ari . shaleshudes . 2017

“Bamba’s a hit. Children forever have known this.”

I arrive at Ari’s with beer and challah in hand. He’s been boiling the gifelte fish with a carrot and an onion for about an hour. We’ll have to wait another hour or so for it to cool down in the fridge and be solid enough to slice. In the meantime we make our way through the other salads and sides that make up the shaleshudes, the third meal of the Sabath. 

In all of our planning and shopping, I realize I haven’t yet asked a very integral question: what exactly is in the gifelte fish log.

“I’m not sure the particular fish that goes in,” Ari says. He doesn’t seem bothered by this.

“Why does nobody know?”

Does every culture have their hot dog?

“It’s probably been lost to the ages. Like most soul foods it’s all the shitty parts of the fish, the parts that no one’s eating. The tail and probably parts of the head. And it would be put through a grinder and made into a log.” An even more traditional version grinds the fish parts into a sweet paste rather than a log. “It’s way hardcore,” Ari says.

Ari’s mother became increasingly involved in the Jewish Chabbad community as she raised Ari and his brother. To this day, she requests Fridays off from work in order to prepare all of the food before the Sabbath begins. Like a lot of kids, Ari distanced himself from the Jewish religion in high school. But instead of pressuring him to rejoin, his mom acknowledged that “everyone kinda has their own truths.” I read his face for signs of tension, and there doesn’t seem to be any, at least not directed at his mom. In her devotion, she cooked without ceasing, like a Salinger prayer, “And that’s what love is too, you know? I think,” Ari says. “The things that people make for you.”

Ari and I crack open the beers.

“In high school, when we weren’t religious, I’d go out and hang out with my friends and come home fucked up Friday night or Saturday night,” he says. “And so like you’d kinda raid the fridge and this was always what was available. Like a chunk of gilfelte fish, and the bread, and hummus, and whatever was left.”

We start with shots of Kedda grape juice and pickled herring, white fish packed into a 4 oz jar. The fish is silvery and wet, and sparkles with white wine vinegar. It feels like a warm up to the dense, cold fish log that’s solidifying in the fridge.

“What this reminds me of specifically is when we were really young we’d go to the Chabbad house in a remote part of Kansas,” Ari says of the grape juice. “They’d make a blessing of the wine and you’d drink it. Shout out to Kedda,” he says, and takes a sip. 

The Kedda grape juice tastes like a grape flavored cough syrup called Dimetapp I used to take as a kid. Besides missing school, Dimetapp was the only good thing about being sick. 

Our next dishes are best served on bread, so we unwrap my challah and slice it. It’s laughably flat on the bottom, and I wait for Ari’s assessment. “I’m impressed,” he says, whether in pity or not I still don’t know.

The inside of the loaf looks more promising than the outside. A bit dense, but it’s chewy. It’s bread. 

“It’s very close,” Ari says.

The zhug we bought at the Jewish market on Pico turns out to be harissa, although we continue to refer to it as zhug as we try it.

“Do you associate the zhug with living in Israel?” I ask.

"Yeah,” Ari confirms. “When I came back to Baltimore after Israel, I incorporated it a lot more into the house. My mom keeps zhug in the house, which I feel like a lot of Ashkinazis don’t.”

“It’s good.”

“Yeah. it’s not as spicy as it normally is.”

“Uh huh. I can see how it could be spicier.”

“I’m mildly disappointed. But not terribly.”

“I like the flavor. It’s very garlicky.”

“Oh, speaking of weird stuff.” Ari opens the jar of amba, yellow and jam-like. “I feel like amba is the weirdest thing that the Middle East has ever produced.”

A condiment made from pickled mangos and spices, “amba is something you eat on your shawarma generally,” Ari explains. “A shawarma place that’s worth its salt should have amba and they should have the purple cabbage and moutabel and fries. All that good stuff.” 

“It sounds good,” I say.

“Yeah and gross,” Ari says.

“Why is it gross?”

“It sounds gross”

“I feel like gifelte fish sounds gross to me, honestly. If we’re being real here,” I say. I’ve had it before at Passovers, more than once, and am still not acclimated.

“Yeah we can be real.”

I expect something sweet and tangy, but it’s acidic, sour. Not bad at all, but something that probably does shine best on top of a shawarma. “What happened to the mango part?” I ask.

We move on to the purple cabbage, similar to a coleslaw. Ari opens what we think is moutabel, but he’s hesitant, and searches the fridge in case we’re confusing it with something else we bought.

“I shared the Israeli snacks with my parents,” I say, referring to what we bought the other day. "They liked the peanut one, that was the best one.” 

“Bamba’s a hit. Children forever have known this.” Ari turns back to the moutabel and decides it is not actually moutabel.  “Moutabel generally has tomato in it. It’s basically the Middle Eastern salsa. This is Moroccan style eggplant, which I like a lot.” I pile it generously onto my slice of challah. 

Ari pulls out the chickpea salad he’s made. He’s added an abundance of green and black olives, along with red onions, cucumbers, peppers, oil, vinegar, and basil.

“In and around that time Florida was very pivotal,” he says. “I found out that chickpeas and garbanzo beans were the same thing. My brother discovered the playboys underneath my step dad’s drawers.”

His mom clipped this particular chickpea salad recipe from a magazine over fifteen years ago. Because the lived far from the Jewish communities in metropolitan areas, his mom relied on Jewish lifestyle and cooking magazines for recipes. Like the gifelte sandwich, the chickpea salad was a fridge staple.

I comment that these are the foods in the fridge that he knew would always be there.  

“It’s also the food that no one else wanted to eat,” he says. Friends didn’t always take the food in the fridge. “The foods that are really the soul foods, the hits are hits and the misses can be just hits for you. Like no one’s gonna eat gifelte fish. You know what I mean? Like my friends, no one was ever gonna want to eat that….I couldn’t get [my roommate] Allen to eat anything on this table. Maybe the purple cabbage. That’s about it. But I’ll eat chicken tenders, you know.”

“Chicken tenders are the norm food. They’re the majority.”

“And then there’s some stuff that later becomes in vogue. I have a friend who’s originally from China and grew up in the Bronx. When he was growing up he would eat pork belly, and you’re in New York, no one knew what that was." He quotes his friend: "‘White kids didn’t know what that was, no one would eat it, everyone thought my food was gross, but now everyone eats it.’”

Ari takes a firm stance: “There will never be a time that Judaism, kosher food, Jewish food, any of that will ever be cool.”

In my head I do a quick skim through Bon Appetite articles, Lucky Peach features, GrubStreet rankings. I recalling recipes for chocolate covered matzah or sesame studded challah.  “I see what you’re saying about pickled herring or whatever, but hummus and Mediterranean-broad food is definitely in vogue,” I say.

“But not this stuff. Amba maybe if you want to seem cool and weird.”

“But there’s not going to be an amba bar somewhere,” I concede.

“No. And definitely not gifelte fish ever. Ever. It’s just how these things go.”

“But neither is meatloaf. Meatloaf isn’t going to have a moment.”

“This is true.” Ari circles back to the lifestyle magazines his mom keeps. Many of those publications are attempting to rebrand kosher meals for a younger audience.

"They’re trying to desperately keep people in the religion," Ari says. "Like I saw poke bowls in one of the recipes.” He picks up the bag of sunflower seeds, “And then sunflower seeds.” And we quickly transition to another topic.

This is Ari’s MO – easily theorizing over the deeper social impact of amba, tying it to far reaching topics with relative ease, then suddenly switching gears to the next item on our agenda, done with the topic at hand, or maybe flustered by his own pontificating.

Smoking is popular in Israel but forbidden on the Sabbath. I mistakingly ask if alcohol is allowed on the Sabbath, and Ari explains that it’s not about vices: It’s not that you’re doing something destructive to your body, (“They don’t think of alcohol that way.”) but that you aren’t allowed to light a fire.

So instead there are sunflower seeds – chewed, extracted, spat on repeat. Ari demonstrates breaking the shell at an angle with your front teeth and pulling out the seed with your tongue.

Ari’s roommate walks through the living room and informs us that he might be “coming through with a desk, we’re not 100% sure.” Anticipation for both gifelte fish and desks ensues.

Finally, after many snacks and sunflower seeds and a couple of beers, the gifelte fish is ready to be cut. Ari slices two pieces of challah, places purple cabbage and chrain cut with mayonaise on one piece, hummus on the other, and a slice of the fish in the middle. He brings the two together.

“This is like when kids from religious homes stop being religious, they call it derech, or off the path. So this is kind of like the ‘off the derech’ stoner sandwich.”

I ask Ari how it feels to eat the sandwich now, the first time since high school. He takes a very long pause and considers the question. 

“I guess warm,” he says.

“Does it remind you of home?”

“It reminds me of basements. It reminds me of like really late nights being stoned and a teenager.”

“So it reminds you of that before it reminds you of your mom making it for you as a wholesome childhood meal.”

I try the sandwich. It’s sweet like I expected, but the texture is much less slimy than the jarred fish I’ve had in the past. There’s more texture to chew through, and the fish is good blanketed with bread and hummus and cabbage.

“Wow,” I say. I don’t know why I say that.

Ari repeats it back and laughs, “No one’s ever said that.”

“It’s just so distinct of a flavor.”

He turns the table on me. “How do you feel about it?”

I tell him that when I think of multiple things being ground together, particularly from an animal, it’s gross. But the taste is nice. “It all depends on how much I think about it, you know?”

“Well like anything else, don’t think too hard about it.” Perhaps the complete opposite of everything we’ve been doing tonight.

Ari informs me that it’s usually a little sweeter, which surprises me. Even though the taste is pleasant, there’s no denying that gifelte fish cut with chrain does not look appetizing.

“It all sounds and looks a little gross but to me it all tastes really good and I feel like that’s – maybe that’s what comes down to the ideas of childhood and familiarity.” Then inspiration makes for a very different analogy: “Or like the person you lose your virginity to. It’s like that. Like that person for most people, 8 out of 10 times, is someone gross.”

“But you have an affinity for them.”  

“You’re kinda connected to that person forever, even though you’re like, ‘Eeeh, why?’ But you always end up coming back to that person because there’s a nostalgia there. And that’s how I feel about gifelte fish.”

Ari’s roommate and his girlfriend slowly make their way through the living room with the desk. And as if we were in a basement, the stoner musings of his youth hold court in somewhat sober conversation. 

“I think my earliest memories are eating these things, fish especially, like smoked fish or fish that’s been pickled, and it just tastes good, it tastes right. It makes me feel connected to something.”

You have to feed the congregation something. 

“I’m always going to like gifelte fish. There’s just stuff that you’re introduced to when you’re really young that you develop a taste for whether you like to or not…I think religion or particularly my religion will always, as much as I don’t follow it, and having issues with it, it’s always going to be a framework that I kinda function in.”

The last time Ari was in Baltimore, he visited a synagogue for the first time in years. Even though he’s out of practice, he still found himself swaying with the music with the rest of the congregation.

“That’s what’s very confusing about it,” he says. “[Traditions] are important to you, but they’re important to you because you were told that they are.”

I think about the gifelte fish sandwich, and how it will never be glamorous, but will always give. It’s made of necessity, and mothers. Even on the nights you would hate for your mom to see you — stoned, messed up — she still has the ability to feed you. And that tradition, too, can be a continual feeding, whether you want it or not.

“I’ve found myself many times sitting at a Christmas table or an Easter table and…I find myself in opposition, and I’m at the point now in my life where I just don’t want to do that. I’d rather view myself as a part [of something]. When I sit at the table for a holiday meal, I want it to be for a holiday that I am a part of…” And then he says, not unhopeful, without self-pity: “But I don’t know if I ever will.”

He breaks down his thesis: “What are the things that matter to me versus what matters to other people verses what’s really important?”

We nosh on challah. Ari gives it another reckoning. “This challah’s pretty good, it’s just denser than usual. But it’s pretty solid….it’s probably how they made it in the old country."

“I’m so annoyed cause my bread braiding I thought was pretty solid and then it just kinda like…”

“…All fused together.”

“Yeah.”

“I think you did a wonderful job Sophie. You did a mitzvah.”

“I hope your mom is proud somewhere in Baltimore.”

“Somewhere my mom is like, 'Ah. A challah has been eaten. Good. Good.’”