with some of them started by New Yorkers.

***

In Judaism, there are four levels of interpretation of the divine text. 

Could we possibly interpret the schmaltz this way? 

Peshat is the literal reading, so the physical act of turning schmaltz into edible dishes. I’ll pickle, fry and roast my way through staples, and reveal tweaks that worked without destroying the aura of a dish. The mission: to answer the question, is Ashkenazi food misunderstood or is it truly, inherently unsexy? 

Remez is the allegorical reading; what the text alludes to. Schmaltz has taken on the meaning of excessive sentimentality, so this is also a chance for me to allow myself to be schmaltzy; and whilst I’m there, to try and answer this question of why I, and ultimately so many of us, are nostalgic for lost pasts, and how food serves as such an unparalleled medium to engage in these desires. This will take me beyond my own kitchen, and into the current Ashkenazi foodways of North London, Stamford Hill, and the nouveau-American Jewish establishments popping up all over London. 

Derash is the metaphorical reading, where I will face the broader identity crisis embedded in the question of what we do with the leftover sticky bits of heritage that never disappear, however you try and hide them, a question I will explore internally.

And finally, sod is the hidden or mystical meaning. I take this as the process of learning what it feels like to cook and eat the food of my ancestors, and follow Jenny Lau's suggestion that “when we cook, as in life, we just need to become who we are.”

Stay tuned.