Praise the Lard : Risky <i> Gribbeness</i>

It’s the Jewish version of pork rinds or chitlin’s and it is alternately spelled gribbeness or griveness or some variant thereof, depending on what part of Europe your grandparents came from. It is chicken skin that is cooked until laden with fat and crispy to the bite.

Gribbeness ‘ raison d’etre around my house was for snacking. It was Jewish popcorn. My father once used chunks of it in a chicken sandwich schmeared with more chicken fat, and of course my father later in life had heart bypass surgery, which for people who eat traditional foods like this is another Jewish tradition.

Keep in mind that back then, in the 1950s, cholesterol was not the feared enemy it has become. No one worried about foods of tradition, foods that had been around for a century. We ate, we lived to be 80. Who knew?

The fact was, we didn’t have gribbeness more often only because it was a pain in the neck to make.

I remembered the smell of onions frying and the exquisite, oily taste and I knew vaguely of the painstaking process; what I didn’t know was how, exactly, the stuff was made. But bringing up such a subject to my parents at this stage of their lives, now that anything fatty is a verboten subject, well, I couldn’t just call on the phone and say, “Mom, how’d ya make gribbeness ?”

*

This required deft handling. I called my parents, invited them out for dinner. We went to a cafe, I ordered a bottle of wine (“That’s good for my heart, I’ll have a glass,” said dad), and I slowly guided the conversation around to Jewish cooking.

Finally I took the plunge. I mentioned it. Mom said gribbeness was chicken skin that had been cooked with chicken fat ( schmaltz ) until crispy.

“Sure, but how did you make it?” I asked.

“Well, I never wrote down the amounts,” she said. Then a look came over her face and she went back in time to an era when she stood over the stove on a Friday afternoon and stirred the pot.

“You needed chicken skin, chicken fat rendered from the chicken you were using, never bought in a jar, salt and chopped onions. I never measured. I guess you get about a cup of skin per chicken.

“You almost never got enough fat from one chicken to make it, so you saved the fat from one chicken in the freezer until you were cooking chicken again. That way you accumulated enough fat to make gribbeness.

*

“I put the salt, the chicken fat and the skin in a pot and put it over a very low flame. And I cooked it until it began to turn very slightly brown. Then I added the coarsely chopped onions.”

“At what point do you add the onions?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s the tricky part, very hard to teach,” she said. “You have to time it so when the onions are brown, the gribbeness is crispy. You just have to know when to add the onions. If you know the color the skin turns, you’ll know just when to add the onions.

“If you add the onions too soon, they’ll get brown but the gribbeness will still be soggy--and if you cook it too long the gribbeness gets crispy but the onions get burned. And if you add the onions too late, they don’t get brown when the gribbeness is crispy.”

In a way, it seemed to me, this was the Jewish equivalent of cooking risotto: You had to watch the pot and stir it constantly or the stuff would ruin. It had a mind of its own, and if you turned your back for even 30 seconds . . . poof , the whole thing would be overcooked, inedible.

*

My younger brother, Sid, tripped and fell in the next room one day while mom was in the kitchen. “Help me up,” he cried.

“I’m cooking gribbeness ,” Mom said, “so come in here and I’ll help you up.”

When the gribbeness is cooked until crisp, put it (including the onion bits) into a strainer and let the remaining chicken fat drain into a small dish that later is placed in the refrigerator.

As far as I can tell, that leftover chicken fat is good for only two things: moistening and flavoring sandwiches and guaranteeing your nephew the heart surgeon some business later in life.