Towards a Kosher Kitchen

I'll admit it: the word kosher meant little or nothing to me while I was growing up. I knew roughly that the word meant "fit"; business deals could be kosher, offers of assistance could be kosher, people (or at least their integrity) could be kosher, and pork was definitely never kosher. But a kosher kitchen, a kosher home? Was that some new real estate term to describe a kitchen that came with all four stove burners working?

Some years ago, as part of my ongoing quest for more meaningful spirituality in my daily life, I decided to explore kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws. I simultaneously liked and felt intimidated by what I read. Being partly vegetarian due to the guilt I felt about animals being killed for food, I was attracted by the mandate to cause no pain to the animal as it was killed, and to treat its body with respect. Still, it was a challenge. Ready to sanctify life through my digestive tract, I jumped in with both feet. And quickly found myself drowning.

I had thought it was going to be tedious, but easy. I spent the better part of a week kashering my kitchen, boiling practically everything that didn't move, scrubbing and soaking and sweating. My apartment manager finally put her foot down against having my oven blow-torched. Undaunted, I continued my work. I had no extra money to buy a second set of dishes and utensils, so I separated what I had. I was sure it would be no great inconvenience to now have only two dairy knives and stickers which proclaimed either "fleishig" or "milchig" all over my cupboards and drawers.

I gave away all the non-kosher food in the house, and found the nearest kosher grocery store. Lying awake in bed at night, I would mentally go over all the contents of my cupboards, making sure I hadn't missed any trayf, unfit food. Instead of counting sheep, I counted meat and dairy dishcloths and towels, rehearsing how I would launder them in separate loads so as not to mix meat and dairy in any way. Wanting badly to do things the right way, I had numerous anxiety attacks because there was only one washing machine. What if I threw the dairy towel in the wrong load? One wrong move, I feared, and I could completely undo all that I had worked so hard to accomplish.

Of course this also meant I had to learn to cook. Neither Hamburger Helper meals nor frozen pizzas were going to help me on this one. I could count on one hand the meals I had learned to cook since college, and every one involved boxes or cans. Sadly, my mother hated to cook and my father could burn water, so consequently I became a child of fast-food and family dining establishments. I could make a mean boxed-macaroni-and-cheese, but I needed some new kosher recipes. And then I had to learn how to cook a proper Shabbat meal! Oy!

Loaded down with kosher cookbooks and children's Israeli cooking books from the local libraries, I became the mad kosher scientist. Brandishing a ladle, I kept my husband out of the kitchen until it became quite apparent that the current meal would never be fit for human consumption.

On one particularly memorable erev Shabbat, I decided to bake challah and chicken as well as fix tcholent for the next day. The challah burned, the chicken was rubber, and in desperation and hunger I settled for a fast-food fish sandwich. Next morning, the tcholent was an even worse story. Burnt beyond recognition, the spillover sparked a small fire in my oven, alarming the neighbors and earning us an early Shabbos morning visit from the fire department. It took me three days of scrubbing to scour the char off my pot and even longer to clean the oven.

I was close to tears and ready to give up. Wasn't keeping kosher supposed to be a beautiful way to sanctify life? How could I observe kashrut without losing my sanity? What had I done wrong? Not knowing what to do, I turned to the rabbi at the shul I attended at the time. I was sure she would laugh me out of her office, but instead she smiled and said she understood. Becoming more observant, she told me, wasn't about changing everything overnight. It was about making small changes, and adding more when I felt ready.

I pondered the concept of adding for quite some time. I stopped driving myself crazy with halachic minutiae. I focused on eating kosher foods and learning to cook one new dish each week. I was able to sleep at night, no longer worrying that if lint from the dairy towel touched lint from the meat towel anywhere in the kitchen vicinity, I would be struck down from the heavens.

Little by little, I added to my observance of kashrut. I keep a fully kosher kitchen now, and it has become second-nature. I am able to transform the mundane act of eating into a holy act of sanctifying life. And I no longer receive early Shabbat morning visits from the fire department.

Copyright © 1995 by Sheyna D. Galyan