A Knishmaker’s Work Continues

No way I want anyone at the Consider the Knish talk to go hungry. A big knish order calls for some elbow grease, kneading and plain old handiwork. No one in my family made knishes when I was growing up. They were something you bought on the street. Cheap, easy food.

But yesterday, whcn I covered my kitchen table in seventy some odd circles of dough topped with pyramids of potato and onion, they were anything but easy. I channeled the ancestors: Nana, who changes all the dishes for Passover; Gramma, who made immeasurable batches of apple sauce pinked and sweet stuffed cabbage; and the ones I never met, who sustained generations. Wow, it is not easy to manufacture a lot of edibles. After the first half dozen came out of the oven, I cracked open a beer. Three mounds of dough loomed and I had to run out for onions to make a new round of innards. A knish without onions is like the Jewish people without tsuris (troubles). *  I sliced the onions and welled up. Not an emotional thing, but an hommage to women of every background who urge food into shape, put it on the table and wait until everyone has been served to eat.

My kitchen still has the scent of fried onions. I handed off a few beers to a friend who came over to sample knishes (he ate four, with some of my dad’s homemade mustard, so I guess they’re OK) and am sweeping out crumbs, getting rid of bread and heading out to a seder.

It’s not so kosher to stash the knishes in the freezer for Passover, but that’s where they are. And, as Barry Levenson, the founder of the Mustard Museum, intoned, eating a knish is a holy act, one that could even cause a person, i.e., him, to bend the rules of the holiday. He’s of Ashkenzi descnet, but come Pesach, he flips into Sephardic mode, which permits the ingestion of mustard during the holiday. Who can blame the guy?

* I just made that up, but I’m sure someone else said it before.