This blade slices, it dices

Top chefs adore them, Rachael Ray sells them, so what's the big fuss about Japanese knives?

By Harris Salat

Topics:Food

In the Quentin Tarantino movie “Kill Bill,” Uma Thurman flies to Okinawa on a fateful mission: to find the greatest samurai blade ever forged. There she meets a white-robed master blacksmith who hands her a gleaming katana and solemnly intones, “I can tell you, with no ego, this is my finest sword.”

Like Uma, I went on a quest for “Japanese steel.” But my intentions were less homicidal: I needed it to chop shiitake, fillet tuna and julienne carrots. I’m a reporter by trade but am fascinated by Japanese food — so much so that I volunteer a couple nights a week in the kitchen of a Japanese restaurant. The knives of the cooks all say the same thing: “Made in Japan.”

And not just those of the cooks. Since the mid-’90s, Japanese knives have become de rigueur in professional kitchens of all stripes — edging out, so to speak, German and French blades. As top chefs like Thomas Keller, Charlie Trotter and Jean-Georges Vongerichten discovered Japanese knives, home cooks began to follow, and in the last five years sales have exploded. Even the enterprising Rachael Ray now hawks an “East/West” blade based on Japanese design.

“They’re perfectly engineered,” said legendary four-star chef David Bouley. As he pulled out blade after Japanese blade — he owns 50 — he explained that these knives cut through the cells of ingredients so cleanly and precisely that food oxidizes more slowly, and tastes better as a result.

When I asked chef Eric Ripert, of New York’s hallowed Le Bernardin, he got philosophical about his Japanese blades (all 25 of them): “When you own a Japanese knife, you show your commitment and passion for cooking,” he said. “You’re showing the other guys you’re serious about what you do.”

My own chef put it simply: “Get yourself some Japanese knives, man.”

I decided to travel, à la Uma, to the source: a gritty industrial city called Sakai, 350 miles southwest of Tokyo. This old port has been the capital of samurai sword and knife manufacturing in Japan since the 1300s. A small band of artisans here still work in the traditional way, handcrafting blades in tiny workshops tucked between bland apartment buildings and factories.

A knife wholesaler named Junro Aoki offered to guide me, and we drove to a prefab warehouse that doubled as a smithy. Inside the soot-covered, dimly lit space a blacksmith stood in a cramped 2-foot-deep pit, face-to-flame with a coal-fueled forge breathing 1,400 degrees of blistering heat. He was 5 feet tall and wire thin, wearing a grimy turtleneck tucked into grey slacks, a denim shop apron and wooden flip-flops with purple socks. Prescription glasses framed his eyes. A cotton glove covered his right hand. That was it for protective gear. The fire from the forge cast an orange glow on his long face.

He didn’t look up at us. With a pair of steel tongs, he shifted a white-hot steel bar from the forge to an anvil and began smacking it with a hammer. His head bobbed as he whacked the fiery metal only a couple of feet from his face. Sparks kicked up at him, but he didn’t flinch. A knife — a fish-slicing yanagi — began to take shape from the bar. He tossed it on the dirt floor to cool.

Only then did he hop out of the pit to greet us. Up close I could see his clothes were peppered with tiny burn holes from the sparks. His name is Keijiro Doi. He’s 80 years old and has been blacksmithing for six decades. He forges more than 100 different kinds of knives, shaping them by intuition and feel. “The fire and steel are both alive to me,” he explained. His work is part craft, part art — part sorcery. I asked him how he knows when a blade is ready.

“I can tell,” he said.

By the time he finishes a knife, Doi has pounded it from a half-inch-thick steel bar down to a fifth-of-an-inch hardened carbon steel blade. He and his 52-year-old son, who helps him, finish about a dozen a day. The blades are dull gray in color, with no edge yet. The thin steel is incredibly strong. I tried to bend one I found in a junk pile. No dice.

This metal is key to understanding Japanese knives. Steel, of course, is an alloy of iron and carbon and other elements. Hardened steel — the stuff of knives — comes from heating, cooling and pounding steel until you crush together its molecules. Japanese carbon steel derives from techniques originally developed to produce steel for samurai swords. Its exceptional hardness lets you hone an incredibly sharp edge on the blade.

Shape is also critical. Japanese knives come in two broad styles: Western and traditional. Western looks like the double-edged knives we know. A gyutou is what we’d call a classic chef’s knife — this is the one American chefs typically buy. Traditional Japanese kitchen knives, on the other hand, come in three main shapes: yanagi, usuba and deba. The yanagi, which looks like a long willow leaf, is for slicing raw fish. The usuba has a wide rectangular blade for cutting vegetables. The deba is a heavy blade like a thick chef’s knife, for portioning fish and chicken.

The Japanese endlessly riff on these three shapes. The local knife museum displays more than 160 different styles of knives, specialized blades to cut sea eel, freshwater eel (four distinct styles from four cities), whale, horse mackerel, the head of the bonito fish, Chinese cabbage, watermelon, silkworm, rolled sushi, soba noodles and 800-pound tunas — this last one an astonishing 6-foot-long maguro kiri that looks like a sword. On top of this, the knives come in different sizes and combinations of steel. The museum alone sells 18 kinds of deba.

Traditional Japanese knives typically have one side sharpened, the other not, which lets you make precise, parchment-thin cuts.

In Sakai City, I was after that old-time religion: traditional Japanese knives, still hand-forged from carbon steel by master blacksmiths like Mr. Doi. (Western-style knives, on the other hand, are typically machine-stamped from a variety of alloys.) Once ready, the wholesaler walks the blades over to a sharpener’s workshop. I never realized sharpening was such a fine art, but here “master sharpeners” are revered craftsmen.

The wholesaler introduced me to Yukinora Oda, another 5-footer north of 70. He’s been sharpening knives for more than half a century. A stocky, gruff man with a green beret framing his fleshy face, he wore a tattered sweater vest over a sweatshirt and shuffled around in an ancient pair of bedroom slippers. A Mild Seven drooped from his mouth with an impossibly long ash.

The sharpener stood on a crate hunched over a stone grinding wheel 4 feet in diameter and a half a foot wide, a wheel that screamed like an airplane engine as it turned. Securing the blade in a wooden holder, he pressed it against the whirling stone, sliding it from side to side, his face 18 inches off the surface. He guided the screeching blade by feel — he couldn’t actually see it. Long sparks shot forward as he worked. The cigarette hung from his lips.

Sharpening and finishing a knife is a 25-step process, he explained. In the final step, the sharpener knelt on a worn cushion and stroked a knife along a fine grit sharpening stone. He pulled a finished yanagi from a bucket of neon green anti-rust liquid. The transformation from raw blade was remarkable: The handcrafted knife was perfectly engineered, polished and scalpel sharp. A thing of beauty.

At the wholesaler’s office, another one of Sakai’s Sunshine Boys, an engraver in his 70s — also 5 feet tall — arrived to freehand chisel Japanese calligraphy on the surface of the blade. Mr. Aoki tapped a hand-turned magnolia-wood handle onto it and wrapped it carefully. The knife was ready. “Hojo toiro,” he said, satisfied — an old expression meaning that each knife has a unique personality because it was fashioned by hand.

That evening Mr. Aoki invited me to dinner at a restaurant specializing in fugu, or blowfish. If there’s anything that puts a chef — and his blades — to the ultimate test, it’s this Japanese delicacy. Fugu’s internal organs have lethal levels of tetrodotoxin — a poison with no known antidote. How you cut this fish makes all the difference between a repeat customer and a dead one. Chefs need a special license to prepare it.

As we sat on a tatami mat before a low table, the chef delivered a platter of raw fugu so fresh the flesh was still twitching. We poached them in boiling fish stock and sipped hot sake infused with roasted fugu fins. Tetrodotoxin or not, it tasted great. The chef was a fit 42-year-old with a buzz cut, proud of his fugu-making skills — and his knives.

“Yeah, I’ve spent a lot of money on knives,” he said, laughing as he walked into his kitchen, an open space before a long dining counter. He pulled out blades from drawers and boxes. A half-dozen more were stuck into two old Yellow Pages taped together and sitting on a shelf above his head.

The chef soon laid 20 knives on the counter. Each had a specific purpose: Three were just for slicing fugu into sashimi. How sharp were they? He grabbed one of the slicers and split in half a piece of fugu skin — thinner than cardboard — lengthwise.

As I watched the chef work, it seemed his knives didn’t so much cut ingredients as float through them. “The knife becomes an extension of my hand,” he explained. He rested his index finger on a blade’s spine and guided it almost effortlessly.

The chef sharpens and polishes his knives every day (carbon steel rusts if you’re not careful). He pointed to a new deba — the heavy fish chopper — and one a decade old. The older blade had shrunk by a third from repeated honing.

“Our knives are like our swords,” the chef said, invoking the devotion the samurai had to their weapon. He wiped his slicer with a towel, reached up and jammed it back into the tattered phone books. It was time to get some Japanese knives, man.

: More Harris Salat

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The rise of Big Meat-bred super bugs

Despite the public health risk of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the lobbyist-swayed FDA keeps easing regulations

By Martha Rosenberg, Alternet

(Credit: Reuters/Mike Cassese)

Topics:AlterNet, Food, Food Business

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

So far, 2012 is bringing bad news for people who don’t want “free antibiotics” in their food.

Antibiotics are routinely given to livestock on factory farms to make them gain weight with less feed and keep them from getting sick in confinement conditions. But the daily dosing, at the same time it lowers feed needs, lowers drug effectiveness and produces antibiotic resistant bacteria or super bugs that can be deadly to people.

This month, researchers found 230 out of 395 pork cuts bought in U.S. stores were contaminated with a super bug called MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus). Worse — there were “no statistically significant differences” between “conventionally raised swine and swine raised without antibiotics,” reported the researchers.

Why would meat labeled “raised without antibiotics” be as full of super bugs as conventional and factory farmed meat? It can be contaminated with MRSA at the farm, by slaughterhouse workers who carry MRSA or by other meat, if processing equipment is not “cleaned out between runs of certified organic and non-certified organic meats,” say the researchers. A 2009 study of swine workers in Iowa and Illinois found that almost half carried MRSA.

And last month, the FDA scrapped its three-decade-long effort to regulate the use of the popular human antibiotics penicillin and tetracycline in livestock. While the FDA says in the announcement that it “remains concerned about the issue of antimicrobial resistance,” it also says “contested, formal withdrawal proceedings” consume too much of its time and money. For example, withdrawing nitrofurans from livestock use took 20 years, DES (diethylstilbestrol) took seven years and enrofloxacin took five years and cost $3.3 million, says the agency. Hey, we’re just the government that makes the laws and enforces them. They’re Big Meat!

Cynics might have seen the concession to Big Meat coming when a report from a USDA-contracted researcher that asserted that MRSA kills more Americans per year than AIDS “disappeared” from the National Agricultural Library Web site last summer with no explanation, says reporter Tom Philpott. Of course, MRSA is only one antibiotic-resistant germ and not even the one clinicians fear the most anymore. Clinicians also worry about vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE), encouraged by the use of the antibiotic virginiamycin in livestock; Clostridium difficile, a serious intestinal bug developing resistance; and resistant Acinetobacter baumannii which has so afflicted U.S. troops in Iraq it has been dubbed “Iraqibacter.”

And days after the penicillin announcement, there was another concession. The FDA issued new, watered down rules on the use of cephalosporins in livestock (a different type of antibiotic) after Big Meat muscled down the FDA’s original order to prohibit cephalosporins in 2008 (which also disappeared with little explanation). Cephalosporins are antibiotics like Cefzil and Keflex used for pneumonia, strep throat, salmonella and skin and urinary tract infections in humans and one type of antibiotic that Clostridium difficile is developing tolerance to. Over a million human salmonella infections occur in the U.S. every year, resulting in 16,000 people being hospitalized and nearly 600 deaths, reported the Harford Advocate.

In 2008, the FDA announced that there was “evidence that extralabel use of these drugs [cephalosporins] in food-producing animals will likely cause an adverse event in humans and, as such, presents a risk to the public health,” and called for their prohibition. Notice the FDA says “will likely cause” not “could likely cause” and “presents a risk” not “could present a risk”?

But by the time hearings were held two months later and lobbyists had worked their magic, the “Cephalosporin Order of Prohibition,” had somehow become a “Hearing to Review the Advances in Animal Health Within the Livestock Industry.” Prohibition — advances, same idea, right?

At the hearings, the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), the Animal Health Institute, a Big Pharma trade group and the egg, chicken, turkey, milk, pork and cattle industries whined that they could not “farm” without antibiotics because more feed would be required and the animals would get sick from being immobilized over their own manure.

“To raise turkeys without antibiotics would increase the incidence of illness in turkey flocks,” sniveled the National Turkey Federation’s Michael Rybolt. Antibiotics “reduce the level of potentially harmful bacteria which result in infections and sickness,” contended the National Milk Producers Federation Robert D. Byrne (key word, “potential”). Antibiotics decrease the amount of land needed to raise animals and provide a lower-priced “wholesome” product for the public, said one farm operator after another. One even claimed that manure is reduced because animals eat less. In their twisted thinking that would make factory farming green.

While most ag reps at the hearings defended the use of antibiotics for “treatment, prevention and control of disease,” the AVMA’s Christine Hoang actually went so far as to call the less feed that antibiotics make possible a “health-promoting” effect and a “therapeutic use.” Maybe she meant health and therapy for the bottom line.

After the hearings, W. Ron DeHaven, who was the USDA’s top vet before leaving for industry and helming the AVMA, penned a rambling, almost incoherent 18-page letter with 62 footnotes to the FDA. Cephalosporin-resistant “human pathogens” aren’t increasing, says the letter, and even if they are, they’re not affecting human health and even they’re affecting human health, how do you know it’s from the livestock drugs and even if it’s from the livestock drugs, the FDA has no legal authority to ban cephalosporin. Got that?

Alternately maudlin and accusatory, the letter plays on terrorism fears by calling a cephalosporin ban a “food security issue” affecting “the number of animals available for the food supply.” It also plays on humanitarian sentiments by claiming a ban would impede veterinarians’ ability “to relieve the pain and suffering of animals” as if cephalosporins are painkillers and other drugs aren’t available. (And as if antibiotics are given for animals’ welfare instead of revenue welfare.)

Nowhere in the letter is mention of the reason Big Meat won’t let go of antibiotics: The industry is able to raise thousands of animals in crowded conditions that would otherwise kill them for prices as “artificial” as the drugs they are raised on. Big Pharma’s invasion into farming is probably the biggest reason for the demise of family farms which are no longer able to compete in price.

But less than a month after the letter was sent, on November 25, the FDA quietly revoked the prohibition. Good hire, AVMA!

Of course, the revolving door between government/Big Pharma lobbying has a distinguished tradition from Louisiana representative-turned-lobbyist, Billy Tauzin, who presided over the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) until 2010, to former CDC Director Julie Gerberding, who presided over the 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak and turned up as — anybody? — head of Merck vaccines when she left the government.

It was not a great surprise that the FDA’s new cephalosporin livestock rules, four years later, had the Agribusiness Seal of Approval. “We thought the original order was too broad and unnecessarily prohibited uses that were not likely to cause problems for human health,” said AVMA’s Dr. Hoang, perhaps tempted to take a bow.

The new rules, which no longer ban cephalosporins, limit “large and lengthy dosing in cattle and swine,” says the New York Times, but allow uses “the F.D.A. has not specifically approved,” and wide use in ducks and rabbits. Yum. Still, the new rules prohibit one unsavory factory farming practice that few are aware of–the “routine injections of cephalosporins into chicken eggs.”

In 2008, while inspecting egg operations, the FDA caught hatcheries injecting cephalosporins directly into chicken eggs, “rather than by the approved method of administering the drug to day-old chicks.” The same year, Tyson Foods was caught injecting eggs with a different antibiotic, the human antibiotic gentamicin, linked to serious side effects. Tyson especially had egg on its face, because the previous year the government disallowed its slogan “Raised Without Antibiotics,” because the ionophores it adds to poultry feed are antibiotics. Ionophores are antibiotics added to poultry and cattle feed for the same “feed efficiency” as produced with other antibiotics but they are not used in humans. Tyson had just backpedaled into the new phrase, “Raised Without Antibiotics That Impact Antibiotic Resistance In Humans,” when it was caught playing fast and loose with gentamicin. Oops.

Several scientific journals report that antibiotics injected into the eggs of layer hens before they hatch produce drug residues in the eggs they lay.

The abuse of antibiotics on farms was one of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s last stands. “It seems scarcely believable that these precious medications could be fed by the ton to chickens and pigs,” he wrote in a bill called the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2007 (PAMTA), which has yet to pass. “These precious drugs aren’t even used to treat sick animals. They are used to fatten pigs and speed the growth of chickens. The result of this rampant overuse is clear: meat contaminated with drug-resistant bacteria sits on supermarket shelves all over America,” said Kennedy years before this month’s report on MRSA-contaminated pork. The meat industry, “is rampantly misusing antibiotics in an attempt to cover up filthy, unsanitary living conditions among animals,” echoed Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., who cosponsored the bill and holds degrees in microbiology and public health.

Over 70 percent of antibiotics go to livestock, not people, says the bill and they are used on over 83 percent of grower-finisher swine farms, cattle feedlots, and sheep farms and found in 48 percent of U.S. streams.

Of course, it’s no surprise that Big Meat denies the dangers of antibiotic resistance and/or its part in it and opposes PAMTA. “We don’t believe we are the main cause of antibiotic resistance,” Dave Warner, the National Pork Producers Council’s communications director told Johns Hopkins Magazine. Doctors who overprescribe antibiotics are the culprit, claims Warner, since “There are only 67,000 pork producers.” Only?

The chicken industry also pleads innocent. “We believe our use is responsible and limited,” Richard Lobb, public relations director for the National Chicken Council, told the Hartford Advocate.

What is a surprise is that Big Pharma, supposed medical professionals, is also “flat earth” when it comes to antibiotic resistance. Elanco, the animal division of Eli Lilly, says that, “Monitoring antibiotic resistance in raw meat products is not an appropriate measure to represent the bacteria that reach the consumer,” in an online brochure, “because cooking destroys these bacteria, and dead bacteria cannot transmit antibiotic resistance.” Plus–who minds germs in their food if the germs are dead? Elanco also asserts, in the brochure, that livestock antibiotics keep occurrences of “food poisoning” down as if food poisoning were unrelated to farm conditions! In fact the size and industrialization of US factory farms is such a factor in food poisoning, it drove the passage of new federal food safety laws in 2010.

The Animal Health Institute, representing Abbott, Bayer Healthcare, Boehringer Ingelheim Vetmedica, Elanco/Lilly, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer is even more flat earth.

“There is no scientific evidence that antibiotics used in food animals have any significant impact on the effectiveness of antibiotics in people,” it deadpans in a brochure created specifically to oppose PAMTA. “People would be more likely to die from a bee sting than for their antibiotic treatment to fail because of…resistant bacteria in meat or poultry.” But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that hospital-associated infections, which are likely to be antibiotic resistant, cause or contribute to 99,000 deaths each year. Under 100 people die a year from all stinging insects.

And AVMA? “At the heart of this discussion is the premise that the use of antibiotics in animal agriculture directly contributes to bacterial resistance in humans,” says the vet group, urging its members to fight PAMTA. A livestock antibiotic ban in Denmark, “has not shown any clear declines in antibiotic resistance patterns in humans,” says AVMA, though CBS News and Food Safety News find otherwise.

Antibiotic resistant intestinal infections increased in Europe after certain antibiotics were introduced on farms, reported CBS. But after Denmark declared a ban, it “drastically reduced antibiotic-resistant bacteria in animals and food.” The Denmark’s Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries reported that the ban resulted in “overall reductions of antimicrobial resistance countrywide,” said Food Safety News.

Nor is AVMA the only veterinary group that sides with industry over animals. The American Association of Swine Veterinarians was one of the groups filing a friend-of-the-court brief supporting this week’s Supreme Court ruling, National Meat Association v. Harris, that overturned California’s humane slaughter law. The law was enacted after the 2008 Westland/Hallmark school lunch meat scandal in which cows too sick and weak to walk were videotaped forklifted and “water-boarded” to the slaughter line. The humane slaughter law prohibits buying, selling or receiving downer animals and processing, butchering or selling them for human consumption. It requires non-ambulatory animals to be immediately euthanized.

Big Meat and its veterinarians argued the California law “criminalizes” the work of federal slaughterhouse inspectors who are presumably preventing slaughterhouse atrocities without the California law’s help. But former USDA inspectors Lester Friedlander, DVM and Dean Wyatt, DVM have testified that federal inspection is a mockery that puts the public at risk at the same time it permits appalling animal abuse.

In fact, antibiotics form such a huge part of Big Pharma revenues, antibiotic resistance literally divides medical professionals along species lines. Many medical groups, including the American Medical Association and the American Public Health Association, support PAMTA out of concern for patient infections while big veterinary groups tend to oppose it.

At first it looked like PAMTA might have a friend in the FDA’s newly appointed deputy commissioner, Joshua Sharfstein, who was a pediatrician and the former food safety staffer for Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif. Both he and the newly appointed FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, had public health backgrounds and were not industry insiders.

At a 2009 House Rules Committee meeting, Sharfstein surprised lawmakers by indicating that the FDA supported PAMTA. The ag lobby was enraged because Sharfstein’s remarks implied White House Office of Management and Budget approval, yet there had been no briefing.

“You deliberately tried to blindside some of us on this committee, and we don’t appreciate that,” barked Rep. Leonard Boswell, D-Iowa, former House agriculture subcommittee on livestock chairman, to Michael Taylor, FDA senior adviser on food safety (considered a friend of agribusiness, until the Sharfstein remarks).

But by early 2011, Kennedy had died, Sharfstein had left the FDA abruptly and without comment, and Big Meat had already showed lawmakers where they could put their cephalosporin ban. Congress seemed to have little appetite left to go up against Big Meat.

So it’s no surprise that in 2012, the FDA is waving through major livestock antibiotics, attaching Mickey Mouse restrictions on others, and U.S. meat is full of super bugs — even meat labeled “raised without antibiotics.”

: Martha Rosenberg frequently writes about the impact of the pharmaceutical, food and gun industries on public health. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune and other outlets More Martha Rosenberg

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The recipe for security

A friend tells me about a doughnut tradition that's held her family together through tough times for generations

By Felisa Rogers

Jan's grandparents, Opal and Paul, with her father, Jerry (Credit: Courtesy of Jan Kinney)

Topics:Heirlooms, Food

The house is big and heavy-timbered, with log supports and ceiling beams hewn from trees that once grew nearby. Inside, there is chatter and light and the hiss of boiling grease; outside skeins of cloud settle over a dark winter forest.

Jan stands at the wooden kitchen island. She cuts neat circles from a rectangle of flattened dough. She is thin, with short graying hair and blue eyes that are at once friendly and shrewd. Her three granddaughters run screaming loops through the kitchen, and guests cluster around the bar inspecting the cocktail selection, but Jan seems unflustered by the crowd. She passes a platter of uncooked doughnuts to her son-in-law Lou, who mans a stock pot of bubbling oil.

As a general rule, I do not like doughnuts, but I make an exception once a winter. I’ve been attending the annual Kinney doughnut party since I was a kid. But it’s not just nostalgia that compels me to eat Kinney doughnuts — the powdered confections are piping hot, with a texture that is at once pillowy and chewy. I wash down a chocolate-filled doughnut hole with a French75, and the winter months ahead seem to promise cozy cheer instead of dreary gloom. As Jan’s granddaughter Opal chases past me, I think of parties in this house when I was little, of eating doughnuts till I was sick, and of the year it actually snowed and a fantastic wooden toboggan materialized. I remember, as I often do, Jan’s son Japhy, who was two months older than me and a hero of my childhood.

A few days after the party, Jan and I meet so that she can tell me more about the doughnut recipe’s background, about her grandparents, who migrated west in a Model T Ford loaded with all their earthly possessions. The plan is to walk while we talk. We drive to Jan’s favorite hiking spot in my car, a decrepit ’92 Honda Civic with no exhaust system to speak of. I’m a little embarrassed because Jan is a neat and orderly and extremely functional person, and the car is anything but. I’ve cleaned it up a little in her honor, but it’s beyond hope — the floor is covered in a thick layer of pine needles and dust. Jan is not surprised, of course. She’s known me all my life and views my foibles with a wry and expectant eye.

We park at the foot of a logging road. As expected, Jan exclaims about my inappropriate shoes and my hatlessness. Her concern is not unfounded — rain smatters the steep gravel road. As we ascend into a windy forest of giant firs, Jan recalls her grandparents’ relocation from Kansas to Oregon. 1931 was a hard year for the family: Jan’s grandfather Paul was out of work and his wife, Opal, had just lost a child. “An 18-month old girl,” Jan remembers with a precision that hurts. Opal didn’t want to leave their tight-knit German community, but Paul decided to go west. He’d heard there was work in Oregon. Opal acquiesced.

“There were two kids and two adults and she was massively pregnant with a third kid,” Jan says. “They packed the family and all their stuff into a Model T Ford, and they did not have a trailer. When they came to the mountains they just couldn’t make it up the roads. They had to offload stuff. But even then, the carburetor didn’t work going at a slant and there were areas when they had to put the car in reverse and go up the mountain in backwards. It was just epic. They were like the Joads — you know, from ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’”

Jan remembers her grandmother as neither severe nor especially sweet. “I always look at Grandma as someone who had so much to give to the world. And how could she do that within the constraints of the society at that time is really interesting to me,” Jan says. When I ask her about the basic tenets of Opal’s character, she answers right off the bat: “Opal? Safety, security, order. She was a classic German housefrau in that her house was always clean and orderly and it was important to her that it be that way … But at the same time she was very creative, which I think is why she was a good cook,” Jan muses. Opal made a point of bringing the kids together for an annual winter doughnut party, an old family tradition. “Always my grandmother’s kitchen,” Jan muses. “For me it was always about safety and security and warmth and acceptance. She liked cooking. She loved the presentation — the doughnuts were always about presentation, and that came through in how they were cooked. It wasn’t a chaotic scene when we were making doughnuts at her house.”

Jan’s own parents were young and eccentric, sometimes chaotic. Jan was an orderly little girl with a heavy sense of responsibility for her younger siblings. She saw her grandmother Opal as a haven. Although she is thankful that her artistic mother gifted her with an abiding curiosity and a love for reading, Jan looked to Opal for security. She remembers her grandmother bringing the family together through food: making sauerkraut, baking bread, fixing summer dinners bright with garden vegetables, frying perfect doughnuts.

The wind picks up and roils the branches of the great firs. Somewhere in the woods, a branch cracks. A blur crosses our path with the sound of wings beating air. Jan pauses in her story. “For the record,” Jan says, “that was a grouse.” A native of western Oregon, Jan has lived in the Oregon Coast Range for most of her life. She married at age 17 and she and her husband, Ray, moved out to the woods to start a family.

“You know, we moved to Deadwood with the intent of creating and being part of a larger community,” Jan says. She sees parallels between her rural community in Oregon and the community Opal left behind in Kansas. This surprises me because Deadwood, Ore., is an infamous enclave of hippies and rednecks, and Opal came from solid German Lutheran stock. As the forest opens up for a view of the adjacent mountains, Jan illuminates the similarities: Although her grandparents were Lutheran, Jan thinks that to them church was really about community, a gathering spot much like Deadwood’s community center and fire hall. “Their kids grew up with a neighborhood,” Jan says. “The parents remained lifelong friends. Cooking and eating was always at the center of social events. You knew people’s foibles and strengths. You accepted them for whatever, loved them even. There were no secrets, which keeps us accountable …” Jan now sees Deadwood as an extension of her own family, which is why she includes the community in the doughnut tradition that was once intended for the immediate family.

After Opal moved to Oregon from Kansas, she managed to get a job at the cannery in Eugene. After that she worked as a housekeeper until she was well into her 60s. Even though she was always busy, she took the time to cook and bake from scratch. From Opal, Jan learned to see cooking as a manifestation of love. She thinks Opal’s fixation with maintaining culinary traditions stems in equal measures from the security of her Kansas community and the uncertainty of her childhood home life.

“She had an insecurity,” Jan says. “When she was 4 or 5, her mother was five months pregnant with her second child, and she developed encephalitis and she died. So grandma lost her mother. Her father couldn’t cope with his wife’s death or with his little daughter, and he farmed her out to his parents. He remarried and eventually took Opal back, but as the much older sibling, she became a caregiver to her father and stepmother’s nine children.” Jan remembers Opal saying that her family never emphasized that she was the half-sister and not her stepmother’s biological daughter.

“So she wasn’t made to feel different?” I ask.

“I think she was, because she said she wasn’t,” Jan says definitely. “Why did she even talk about it if it wasn’t an issue?”

Opal’s story makes me think how our positive aspects are so often shaped in reaction to loss and hardship. In order to survive the vagaries of life, we mimic the people and activities that represent islands of solace. “I think one of the reasons that our family really centered on her traditions was that she was always determined to be the secure, safe person — and nobody was going to feel left out or abandoned,” Jan says. Opal created the sense of family and security she missed as a child, and Jan continued the tradition.

Jan’s family has now weathered the death of her son Japhy, her own battle with cancer, her husband Ray’s back problems and the rewarding but tumultuous experience of generational cohabitation: Jan and Ray now share their home with their grown daughter Mizu, her husband, Lou, their three little girls, and Jan’s mother, Margie. Food is still an important part of family life. Margie is a master gardener, so they are able to maintain Opal’s tradition of garden vegetables. Jan believes in making things from scratch, and every weekend, she bakes enough bread for the entire family. Like Opal, she struggles to find time for everything: After starting out as a young general assistant at a local clinic, she has worked her way up from the bottom to become Director of Quality at a hospital, a job that requires a two-hour commute daily. “Director of Quality” is a pretty apt title for Jan.

When I ask Jan her secret for surviving the long hours and the tumult of a large family, she says that her tongue is calloused from biting it, but then admits that her son-in-law probably feels the same way. This year they argued over the doughnut party. Lou wanted to serve cocktails and other types of fried food such as deep-fried cheese curds and calamari. Jan was resistant to modifying her family tradition. Now she concedes that Lou’s idea wasn’t so bad. “Isn’t that how traditions always are? Don’t they always change? For me the nucleus of the doughnuts is the family. And what that family looks like and when it happens … that’s where all the change happens.”

Opal’s Doughnuts (makes 18)

Equipment

2 bowls
Stock Pot
Doughnut cutter
Cooking thermometer
Paper towels

Ingredients

1 tablespoon yeast
¾ cup of warm milk
1/3 cup of sugar
¼ cup of shortening
1 teaspoon of salt
2 eggs
3-3 ½ cups of flour
Vegetable oil for frying.
Sugar to dust on doughnuts

Directions

In a large bowl, dissolve yeast in warm milk.
Add sugar to mixture.
In a smaller bowl, beat eggs and shortening together.
Add salt and 2 ½ cups of flour to the milk mixture.
Add the egg and butter mixture to the large bowl.
Beat well.
Gradually add more flour to make a moderately soft dough.
Beat or knead until smooth.
Shape dough into a ball and put ball in a greased bowl.
Put dough in a warm place to rise until it doubles (45-60 minutes).
Punch down.
On a lightly floured board, divide the dough in half.
Roll each piece out until it is ½-inch thick.
Cut doughnuts from dough using doughnut cutter. Put doughnuts on plates. Cover and let them rise for another 30 minutes.
Heat vegetable oil in a large pot or fryer.
When oil is 375 degrees, begin frying doughnuts.
Cook each doughnut for about one minute on each side.
Drain doughnuts on paper towels.
Roll doughnuts in sugar.

: Felisa Rogers studied history and nonfiction writing at the Evergreen State College and went on to teach writing to kids for five years. She lives in Oregon’s coast range, where she works as a freelance writer and editor. More Felisa Rogers

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When Michelle Obama came for lunch

I'd been working as a line cook for just three months when the first lady showed up -- and ordered my dish

By Sophie Brickman

First Lady Michelle Obama (Credit: Reuters)

Topics:Food, Michelle Obama, Life stories

This article originally appeared on Gilt Taste.

In my dream scenario, titled “Michelle Obama Drops By for Lunch,” there are a few givens. I’m:

Clean;
Well-rested;
Impeccably dressed;
Well-versed in current events and prepared to deliver a handful of hilarious yet tasteful jokes on relevant topics; and
Ready to Dougie, if asked.

In reality, when Michelle came for lunch,

I hadn’t showered in two days;
I’d slept less than five hours each night for the previous three weeks, due to a recurring nightmare about burning risotto and disappearing pan handles;
I was in a carrot-spattered chef’s coat and oversize pants held up by a belt made of twisted Saran Wrap;
I hadn’t read a paper in weeks and felt comfortable conversing mainly about legumes; and
I’d spent the last week picking up heavy objects “properly,” according to a chiropractor, which required that I continually squat while sticking my butt out. As a result, I was unable to do a stiff-limbed waltz, let alone a shimmy.

I’d been working the lunch service as a line cook at New York City’s Gramercy Tavern for about three months when one morning I arrived to find a secret service agent inspecting my prep.

I froze. Had my sous chef called the FBI to investigate why my carrot puree always needed more salt? As I tried to remember the name of a good lawyer, our Executive Chef, Michael Anthony, motioned everyone to the pass.

“Listen up, guys,” he said, with a grin. “The first lady is on her way in for lunch with a few friends. Everything is going to run just as it would during a normal service, but we’re just going to be extra sharp today, OK?”

Right.

***

I studied social theory in college and, upon graduation, quickly realized that my degree was practical only if I wanted to foment a Marxist revolution. While working at a nonprofit, I found myself craving hard skills that could deliver instant enjoyment, so I enrolled in evening culinary school. I had no agenda, just a love of cooking and a vague notion of eventually writing about food.

I didn’t imagine I’d end up as a line cook. During school, I staged – or interned — at Jean-Georges. There, I spent days peeling and julienning carrots in a windowless basement, wearing a dorky hat signifying to all that I occupied the bottom rung of the kitchen brigade. Few people spoke to me, I snuck radish peelings for lunch because eating in the kitchen seemed to be a sign of weakness, and the closest I got to the master was when he sliced his morning bagel on my cutting board.

I’d all but sworn off professional kitchen work when, at the urging of a friend, I spent a day at Gramercy Tavern. Chef Anthony introduced himself, then invited me to watch him build a halibut dish, going from station to station, taking a little garlic from here, some thyme from there, a radish, some olives, a strawberry (really, a strawberry?). Around us, line cooks whirled through their prep, juggling pans and utensils, cracking jokes. One sang “chowder base” to the tune of Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” – “muh muh my chowder base, muh my chowder base” – as he stirred a big pot. The atmosphere was exhilarating, lively — worlds apart from my previous stage.

Chef effortlessly navigated the line, anticipating the movements of his cooks so that no one bumped into anyone else. I tagged along, bumping into everyone. He cooked, tasted, then handed me a spoon. “Needs a little salt?” he asked. I tasted and shook my head no, baffled that the combination worked.

A few days later, to the surprise of friends, family and myself, I asked to be considered for a full-time position, and later took over the hot appetizer station, where I was responsible for three dishes: barley-carrot risotto, lamb ragu and, a dish added just a week prior to Michelle’s visit, spinach fettuccine with mushrooms.

***

Moments after Chef’s announcement, my fellow line cooks started taking bets on what the first lady would order: “$50 on char!” one called out. “$25 on the trout!” crowed another.

No one bet on any of my three dishes, myself included. She just didn’t seem like a pasta-for-lunch kind of gal.

When the computer spit out the first ticket and Howard, the sous chef, called out, “Obama, VIP,” I was so focused on readying my prep that I barely heard him read out her order: She’d start with a salad, and finish with an entrée portion of … my fettuccine.

For an instant, I was standing on the White House lawn against a backdrop of a giant American flag, expertly flipping mushrooms in slow-mo while the president clapped me on the back, laughing and chanting, “Pasta we can believe in!”

“Sophie!”

I came to. The appetizers had gone out and the kitchen was swarming with sous chefs, one of whom – we’ll call him Andy – was standing at my station.

“I’m going to be handling this,” he said, and when my face fell, he added, “Bring me seven perfect spinach leaves from the walk-in.”

“But— but—” I began to protest, but Andy was already in the zone, setting up his pans, tasting the pasta water for seasoning. I headed toward the stairs, fuming.

Yes, he was an experienced cook and I’d just started. I’d only made the dish a handful of times, and once, my mushrooms had burst into flame, nearly singing my eyebrows off.

But still, I thought as I passed the agent and tromped down the stairs. She picked my pasta. It was my dish. I could handle it. Couldn’t I?

I pushed open the door to the walk-in and proceeded to have a crisis of faith. What did it matter if the leaves were perfect? When they hit the pan, they’d wilt into a green blob anyway, I thought as I ripped open the bin of mizuna — the most expensive salad green in house — and angrily shoved a handful in my mouth. I didn’t even like mizuna. What am I doing in this kitchen anyway?! I grabbed another handful of mizuna, gathered my spinach, and headed back upstairs.

“Corner!” I shouted, rounding the bend. I returned to a kitchen crowded with waiters, busboys, sous chefs and Chef and instead of jostling for position, I paused by the secret service agent. This was the guy who would, presumably, throw himself in front of a bullet to protect the first lady. His eyes moved down to my spinach leaves and hovered there, briefly, before scanning up to meet mine. I gave him a shrug and quick smile, meant to convey, “We all do our part.” He moved his cold, dead eyes back to the kitchen.

Sous chefs, who rarely cooked food to order, were working alongside experienced line cooks, and Chef himself was correcting sauces, adding a spritz of lemon here, a dash of vinegar there, plating dishes and supervising all at once. I watched Andy accomplish in four simple moves what took me twice as many to do — drop the pasta, sear the mushrooms, reduce the sauce and heat the spinach pan. The person next to him asked for a pot, he asked for oil, and both gave the other what he needed without missing a beat. Every movement in the kitchen was quick, deliberate, focused.

“Soph, the spinach?”

I rushed to Andy and, in my most patriotic act to date, handed the perfect leaves over. Something clicked as I watched them hit the hot pan and instantly shrivel. I’d ironed my chef’s coat in culinary school not because it was the first step toward a clean, orderly kitchen, but to dissuade my instructor from referring to me as “la vagabonde,” which he did with regularity. I’d perfected my carrot-peeling swipe at Jean-Georges not to maximize efficiency, but because I harbored a ridiculous fantasy that Jean-Georges would single me out for my peeling skills and reward me with a truffle dinner. Here, I realized a truth of this high-functioning kitchen: Michelle would never know that the leaves I’d picked were the seven best leaves in the bin, but the kitchen would. These chefs pursued excellence for its sake alone.

Andy plated the tangle of pasta and mushrooms, Chef gave the dish a once-over and with his nod, I sprinkled some herbs on top. A waiter wiped the rim clean and whisked the plate out to the dining room. The whole episode, from the moment the entrée course was called until it went out, couldn’t have taken more than five minutes.

Instantly, the kitchen downshifted – one cook grabbed a sip of water, another wiped down his station, quick smiles were exchanged. Andy clapped me on the back and headed downstairs to prep for dinner service and I returned to my station, heady and conscious of my movements as never before. I glanced down at my spattered apron and quickly untied it, turned it inside-out, and put it back on. Howard caught my eye and nodded.

When the busboys returned with plates from Michelle’s table, I found the pasta dish. It was eaten clean, not a spinach leaf left. I felt a twinge of pride, then turned back to my work. Maybe next time, when the kitchen would be swarming with secret service agents, when the ticket spit out read “VIP, President,” I’d be at the stove.

: More Sophie Brickman

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Why Americans sing about food

Elvis helped cement a lyrical tradition where food stands in for everything from sex to rural nostalgia

By Felisa Rogers

Topics:Eatymology, Food, Music

Elvis Presley once said, “Ambition is a dream with a V-8 engine.” At once a gentleman and a rebel, a down-home boy and a global conquistador, the King, who would have celebrated his 77th birthday on Sunday, was a powerful amalgamation of American obsessions. The King loved fast cars. The King loved rock ‘n’ roll. The King loved fried food. And the King knew how to interpret America. Take food, for instance. Elvis was notoriously obsessed with food, and he sang quite a few songs about this favorite topic. But “Crawfish” and “Milk Cow Blues Boogie” say more about our culture than they say about the icon himself. After all, Elvis wasn’t a songwriter: He was drawing from a deep well. American music sizzles with barbecue grease and bubbles like red-eye gravy. Food is a metaphor for all things, from your baby’s biscuits to the King’s caviar.

What does our music say about us? When it comes to food, it says we have dirty minds. For example, Elvis cut “Milk Cow Blues Boogie” in 1955. It was his third record. Several country artists had already recorded the song, which is credited to a bootlegger and bluesman named Kokomo Arnold. “Milk Cow Blues” works perfectly as a blues, country and rock number, which illustrates how much the three types of music have in common when it comes to sentiment:

If you see my milk cow, lord, lord, send her home …
Since my milk cow left me I’ve been treated wrong …
I ain’t had no milk and butter since my cow’s been gone …

The portrayal of women as livestock and sex as butter is pretty typical of the blues tradition, so perhaps it’s not surprising that the lyrics reverberated up through American music over the course of the 20th century: The song has been recorded by everyone from Bob Dylan and the Kinks to Aerosmith, George Strait and Dead Moon.

Elvis funneled the longing, pain, hokey sentimentality and raunchiness of American roots music into the blender of rock ‘n’ roll. He was always frank about his influences; in a 1970 interview, he describes his sound: “It’s a combination of country music and gospel and rhythm and blues all combined. That’s really what it was. As a child I was influenced by all of that.”

Although gospel music soars above the earthly pleasures, food has long been the go-to topic for country and blues lyricists who wanted to spice up their tunes. Bluesmen have a particularly bizarre talent for turning legitimate and seemingly innocent cooking references into raunchy odes to doin’ the nasty. In contrast to later pop songs in which candy, sugar and fruit are the primary metaphors for sex, these old blues tunes are rich in culinary detail, which leads to some incongruous imagery. In “Fried Pie Blues,” Curley Weaver sings: “My baby baked my first biscuits, she baked them nice and brown. Well, it pleased me so well … she bake ‘em with the damper down.” The song encompasses what sounds like a real longing for an actual fried pie, old school cooking strategies that double as sexual metaphors, and steamier sentiments: “My baby she got a mojo; tryin’ to keep it in …”

Over the past hundred years, blues and jazz singers have appropriated every cut of meat for their bawdy purposes. Fats Waller gets frisky with “The Rump Steak Serenade”: “Big, juicy, nice and tender … the rump steak serenade!” Josh White takes it to the next level with “Pigmeat and Whisky Blues”: “I used to like her love, oh that hard pigmeat can’t be beat.” Not to be outdone, Memphis Minnie addresses her butcher:

I’m going to tell everybody I’ve got the best butcher man in town
He can slice your ham, he can cut it from the fat on down
He slice my porkchops and he grinds my sausage too …

A verse later she saucily demands: “I’ve got enough butcherin’ for you to do if you promise me you just only hush your mouth.” As Savannah Churchill sang with panache, “If you’re a hep cat, you like your meat fat.”

But while food in country music sometimes doubles for sex, it more often represents another American fixation: a longing for lost places. From the first days of the recording industry, record executives and promoters capitalized on town dwellers’ nostalgia for lost rustic roots. Most early country musicians were from the rural South, but it was industry professionals who convinced them to play up their “authenticity” by switching from their Sunday best to hokey down-home outfits: overalls and straw hats for men, gingham dresses for women.

Rootsy names were encouraged, bringing us the Fruit Jar Drinkers, the Possum Hunters and the Skillet Lickers. Naturally, down-home cooking worked its way into the recordings: The Possum Hunters stomped their way through “Ham Beats all Meat,” the Coon Creek Girls wanted to know how many biscuits you could eat, and Uncle Dave Macon growled about keeping his skillet good and greasy. If you can think of a fried food, there’s probably a country song about it.

In old country, blues and jazz tunes, down-home food also evokes hard times. Kokomo Arnold’s “Red Beans and Rice” is about being broke in Chicago and wanting to return to Georgia, a place with an abundance of red beans and rice and mercifully few “mean Chicago women.” These songs have a certain defiance: The lyrics imply that the hard life may be hard, but there’s a badass glory to it. If you want to summarize the rock ‘n’ roll attitude, look no further than Bessie Smith belting Coot Grant’s “Gimme a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer”:

I wanna pigfoot and a bottle of beer
Send me ’cause I don’t care
Slay me ’cause I don’t care
Gimme a reefer and a gang o’ gin
Slay me, ’cause I’m in my sin
Slay me ’cause I’m full of gin

Elvis himself was no stranger to hard times. He grew up wearing flour sack shirts, and the family often stretched a pot of beans and corn pone for nights on end. “Poke Salad Annie,” a staple of Elvis’s ’70s shows, describes a family reduced to eating pokeweed:

Some of you all never been down South too much …
I’m gonna tell you a little story, so you’ll understand where I’m talking about
Down there we have a plant that grows out in the woods and the fields,
and it looks something like a turnip green.
Everybody calls it Polk salad. Now that’s Polk salad.
Used to know a girl that lived down there and
she’d go out in the evenings to pick a mess of it …
Carry it home and cook it for supper, ’cause that’s about all they had to eat,
But they did all right.

It’s ironic that Elvis sang this song during the period when he was most removed from his hardscrabble youth: Elvis crooned about poke salad while his belly glittered in jewels and white satin. Yet, the excess of Elvis’ twilight years may well have been a direct result of the poverty of his childhood: Deprivation breeds fascination. You can see it in the King’s infamous fixation on food: Elvis ordered pork chops and gravy at all hours of the night to remind himself both of the comfort of his past (homey Southern favorites) and of his triumph over poverty (his ability to make riches materialize at the snap of his fingers). Oh, and probably also because pork chops are delicious.

As a child of the 1980s, I had an easy time understanding why Michael Jackson was the King of Pop, but I had harder time grasping why Elvis was the King of Rock. Why not Mick or Jimi or Chuck? But as an adult, I get it: In his rise and slow fall, the King mirrored both rock ‘n’ roll and America: from sweaty obscurity to rhinestone-studded excess. You don’t have to be a fan of the 12-bar blues to understand: This story speaks to all Americans. Elvis is King in America because he represents our country to a T: a hip young rebel who ended up overindulged, overprescribed, right wing and paranoid. If Elvis had gone broke, it’d be the perfect analogy. But take heart, America. Old Elvis was still kind of awesome. We’re only obsessed with his decline because he was once so damn beautiful. Maybe we see ourselves in that.

Besides, the King may be dead, but rock ‘n’ roll lives on. Musicians in the post-Elvis era have continued to make the most of food as a metaphor. In 1977, the Dead Boys stripped culinary sexual innuendo down to a brutal scream:

Look at me that way, bitch
Your face is gonna getta punch
I said I don’t need no cook girl
I need lunch!

Southern Culture on the Skids snacked all night on her “eight piece box” of fried chicken, and the Presidents of the United States of America reprised the country music tradition of using food to comment on the superiority of rural life. Other artists have used food to tackle U.S. history head-on: See John Mellencamp’s bizarre decision to write a song about Native American genocide that somehow boils down to deciding between “Hotdogs and Hamburgers.” It doesn’t get much more American than that.

: Felisa Rogers studied history and nonfiction writing at the Evergreen State College and went on to teach writing to kids for five years. She lives in Oregon’s coast range, where she works as a freelance writer and editor. More Felisa Rogers

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How I conquered my fear of latkes

Mom nearly burned down our house making potato pancakes. Then a local shop owner asked me to cook 1,500 of them

By Rebecca Flint Marx, Gilt Taste

(Credit: iStockphoto/Lisa F. Young)

Topics:Food, Life stories

This article originally appeared on Gilt Taste.

A couple thousand years after a small amount of oil burned miraculously for eight days and gave the world Hanukkah, latkes nearly burned down my childhood home. I was six, my sister was five, and our mother was attempting to fry a pan of the potato pancakes when the burner caught fire and the smoke alarm wailed, announcing our imminent doom.

My sister and I were bundled up and marched through waist-high drifts of Michigan snow to the home of our neighbors, whose children we loathed. We stared through their sliding glass doors, waiting for flames to engulf our house. Half an hour later, my mother came back to collect us. The latkes had not, it turned out, succeeded in incinerating our home. But the damage was done: from that day forward my mother refused to make latkes, or even really much at all in the way of potatoes. They were dead to her.

Tradition, however, was not, and so she compromised by way of the supermarket freezer. Each subsequent Hanukkah brought with it boxed potato pancakes left on the counter to thaw before being dressed for the occasion with applesauce and sour cream. Their holiday finery did nothing to disguise their innate sadness, much less ours at being asked to eat them in the name of celebration. They were insult added to injury. And even worse, they were squishy.

An early association between latkes and imminent destruction thus formed, I grew up with a deep distrust of them. Having a deep distrust of a potato pancake is an embarrassing proposition. You may as well admit to having a deep distrust of yarn, or a morbid fear of potpourri. But there it was: On the rare occasion I saw a latke, I smelled smoke and saw panic in my mother’s eyes. They were shifty little suckers, charming people with their delightful promise of salt and grease, but I had their number.

Rejecting one of my religion’s most celebrated, if lumpen, foods in turn complicated my feelings towards Hanukkah, a minor holiday in the eyes of almost all but Jewish children, who view it as the only holiday that brings presents instead of some form of repentance, and thus the only one that really matters.

But because Hanukkah is a celebration of light – specifically, the light that burned for eight days and allowed the ancient Jews to ritually purify the temple they had reclaimed from their Syrian-Greek oppressors – it’s also a celebration of oil, symbolized the frying of latkes. We are a people that like to celebrate our survival with foods all but guaranteed to lessen our chances of it.

So while I was perfectly happy to see Hanukkah roll around every year, and even happy to eat myself sick on the junky chocolate gelt that accompanied it, I sort of resented the whole endeavor for also asking us to celebrate latkes as part of the bargain.

And then I made the mistake of moving to New York, where I began seeing them everywhere, all the time, unyoked almost entirely from their religious context and instead lumped with bagels and knishes as my people’s contribution to the city’s carbohydrate compendium. They sat in repose behind deli glass, brawny and deeply tanned, and had the temerity to appear on brunch menus, tricked out with house-cured salmon gravlax or horseradish crema. They were almost obscene in their quantity, positively indecent in their broad secular appeal.

Friends assumed I must love them, and I hated to disappoint them. Doing so made me feel like the Grinch who stole Hanukkah, a disgrace to the race. Jews, as a rule, are taught not to reject food – think, bubbalah, of the suffering, not only of our people, but of your mother, who wants only that you should eat!

To reject this most deep-fried part of my heritage felt like a rejection of that heritage as a whole, or at least the part that everyone else could relate to, the part that casts Judaism as Falstaff, hungry and avuncular in the face of mortality. So I took my latke hatred underground.

This continued until two years ago, when the owner of a Jewish lox purveyor asked me for a favor. His store had become the closest thing I had to a synagogue in New York: I worshipped there on a weekly, sometimes twice-weekly basis, finding divinity in untold volumes of whitefish salad and lox.

Thanks to the convergence of Christmas and Hanukkah that year, the store was facing great demand for its latkes, whose renown was such that they were also popular with the gentiles. Would I, the owner asked, be interested in coming in for a few nights to cook about 1,500 of them?

I said yes, for the simple reason that my hatred of latkes was exceeded only by my love of the store, and my eagerness to be even a footnote in its almost century-old history. Also, they paid well.

Along with the other woman they hired to help out, I was given an awesome quantity of latke mixture, made by one of the store’s redoubtable cooks, and a frying tutorial by the chef, a Dominican with an almost supernatural ability to know exactly when a latke was ready to be flipped. Despite his expert tutelage, things did not begin auspiciously. Left alone our first night, my colleague N. and I promptly forgot almost everything the chef had shown us. He’d had no trouble keeping 20 latkes in constant rotation on the griddle, all parading their way towards crispy, golden-brown perfection. We, on the other hand, had trouble keeping them out of the trash. One after another they burned or exploded or refused to brown, opting instead for a sort of petulant sogginess.

I took it personally. This was what it had come to, all of these years of distrust: Me, sweating profusely in an oil-splotched T-shirt, driven to a near-babbling panic by a pile of shredded tubers. They knew I hated them, and I’d been foolish to believe we could work out our differences. I tried not to say as much to N., who seemed perfectly sane, albeit as stressed out as I was. We worked in grim silence for five hours until the store’s owner came to lock up for the night. He looked at us, looked at the trash, and inexplicably didn’t fire us.

Instead, we came back the next day for another lesson, and for whatever reason, this time it took. While more than a few latkes went to the trash, the majority did as they were asked. N. and I shaped, fried, flipped, fried, and drained latke after latke, gradually filling deep pans with them. And as I learned how to make the hot fat do my bidding, I began to relax, to find satisfaction in the sight of perfect – or at least perfectly adequate – latkes tucked into their pans and stored in the walk-in over vats of pearly herring.

By the third night, N. and I had settled into a pleasantly mindless routine. The sight of the latkes, evolving in stages across the griddle, had assumed a hypnotic quality, as had the hiss of sizzling oil.

And that’s when I began to appreciate not so much the latkes themselves as the unexpectedly comforting ritual of making them over and over again, of losing myself in repetition and finding, in the process and in this kitchen, a connection to my heritage that I’d never found in a sermon or nine long years of religious school classes.

The rows of latkes formed a through line to people who had died before I was born, who had grated and fried potatoes in celebration simply because they could, and because eating hot, fattening food was both an affirmation and a greasy middle finger extended towards life’s astonishing rottenness.

And so celebrating latkes as part of Hanukkah finally made sense to me. It’s a food symbolic of victory, however short-lived, over those who would prefer we not exist, an inherently fattening food custom-made to cushion us against hardship. Hunched over the flattop, coated in a thin film of atomized grease, I finally came to associate latkes not with imminent destruction but as one of our last – and most lasting – lines of defense against it. I won’t say that I saw God in a potato pancake, but I did see logic, survival, and a stolid sort of beauty. And that, for me, was good enough.