Dana ShavinLately I've been thinking about food. Passover just ended and, while I am not particularly observant (this might be an understatement), I am always aware of what should and should not be happening in my kitchen during those seven days. Bread should not be happening. Popcorn, legumes and cereal should not be happening. Certain wines can happen, but they should be blessed (by someone other than me).
Most dog foods, perhaps unsurprisingly, are not kosher for Passover. But for the very observant owner, there is Evanger's Grain-Free Beef for Dogs. According to the back of the can, the Chicago Rabbinical Council has declared that my Theo and your Fido can eat it without guilt all year long.
I found Evanger's by accident. While I haven't typically rid my home of "chametz" (unleavened foods) at Passover, I have tried to rid my dog's ears of yeast, and grain-free food seems to help. The discovery of Evanger's kosher line of dog foods came as I was looking for something that might suit Theo's finicky palate, and it got me thinking about my family and our foodie past.
I grew up in a conservative Jewish household. In our cabinets and kitchen drawers were separate plates and silverware for meat and dairy meals. We did not eat pork or shellfish or mix meat and dairy at the same meal. We did not always empty our home of "chametz" at Passover, as some observant Jews do, but we also didn't eat what was prohibited -- unless we forgot or, in the case of my father, just wanted to.
Many Passover mornings I awoke in a sweat, having dreamed I'd eaten a hamburger bun, only to stumble bleary-eyed into my parents' kitchen to find my father tucking into a large bowl of corn flakes.
"Dad!" I would cry, "It's Passover!"
My father would feign horror, then mumble something about "forgetting" and not wanting to waste food by throwing it out. "I'll just finish this bowl," he'd say, as the rest of us dutifully ate our tablets of dry matzoh. For the next seven mornings, the same drama would play out until at last Passover came to an end or we ran out of corn flakes or both.
And then there was the matter of Chinese egg rolls, little fried cylinders of deliciousness which, if you pried them open, revealed a tangle of colorless cabbage dotted with tiny neon-colored nuggets of shrimp which, somehow, took us by surprise every time. "Dad!" I would cry, "There's shrimp in these egg rolls!" about which my father would feign horror and then eat four of them.
Just the other day my husband and I were discussing my history of pork. I never had it after age 8, I told him, when I mistook bacon strips for beef strips at a friend's house. As we talked however, I recalled a certain Hickory House restaurant's Brunswick stew whose smoky meaty flavor was unlike anything my mother cooked for us. Suddenly suspicious, I decided to Google the recipe. What I discovered was that, along with the unconscionable pairing of butter (i.e., dairy) and chicken, the stew also contained pork.
So Brunswick stew was unkosher in so many ways it would have required full-blown dementia to "forget" its many multitudes of sins. It was such a flagrant disregard for the rules of "kashrut" that we might as well have been eating our neighbors. With milk shakes.
And yet somehow, I grew up believing the myth of our kosher-ness. In my head was the firm belief that, because our muscular pottery plates never mingled with our dainty porcelain ones, we were fully under the protection of some unseen, all-powerful entity who so deeply cared about place settings that we would be kept safe from harm. And in fact, we mostly were.
So I bought the Evanger's Grain-Free Beef Loaf for Dogs. Because unlike my father, I don't believe in tempting fate. At least not when it comes to the dog.
Dana Shavin's memoir, "The Body Tourist," is now available on Little Feather Books. Contact her at danalise@juno.com.