outfits, and on the stereo an instrumental version of Chris de Burgh’s “Lady in Red” is playing. It is one of those songs that is appalling when you can hear the lyrics, worse still when you can’t.
It doesn’t help that, on a Thursday lunchtime, I am the only diner. Eventually there will be others, big Russian men with thick necks and cropped hair, drinking vodka and ordering the oysters at £5 each. For now it’s just me and Chris de Burgh and the waiters and the stonking three-foot sturgeon, with their familiar ribbed backs and pointed noses. Beneath my feet they swim in long, lazy circuits as I study the menu. I consider having the BBQ sturgeon because I think it would be cute to eat the siblings of the tank’s residents. Unfortunately it’s not available.
Instead, in celebration of the other species in there, I order the “fillet of carp in the Jewish style with ruby jelly.” What arrives is a solid chunk of cold, skin-on fish, complete with bone, itself stuffed with more minced white fish. There is beetroot jelly on the plate and a little horseradish, and the moment I taste it all I am a child again, though not in a good way. For what I am eating reminds me, in a visceral manner, of a dish my mother used to cook, one that I always hated. But the sudden taste memory goes so much further than that.
For days, wandering Moscow, I have been intrigued by the Soviet-nostalgia menus of pickled vegetables and smoked fish, of cakes made with poppy seeds, and now this lump of dense carp on the plate before me. I have been intrigued by it all because every single one of those tastes has been so familiar and therefore a reminder to me of what I really am:not the savvy cosmopolitan Londoner. Not the Englishman, raised on Dickens and Shakespeare, soothed by Edward Elgar and Vaughan Williams. Instead, I am just a big-bellied peasant of Jewish stock, with a taste for chicken fat, salt beef, and new green pickles, who happened, by good fortune, to end up living a bloody long way from here.
WORSHIPPING AT THE FRIDGE
When I was thirteen years old I was Bar Mitzvahed and, though I recall none of the Hebrew I read that day in synagogue, I do remember the dessert that we ate at the party afterward: It was blintzes stuffed with thick, sweetened cream cheese. There were also, after dinner, platters of fruit-laden Danish pastries. There were biscuits and outrageous cream cakes and, with the coffee, chocolates, both plain and milk.
This suggests the main course had been fish of some kind, for, while my parents didn’t give a damn about religious observance, even they would not go so far as to bust Jewish dietary laws by serving milk and meat together at a Bar Mitzvah. My mother, to be fair, was so antagonist toward any form of religious observance, she would quite happily have foregone the whole affair. However my father, though no great believer, insisted that we would only regret that which we hadn’t done. He told us that afterward we could decide for ourselves if we wanted to take Judaism further.
He was the one who made sure I got to Hebrew classes and who, pressing into service his experience in the menswear trade, chose my outfit for the big day: houndstooth trousers, white ruffled shirt, black velvet jacket, and a flowing red silk cravat held in place by a silver ring. It was not a good look for a fat thirteen-year-old; I appeared to have taken fashion tips from Tony Curtis in his plump 1970s phase.
It is curious that it should have been my father who took responsibility for my Jewish education because, while he gave me the knowledge, it is actually from my mother that I take almost all my Jewish identity,though only because she fed me. I have always thought that I am almost entirely Jewish by food, and have long joked that I worshipped at my mother’s fridge. She made a mean chopped liver, and there was always matzo in the house to spread it upon, not just at Passover.
She knew how to boil a fowl to make
It doesn’t help that, on a Thursday lunchtime, I am the only diner. Eventually there will be others, big Russian men with thick necks and cropped hair, drinking vodka and ordering the oysters at £5 each. For now it’s just me and Chris de Burgh and the waiters and the stonking three-foot sturgeon, with their familiar ribbed backs and pointed noses. Beneath my feet they swim in long, lazy circuits as I study the menu. I consider having the BBQ sturgeon because I think it would be cute to eat the siblings of the tank’s residents. Unfortunately it’s not available.
Instead, in celebration of the other species in there, I order the “fillet of carp in the Jewish style with ruby jelly.” What arrives is a solid chunk of cold, skin-on fish, complete with bone, itself stuffed with more minced white fish. There is beetroot jelly on the plate and a little horseradish, and the moment I taste it all I am a child again, though not in a good way. For what I am eating reminds me, in a visceral manner, of a dish my mother used to cook, one that I always hated. But the sudden taste memory goes so much further than that.
For days, wandering Moscow, I have been intrigued by the Soviet-nostalgia menus of pickled vegetables and smoked fish, of cakes made with poppy seeds, and now this lump of dense carp on the plate before me. I have been intrigued by it all because every single one of those tastes has been so familiar and therefore a reminder to me of what I really am:not the savvy cosmopolitan Londoner. Not the Englishman, raised on Dickens and Shakespeare, soothed by Edward Elgar and Vaughan Williams. Instead, I am just a big-bellied peasant of Jewish stock, with a taste for chicken fat, salt beef, and new green pickles, who happened, by good fortune, to end up living a bloody long way from here.
WORSHIPPING AT THE FRIDGE
When I was thirteen years old I was Bar Mitzvahed and, though I recall none of the Hebrew I read that day in synagogue, I do remember the dessert that we ate at the party afterward: It was blintzes stuffed with thick, sweetened cream cheese. There were also, after dinner, platters of fruit-laden Danish pastries. There were biscuits and outrageous cream cakes and, with the coffee, chocolates, both plain and milk.
This suggests the main course had been fish of some kind, for, while my parents didn’t give a damn about religious observance, even they would not go so far as to bust Jewish dietary laws by serving milk and meat together at a Bar Mitzvah. My mother, to be fair, was so antagonist toward any form of religious observance, she would quite happily have foregone the whole affair. However my father, though no great believer, insisted that we would only regret that which we hadn’t done. He told us that afterward we could decide for ourselves if we wanted to take Judaism further.
He was the one who made sure I got to Hebrew classes and who, pressing into service his experience in the menswear trade, chose my outfit for the big day: houndstooth trousers, white ruffled shirt, black velvet jacket, and a flowing red silk cravat held in place by a silver ring. It was not a good look for a fat thirteen-year-old; I appeared to have taken fashion tips from Tony Curtis in his plump 1970s phase.
It is curious that it should have been my father who took responsibility for my Jewish education because, while he gave me the knowledge, it is actually from my mother that I take almost all my Jewish identity,though only because she fed me. I have always thought that I am almost entirely Jewish by food, and have long joked that I worshipped at my mother’s fridge. She made a mean chopped liver, and there was always matzo in the house to spread it upon, not just at Passover.
She knew how to boil a fowl to make
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