Driving through the Chicago suburb of Skokie a few weeks ago, my wife and I hankered for a good lunch at one of its kosher restaurants. Since we observe the Jewish dietary laws, it is rare for us to dine out for a burger or deli sandwich. To be kosher, an animal must be slaughtered and prepared in a specific way that minimizes its suffering and that removes its blood, the fluid of life which we are forbidden to consume. There are no kosher restaurants in the Capital District, so eating this kind of a meal is an uncommon treat that we enjoy only in larger cities with big Jewish communities. As a former vegetarian whose diet is largely plant-based, I looked forward to us treating ourselves.
We stopped in at Ken’s Diner, a Chicago landmark with a classic deli atmosphere whose entire menu is kosher. Lacking a connoisseur’s taste for good deli, I asked the owner what he would recommend.
“Try the Italian beef,” he advised.
Italian beef it was, and what an Italian beef it was, fully satisfying our hunger and our taste buds. I later learned that Italian beef has a celebrated history in Chicagoland where it was invented over a century ago. It is served au jus, cooked in its own juice, then nestled in a hard roll with mild or spicy giardiniera, a marinated and pickled vegetable medley. The non-kosher version might also be served with cheese, which we could not eat because kosher laws forbid mixing meat and dairy. Even with this ingredient absent, the sandwich lacked nothing.
Upon returning to Albany, we decided to livestream The Bear on Hulu. The wildly popular three-season drama follows Carmen Berzatto, a brilliant but troubled Michelin quality chef who returns to Chicago to take over his dead brother’s run-down Italian beef shop. Knowing nothing about the show when I began watching, five minutes into the first episode, I was stunned by my memories of the delicacy I had eaten a week earlier. The Bear’s dramatic effect is heightened by intimate and vibrant close-ups of Italian beef being cooked, assembled and sold. Apparently, it has raised the profile of this regional favorite to national status. My almost Pavlovian response to the images felt to me like a reversal of Marcel Proust’s Madeleine descriptions in his novel, Swann’s Way. Upon eating Madeleines, traditional French sponge cakes that he had enjoyed when he was much younger, the protagonist experiences intense involuntary memories of his childhood that had been lost to him. Eating Italian beef wasn’t my Madeleine-like portal into my distant memories; watching it on TV led me back to recent memories of enjoying it.
I have crowned Italian beef as a new comfort food, though unlike most comfort foods, it will be a rarity to which I look forward, not a common favorite which I will consume regularly. That is alright with me. My anticipation of this treat is one small part of a kind of voluntary memory that I now cherish: recollections of my daughter and son-in-law’s recent wedding in Chicago that same week as our culinary outing. Anytime I wish, I wrap up a lot of my memories of that holy, joyous time into this humble remembrance of eating something wonderful that week, a reminder of the deliciousness, as it were, of my children’s and family’s love. Looking forward to eating that classic Italian beef also reminds me of the future times of joy that I hope will grow from their marriage and our family.
Special foods, songs, dress, and ceremonies, especially but not exclusively during holidays, evoke powerful memories for us, hopefully all good ones, of times with family and friends, of happy moments from our pasts. They possess their own pageantry as sacred rituals of the twin temples of the kitchen and the dining room. Without them, our sense of history and heritage is impoverished. They can also evoke our deepest hopes for the times ahead by serving as rituals of comfort and camaraderie in the sacred space of a family or communal meal. Without them, our sense that we can look forward to tomorrow is also impoverished. In fact, all rituals – whether religious or secular -offer us the opportunity to relive our best pasts and to rehearse for our best futures. When people tell me that they find religious rituals especially overbearing, I remind them that they can jettison whatever rituals they want, but they will inevitably fill the void with others. Without these practices to dramatize our origin stories, we lose track of where we came from. Without them dramatizing our visions of the world that we want, we lose sight of where we could and should be going. Yes, ritual rules can be burdensome and restrictive, but practiced faithfully in private, in family, and in community, they can also liberate us, allowing us to be fully human. With that I have no beef.
Dan Ornstein is the rabbi of Congregation Ohav Shalom and a writer living in Albany, NY. Check out his writings at danornstein.com
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