The Zeitgeist with Howard Barbanel

    

Father's Day and a Bowl of Cholent

GIVING DADS THEIR DUE AND FIGHTING ‘KUGELEXIA’

Father’s Day was this past Sunday. Around these parts Mother’s Day seems to be a bigger deal – mothers get taken out for brunch or dinner, flowers, jewelry and other gifts are procured and no end of sentimentality is gushed forth. In many households being a mother is a tough row to hoe and much praise for mothers is wholly justified.

Dads on the other hand tend not to want too big of a deal made about them. Many fathers take the quiet, stoic approach to their paternal duties and become self-effacing when confronted with the specter of any attention. Father’s Day is also when an annual ritual of tie and polo shirt purchases (which invariably are either retuned, gather dust or look ridiculous) get made along with no end of tzotchkes of no discernable utility and gallons of men’s cologne that will ultimately gather dust in medicine cabinets.

In our area, which is very expensive to live in, many fathers engage in backbreaking commutes combined with exceedingly long hours of toil beneath the fluorescents in the vertical filing cabinets we call office buildings. Dads endure no end of corporate politics, endless, mindless meetings and corporate travel. To say a 40-hour week is the exception and not the rule is an understatement. And after fathers eventually get home, thanks to the miracles of modern technology, they are expected often to keep the ball moving on whatever projects they left behind when they hopped on the 7:30 eastbound train. Between all this they make time for the kids and even an hour or two for their harried spouses.

There is a quiet heroism that comes from decades of self-sacrifice and often even self-abnegation that many fathers often are not recognized for. In this remote-control, mouse-click age, the commitment, responsibility and stick-to-itiveness demonstrated by dads every day when it would be far easier and perhaps much more fun to just run off and flake out is truly inspiring and worthy of all possible praise for a least one day a year.

Raising the next generation isn’t easy and it’s not for the faint of heart but without it we’d have no stable society and no posterity. So while it often takes two parents, we shouldn’t forget the fathers who often eschew attention. Sometimes the best way to express it is just the simple way, “Thanks Dad.”

Food as a Drug

Our neighborhood suffers from addictions and abuse but contrary to what you might expect, drugs and alcohol are probably not foremost among them. What afflicts vast segments of our population here in The Five Towns is overeating and over indulging.

In the Orthodox community this can been evidenced by the profusion of eateries, take-out, catering and grocery establishments. Go to Rockville Centre and there is a bar every other storefront that may serve food, here it is food places that probably only serve just more food and has no bar.

The heavy eating culture takes off in earnest on Thursday evenings at places specializing in Cholent – a Jewish type of stew-slash-chili that is slow cooked for many hours and comprising beef, beans, barley and potatoes. No clubbing for Five Towns men – they can be found in droves scarfing down enormous plates of Cholent, often topped with freshly carved Shwarma (a type of Souvlaki) beginning at 10:00 p.m. and running well past 1:00 a.m. at places like Delicious Dishes in Woodmere and Mauzone and Carlos & Gabby’s in Lawrence.

This gets followed by a Thanksgiving-sized dinner on Friday nights in “honor of the Sabbath.” On Saturday mornings many will start-off at a “Kiddush Club” at 10:30, followed by a Kiddush smorgasbord at 11:30 and then lunch at 12:30 or 1:00. A “third meal” around 8:00 p.m. is then followed by a post-Sabbath run for ice cream and/or pizza. All you have to do is lay out a table with food in front of Jews and they attack it as though it were their last meal. Want a crowd? Advertise food.

Two weeks ago I attended a “destination Bar Mitzvah” at a swank hotel in Westchester held over 30-plus hours from Friday afternoon thru Sunday morning. I lost count of the food somewhere after the eighth meal/buffet. Passover programs in Florida, Arizona and the Caribbean are deemed a failure unless food reaches wretched excess proportions. Ditto with celebrations like weddings and organizational dinners. If the Iranians really want to defeat Israel and the Jewish people, forget terror or nukes. All they really need to do is put out a free daily shmorg and we’ll be stupefied to a level of inertia and inaction.

The Orthodox community suffers from the opposite of anorexia – I’ll call it “Kugelexia,” as many haven’t met a free kugel they don’t like. Synagogues also only seem to know how to serve regular soda with high fructose corn syrup to wash all this food down. Seltzer? For wimps. The prodigious eating is to a point where we need synagogues and kosher restaurants to put in bars and offer free cocktails just to moderate the vast food intake. Exercise? Gym classes? After school sports? Please, this just gets in the way of more eating. I would wager that per-capita food consumption in The Five Towns is significantly above the national average.

There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. We need to see more folks jogging, bike-riding, packing the gyms and trimming down (although the vast number of doctors in our area might not be happy with all this newfound health, bad for business) and kids need a whole lot more fresh air, sunshine and running around. We’re killing ourselves with kindness and Kiddush. “Super-size Me” needs to be dialed back to “regular” and we need to psychologically examine what compulsive need all this food satisfies, what pacifier-effect all this food has.

Eating at this level won’t somehow make up for all the starving our ancestors endured in Eastern Europe or wherever, all it does is turn us into balloons and set a bad example for the next generation. I call on the Cholent purveyors to take the first step by offering chi-chi nouvelle-cuisine sized portions and charge exponentially more for trough-sized plates. We need to stop glorifying groaning tables and instead heap praise on the grunts emanating from those working out.

The Zeitgeist

           

Mexican Coke (left), U.S. bottled 6-pack and a fatty Hot Pastrami Sandwich.

Gourmet Imported Coke and When Pastrami was Pastrami

One of the things about working in publishing or the media are the long and sometimes odd hours, it’s not exactly a 9-5 job. Thanks to my Blackberry (being sarcastic here) it can sometimes seem like a 24/7 job. Journalists are known to be big consumers of caffeinated products. We have two coffee machines here in our office that get a lot of use. I’m not a coffee guy (never cared for the taste) and generally shy away from caffeine in general but sometimes you just need a jolt to get over the hump at some strange hour of the day or night.

My stimulant of choice on those rare occasions when I will indulge is classic Coca-Cola. But, I’m very particular on what kinds of Coke as would befit someone who spent 18 years in the wine business. For me, Coke is best in thick glass bottles. Somehow, plastic bottles or cans diminish Coke’s taste. Cans make it tinny and plastic makes it flatter to my palate. Obtaining Coke in thick glass bottles isn’t as easy as it was back in the day as glass costs more to make, more to fill, more to pack and most significantly in these times of high energy costs, more to ship.

In light of that you probably won’t be surprised to learn that Coke in thick glass carries a premium price just about anywhere. Here in The Five Towns, Key Food in Woodmere generally carries six packs of the little glass bottles, the kind that were so ubiquitous decades ago. These don’t come cheap and I tend to sip them sparingly like some rare vintage Burgundy or Bordeaux. Lately there is an alternate source of glassed-in Coke – at many area convenience stores (such as the 24-hour shop down the block from our offices on Broadway in Woodmere) one can now find 12-ounce tall bottles of Coke smuggled in (I mean “imported”) from Mexico. These bottles are the Holy Grail of Coke as the Mexicans use real cane sugar (the original, original recipe) instead of the hated high-fructose corn syrup which has helped turn America into a nation of obese burghers. These bottles absolutely look and taste the way Coke did in 1968. They also are priced like fine vintage wine at $2 a bottle. Compared with the cost of a latte at Starbucks, I suppose that’s something of a bargain however. I remember buying these bottles from vending machines for a quarter, but then I also remember candy bars for a nickel, (yes, they were that price in the mid to late 60s) Good Humor ice cream for a dime, pizza for 25 cents, the Atlantic Beach Bridge toll for 10 cents and the subway for 35 cents (late 70s).

My ultimate Coke experience is even harder to come by these days and that’s at a genuine soda fountain where they mix Coke syrup with seltzer and even better, will make you a real cherry Coke with Coke and cherry syrup. There just is something so intrinsically American about a juicy burger with lettuce, tomato and onion with a fountain Coke that foreigners will never fathom. These days in an effort to keep trim, I rarely consume any kinds of soda, let alone Coke. But when I’m having a Coke, I want a Coke, not some diet thing with chemicals that purports to be a Coke. Way back in the day I used to like Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray when it was also made with real sugar and only came in big glass bottles that could only, tantalizingly, be obtained at kosher delis and never at supermarkets. Today, the plasticized corn syrup version is a pale imitation of its original self (ditto with the cream soda) along with the quality of much kosher deli in general.

There was a time when men were men, women were women and pastrami, corned beef and brisket came piping hot out of steam trays and were so moist and tender from the steaming that it would melt in your mouth. The meat had fat in it (no one asked for lean pastrami – please!) and the rye bread had real onions, garlic and/or seeds permeated and infused throughout the bread, not just as some decorative ornaments on the exterior crust. Chopped liver was made with chicken fat and pickles, peppers and sauerkraut were so pungent you would wince from taking a bite. And the people who ate this stuff all the time (not just once and a while as we do these days) somehow managed to live well into their 80s (or so it seemed) and beyond without working out, aerobics, spinning classes or marathon running. (Granted, they didn’t look too good though…).

One reason for this diminution in the quality of much deli is because the old timers who but their body and soul into smoking and curing their own corned beef and pastrami were just as smart and talented and driven as their progeny who now are some of the nation’s top financiers, attorneys, real estate moguls and movie producers. But they never had the educational opportunities our generation did, do they did deli.

Homogenized standardization and mass-market production is the rule of the day, but still, once and a while with a “contraband” Mexican bottle of Coke imported from Monterrey one can kick back and feel that all is still right with the world, that we’re heading off to a barbeque or for deli in my late grandfather’s block-long white Cadillac Sedan DeVille, that $5 was a lot of money and that no one can reach me across six platforms of media at all hours because Blackberrys and i-Phones hadn’t been invented yet.

The Zeitgeist

Here is a very inventive and ingenious solution to the seemingly intractible problem of the Middle East. It also has the benefit of being very, very funny. Well worth 3 minutes of your time!