Life Without Pepperoni

There are ways to tell your children that you and their mother are getting divorced. There are ways to tell those same children a few years later that you are marrying again. There is no good way to tell your children that they can no longer eat pepperoni pizza, pork chops, Philly steak-and-cheese subs, shrimp or cheeseburgers because you are going to begin keeping kosher. They stare at you, breathing heavily through their mouths, as if you’ve just announced that you’ve quit your job and are moving the whole family to Nepal.

Yet that’s what I did seven years ago when I remarried. My wife-to-be kept kosher, and as a condition of marriage I agreed to do so as well. I also agreed to have a dog and to give her every inch of closet space in the house. (And yet for some reason she sends me to negotiate new car purchases.)

A word about the tradition of keeping kosher for you non-Jews out there. Keeping kosher is an ancient Jewish practice that supposedly is spelled out in the Torah. Trust me, there’s no list of rules in there. There is an admonition not to mix the milk of the mother with the meat of her offspring. From there, I don’t know how we got to “Don’t eat Maine lobster, and get two sets of dishes and silverware.” Makes you wonder if God has a financial interest in Crate and Barrel.

Keeping kosher can be a full-time job. You have to keep one set of dishes and silverware for meals that contain dairy products and another for meals that feature meat. Fish is neutral, except shellfish and any fish without scales, which are prohibited. (To increase your rate of compliance, I recommend courses in marine biology.) Pork is out, and you’re supposed to buy your meat from a kosher butcher, who charges somewhere around the price of a Las Vegas bar mitzvah for a steak that has been prayed over by a rabbi. At that price, I can learn to pray over my own $4.99-a-pound steak. Then there are the philosophical dilemmas, which present themselves as story problems. If you have a meat dinner, how long after your meal can you serve coffee with cream?

Now a word about my wife. She is highly intelligent and was voted least likely to join a cult in high school. She had a very good explanation when I asked her why she would want to have two sets of dishes, upon which no shrimp would ever be served. Her answer was poetry. “The idea behind keeping kosher has nothing to do with food,” she said. “It has to do with making the profane act of eating sacred.” She explained that if you commit to keeping kosher, you are committing to thinking about God at least three times a day.

Now she was talking my language. I, too, believe in the sanctity of food. If there is a God, his finest moment was creating the fruit of the earth and the beasts of the jungle for us to eat. His invention of eggplant parmesan is right up there with Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. I just didn’t understand why an all-merciful God would want me to deprive myself of scallops.

Avoiding sin I could understand. His admonition to not lie or steal or covet my neighbor’s wife makes perfect sense. He’s trying to create a civilization here. We can’t have everyone coveting everyone else’s stuff. You ever been to a 5-year-old’s birthday party? All that coveting can get pretty ugly.

After the failure of a marriage and the joy of discovering that another person could love you so well, you’re ready to make sacrifices. You want to sanctify the profane. At least I did. So I embraced keeping kosher. I do all the cooking in our family, and I generally start thinking about food the minute the alarm goes off. I wasn’t thinking about God a mere three times a day, not me. I thought of God as I showered and wondered if I could use imitation crabmeat for paella I wanted to make that night. I thought of God as I buttered my toast, wondering if I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter contained any real dairy products. (I could believe it’s not butter but I couldn’t believe that it’s not dairy.) I thought of God when I read any book that contained the letters “m, e, a, t,” not necessarily arranged in that order. I thought of God when I raked leaves, which made me think fall, which made me think of the clambakes I wouldn’t be enjoying.

Food and I go way back. My first visual memory is of my father in the kitchen on Thanksgiving, struggling with a 20-pound turkey. I was 2 and my mother was in the hospital having just had a 7-pound Larry, my new brother. My father’s bird was undercooked, delivered to the table prematurely, and bore a great resemblance to the little brother I would meet the next day.

In the summer before I left for college, my father, who had learned how to cook in the intervening years, taught me how to make chili, chicken cacciatore and a couple of other staples. I was the only guy in a dorm of 400 guys who ever used the kitchen. I became as powerful as the inmate with cigarettes.

The joy of feeding people became intoxicating. I devoted myself to cooking. I read cookbooks when I should have been reading “great” books. I went to restaurants and asked the cooks to tell me their secrets. From an Indian cook, I learned to make a sauce out of pureed onions, garlic and ginger. From an Italian chef, I learned how to roast garlic. A cook at a vegetarian restaurant showed me the proper way to cook brown rice.

Food became my religion. When my children were babies, they ate pureed pad Thai. Instead of Gerber’s rice and lamb, they had biryani rice with chunks of lamb I cooked myself. So when I met Rique and agreed to keep kosher, few people were more prepared than I to accept the idea that the profane act of eating could be made sacred.

The problem was the kids. The more we tried to make food sacred, the more profane they became. They cursed pizza without pepperoni. They mocked my Tandoori chicken made with non-dairy yogurt. They became shellfish fanatics. I made paella with fake crab, and they refused to eat it. Suddenly, I was living with a bunch of seafood purists. Whenever their grandmother asked them what they wanted for their birthday, the answer was: “Dinner at Red Lobster.” And my mother was happy to oblige. For all I know, she got them pork-flavored ice cream for dessert.

All my wife and I wanted was for our kids to learn to think about something higher than their stomachs a few times a day. Instead, we turned them against the very God we wanted them to embrace, one meal at a time.

After five years and a crisis of faith that involved a mean-spirited Napoleonic rabbi who hassled my wife, we bought several pounds of pork sausage and celebrated God’s genius. It’s been a year now, and I still think of God every time I think of food. Only now I think of him fondly, like a guy I could have a beer with, and offer thanks for the miracle of mussels and other mollusks, which are so perfectly designed they come with their own shell that doubles as a little serving dish.