Kasha Varnishkes á la Academy of Holy Names

– From The Messiah Comes Tomorrow: Tales from the American Shtetl by Alan Lupo ’59; University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst
 

There are certain things you do not do in this world.

     You do not just suddenly walk into a bikey club and challenge those present to a brawl.

     You do not sing “Yankee Doodle” in Tehran.

     You do not stay home for dinner if a parochial school graduate cooks kasha varnishkes.

     Kasha varnishkes are essentially groats with noodles. If you don’t cook the stuff correctly, you end up with either homemade plaster, handy for improvements to living room or den, or very loose and dry foodstuff that horses might eat if they were on their last hooves.

     Something between jellyfish and dust is what’s called for in this Jewish dish. The cook in question had a Catholic father and a Lutheran mother.

     When it came to steaks, you couldn’t ask for better in-laws. Their steaks were thick and juicy and bore no resemblance to the stuff your relatives used to broil to death.

     But these same people also ate stuff like macaroni and cheese or spaghetti noodles with canned sauce. Their daughter, a reflection of her times and upbringing, once went into a New York City deli and ordered a corned beef on white with Mayo and a glass of milk. The waiter, barely heeding her presence, looked at you and practically ordered you out of both your race and, as they say politely these days, religious persuasion.

     So it wasn’t as if there hadn’t been warnings.

     She had converted from a macaroni-and-cheese slave to an inventor of spicy, saucy dishes – Mexican chicken, French chicken, some kind of fancy veal stuff, cooked with salad dressing, beef cubes cooked with different kinds of booze.

     None of this indicated she was ready for kasha varnishkes. Had she not, for example, managed to turn an attempted turkey soup into a pot full of very hot water in which turkey guts were floating like survivors off a wrecked ship? You would have tried it yourself, but she reminded you of the time you and a pal had promised homemade Chinese food, which turned out to be a large pot of canned brown gravy, on the bottom of which rested in peace a few inedible chunks of cheap beef and some crunchy water chestnuts. You also were the person who once bought a chuck steak and proceeded to broil it, because, after all, the second operative word was “steak.” After two hours of broiling, you noted little progress and still needed a consultant, the landlord’s wife, to inform you that chuck steak was beef to be roasted, or, perhaps, avoided altogether.

     You and she hardly cook anything anymore anyway because neither son nor daughter has shown any enthusiasm in the last seven years for anything the two of you might cook. Well, almost no enthusiasm.

     The son does like a round roast going down for the third time in a sea of gravy; the daughter won’t even sit near it. The daughter doesn’t like the way calves are bred for veal and refuses, therefore, to eat it; the son doesn’t care how they’re bred but hates veal anyway. The daughter occasionally will eat some form of chicken; the son avoids most chicken.

     So, it was without warning one evening that she announced she was making kasha varnishkes. Nobody had asked for them, and you cannot even remember the main dish that they were to accompany. She did indeed produce a pot of groats and a big bowl of noodles. One could indeed mix together the groats and noodles. They were not sopping wet; on the other hand, they were not wet at all.

     The son rejected them out of hand. The daughter gave them a shot but was reduced to moving them from one side of the plate to another in an attempt to look busy and not hurt her mother’s feelings. You thanked the Academy of the Holy Names alumna for trying this wonderful surprise, but you couldn’t bring yourself to finish them. The cook bravely ate her creation, which she insisted was quite good and just needed a little salt, pepper, gravy, booze, blood transfusion or whatever else might be handy.

     A good bit of it was left over. It was suggested that people in the sub-Sahara would easily and in good conscience reject what was left over, but that didn’t get a big laugh from the cook. An offer to pack it in feed bags and take it to Suffolk Downs brought no yuks at all.

     It was given a proper burial in the garbage disposal, over which you silently prayed, “Lord, if you think matzo, the bread of affliction, is a punishment, take a taste of this.”

     At issue here is not the culinary ability of said wife. There’s just something about Jewish food that brings out in her an ever so subtle Torquemada streak. She did a brisket once that melted in one’s mouth and tasted of the French wine country. It’s supposed to be hard and taste Jewish, but there you are.

     Maybe it just proves that in the wide range of ethnic cooking, some morsels resist the American melting pot.