Chulent. A Love Story.

More Torah fans!  What happened?  Where have I been?  I am at the airport in beautiful, sunny Milwaukee.  It is time to get back to business and update the More Torah site.

Epiphany!  Someone commented on a More Torah blog post about Shwarma.  Here is an excerpt:

I always feel so sorry for the Jews who lost so much of their own culture and culinary traditions throughout their 2000 year exile that in modern times they had to resort to copying arabs and other middle eastern cultures in order to even begin to have anything like native cuisine in Israel.

You can read the whole thing, I can’t tell if it is anti-Semitic, political, whatever, or both.  But that isn’t the point.  The bottom line is that the opinion about Shwarma is somewhat correct.  Ultimately shwarma is a Jewish adaptation of non-Jewish Middle Eastern food.  It is the food equivalent of Yiddish or Klezmer.  And that is cool.  But there is an exclusively Jewish food.

Chulent.

Yikes.  Why promote a hybrid?  Promote a Jewish original.

This Shabbos I had three different Chulents.  I had one Friday night, one at Kiddush on Shabbos morning, and a third at Shabbos lunch.  I am a changed man.  True, I nearly OC-ed (over chulented).  True, I am a lot heavier today.  And true, my stomach is rumbling.  But that is all part of the beauty of chulent.

Chulent is a Jewish original.  It is pasty.  It is love.

Maybe it is the new Shwarma.

February 21st, 2010 Shwarma