My grandfather's favorite dish was actually beef testicles. That was his favorite dish, and my grandmother would prepare them on a hot shovel. She would take the shovel, she’d put the shovel in the fire, heat up the shovel and put the beef testicles on the shovel. That was his favorite dish. Now, that wasn't for Shabbes.

I think you can still get them in… Can you get them? Moroccan Jews still eat them. And I think in Israel at some of these mixed grill places, you can get most of the audience there.

They're hard to find. There are, you can get them. But again, the expectation, at least in this country in this day and age around quote unquote, cleanliness of food or presentation of food has changed. And in many ways that dictates and the way the tomatoes don't taste good, but they look great. You know, you have similar things in the meat business.

And my mother used to singe the feathers off the chicken. She used to pull the pin feathers out.

It wasn’t a problem! But now mothers work. Most of my customers, both parents are working. And that also, I think, you know, impacts what's on the table on Friday night, right. When both parents are working till four or five o'clock on Friday, your options get limited. And that's also, you know, there goes the birth of the takeout and why takeout has become so popular.

The other problem with the meat in particular are all the state regulations for hygiene. I had terrible time last fall. I was desperate for calves feet and was told that I could not get them in New York State. I couldn't get them in Massachusetts, I couldn't get them in Vermont. And so I had my guy from New Jersey drive them up. You know, it felt like a sort of mobster scenario. And I got my calves feet… Across state lines? You were able to do that? …across state lines, yeah.

Statute of limitations, hopefully has expired… It would have been easier to bring the calf!

So I have to say that I do not have nostalgia for organ meats. And I mean, maybe as a vegetarian you might... I mean, but I think Naf has a good point that there are also kind of cultural shifts of being in America that, you know, organ meats are not foods of affluence. And I have to admit that probably my tastes preferences have been shaped by American affluence. Although I agree with you on one level,

but if you look at a restaurant like St. John’s in London, which is very expensive and extraordinary and it's all about offal.

Right, and Oxford Symposium, can have a whole like… How could you give up sweetbreads, you know? Brains, how can you give up brains? Well, again, I have memories of my mother cooking tongue in our house and hating it, it's made the house smell terrible. Maybe she didn’t cook it well. Exactly! She’s alive, I'm not going to comment on that. But I think that that was the thing, it’s that, I think for a kid growing up in Cincinnati, Ohio, having beef tongue smell up your house was not my ideal… Was it fresh or pickled? It was just nasty.

But right there, let’s, we have to be honest, it is not easy to cook a beef tongue well, and I have done it. You just simmer it! All you do is boil it! Yeah. For how long? Oh, but it depends on the weight. Yes. But for how long for let's say a three pound tongue? A long time. Yeah. So before we drop off the kids at daycare or the bus pick up and go like that's… Put it in your slow cooker. Yes, and that’s a great way to do it. Or the insta pot now, I’m gonna try this in an insta pot. So I haven't done it in the insta but I've certainly done it in the slow cooker, but then you still have to peel it. So what! You peel an orange why not peel a tongue? If you will watch the kids. I will peel the tongue. And when you say though you can peel an orange, you can peel a tongue, people buy their oranges sliced in wedges now. Oh, please. I'm not saying I do or I'm recommending it, but that is the cultural context.

There's no way back The kids are not all right. I think what’s coming out of this discussion is the passion that we feel for food, whether it is an intense feeling of nostalgia or a love for something tasty, how it was tied up with childhood memories or other memories. But there's also a strong sense of disgust and distaste which plays into it too. Health regulations, consumer ideas about what is edible, what isn't. And what really it comes down to is to try and remember these Jewish foods and serve them, if only periodically, at the table so that they're not lost, and perhaps on occasion revisit foods that once seemed disgusting. And you might have a revelation if you return to them with a different frame of mind. So does anyone want to add anything or should we… Just that I would say that the Sabbath table, the holiday table

is a very reduced version of Jewish food and that the, if you will, the Jewish kitchen, the Jewish table has a much, much, much greater range. And I would like to think that in a way, as time goes on, that our view of the kitchen, of the table, of the repertoire isn't sort of reduced, reduced, reduced to a few holiday items, you know, periodically during the course of the year. And that the whole rest of it, is, in a sense, lost. I think there's something to be recovered that is very much on a daily basis, very seasonal, and…

But I would, also see the opposite trend, Barbara, which is, because we live in America and we have such bounty, and other parts of the world, equally so, we have so many other varieties that we can get. Even if we try to eat seasonally, we can still get so many more foods than two or three generations ago we were able to do, certainly in Europe. And so we have these options today which have broadened our options on the table, which certainly inform the way we eat at home, not only during the week, but even more so on Shabbat.

Yeah, but, you know, I don't think that more choice is necessarily better. And especially out of season. And especially, you know, imported, like, I just, you know, saw, oranges from South Africa,

this time of the year… No, we do eat seasonally, so we don't do that.

But, but I would say that I think there's also a misperception of what was actually available in Eastern Europe seasonally. You know, for example, there's a range of berries that was available that is available today and was available seasonally that we just don't see today. I mean, three or four colored currants and gooseberries, several kinds of raspberries, cherries. You know, Poland was the land of, is the land of sour fruit, was the land of sour fruit. And we just don't have that perception, we have some idea of this very poor cuisine that all they ate were turnips and potatoes, which is not true.

But you still can get them in Europe today. I mean, I've gotten all those in Europe.

Yeah, yeah. For sure. But I mean, what I mean to say is that having more choice is great.

I mean, so the world is our oyster. But if we're thinking about, in a sense, put it this way, if we're thinking about Jewish culinary tradition, history, culture as a resource, that it is more than Challah, chicken, kneidlach and chicken soup.

When we call something, when we specifically label something as Jewish, that is one of… potentially you can make anything Jewish, you can have transgressive Jewish eating. You can have a restaurant called Treyf in Brooklyn. And if people are eating there deliberately, you know, knowingly violate the laws of kashrut, they're expressing their Jewish identity in a certain kind of way. And I think that that's a really important aspect. I know we've tended to overemphasize the situational holiday aspect of Jewish food, but potentially our words, and by saying that this is a Jewish style chicken or even this reminds me of what my Jewish grandmother made in such and such a time. It doesn't matter what time of year it is, it doesn't necessarily, this tofu, this Cauliflower Marranca that we’re serving on Shabbat dinner from The Moosewood Cookbook is Jewish because, you know, because. Well, it's because Mollie Katzen’s Jewish.

But it's also it's critical to look both ways, right. We have to look to the past if we want to maintain these traditions, but we also have to make sure we're looking currently and forward. I think that the notion of, well, you know, let's make the tongue in the instant pot that is a great example of it. You can't be in this vacuum of, you know, well, I used to pin the chickens and it took three hours, but no big deal. If people don’t have three hours…Didn’t take three hours. My customers tell me if they find a feather. It took three hours. It didn't take them three hours. They don't know how. It’s true, but you have to understand the modern sensibility in the modern kitchen or else people are just going to leave it behind and find that way to be authentic while also being realistic, I guess, or being, you know, or fitting in on some level in the modern lifestyle.

Actually, I think the modern lifestyle, if anything, for those who care about food is all about like for example, there's a whole cult around cooking clay pots, not insta pots, clay pots.

There's a whole cult about cooking in cast iron. I would say that at the same time that you have those that have no time and that are looking for the shortcuts and the quick and the easy and the whatever, you've got the exact opposite. Those who are, in a sense, reverse engineering all of those modern shortcuts and are trying to, they're making their own sourdough, they're making their own pickles, they're lacto fermenting everything. So I think that there are trends in both directions. But I think that, I mean, what's happened with our situation here today and I would agree that what makes the food on this table Jewish is the context.

Yes, these are quintessential elements in a Friday Sabbath meal. But it could have been anything. It could have been pita, it could have been bagels. Or it could have been a whole grain sourdough or French loaf, could have been anything, although if you're going to make challah yourself, you have to take the challah. I mean, you have to do something besides just bake it. But nonetheless, there could have been anything on the table.

But if it were a part of a Friday night event, then the whole constellation is Jewish without having to say this is a particularly, specifically, Jewish food. In an American Jewish culture where the cooking is not the norm, the fact that you're even cooking the food on certain occasions is one of the things that adds… 

I mean, you can't say cooking is specifically Jewish, but the fact that you are trying to make something a special occasion by cooking it often for some Jewish reason Having seen many generations of students that I've taught, they go through this experience of not cooking, and then they desperately want to learn to cook. Yes I agree. So they come back to it and it's fine to be young and- Yeah, microwave, ramen, fast and be on the fly. But they do mostly want to come around. As we should at this moment.

So context is really all important and community and sharing the meal and remembering why we have come together and thinking about that. So thank you all. Thank you.