Many of us will be taking today, Yom Kippur, off from work to sit in temple, pray, and do everything in our power not to think about food. So we too have abstained from posting mouth-watering pictures and recipes because, well, that would just be cruel, and it would give us yet another negligence to atone for.
But it’s hard not to acknowledge the strange culinary challenge that this holiday presents. At the end of morning services, many Jewish women return home to begin preparing the break fast meal, a hodgepodge of favorites like whitefish salad, kugel, and brisket (which, at my Aunt Jennifer’s table, puts everything else to shame). After a healthy appetizer of one or more bagels piled high with lox, cream cheese, tomatoes, capers, and red onions, I would summon my stomach’s second reserve and dig into a mound of Aunt Jen’s brisket, leaving me dizzy, tired, and in need of a bulldozer to transfer me to the car.
Sometimes it seems my faith is summed up by the memory of this particular plate of brisket.
When I went to college, the High Holiday services at the University Hillel felt a little empty. But perhaps this was because I knew I’d be breaking fast at the campus pizza joint at sundown. My senior year, with a ramshackle kitchen at my disposal, I decided to take one for the team, invoke the culinary prowess of Aunt Jen, and prepare a break fast meal for a group of my observing friends.
In true amateur fashion, I began my preparations for the meal during the afternoon, when I was already long underway with my fast. The smell of sautéing onion and garlic tortured my senses, and I began chewing a stick of gum when I instinctively went to taste the sauce before bathing the meat in it. Luckily, I had found a recipe similar to Aunt Jen’s, which I had made before, and taken some liberties with, but I was still a little worried about the result. It occurred to me that when you can’t taste as you go, it’s best to stick with a tried and true, age-old recipe, unless you’re wise enough to do all the cooking the day before.
Even though it was made while I was starving, my break fast brisket back in 2006 turned out just as good as the ones of my memories. When a meal is gobbled up as fast as mine was that day, I got to understand the true feeling of home-cooking success—it’s a little like having your joke laughed at, when you weren’t sure it was funny—even if I knew deep down anything would taste good after 24 hours of starvation.
From my kitchen, where I am starving right now, to yours,
Phoebe, THE QUARTER-LIFE COOK
