Saturday, November 15, 2008

"kosher style" chicken

This week, the local Jewish student organization organized a student-professor Friday night dinner. It took place at a colleague's place who was nice enough to invite me for Shabbat. The students stressed that it would be a meat dinner, so we all took care to prepare parve side dishes and I was getting excited (meat!!!). When the meat showed up, it was "kosher style"--i.e. the chicken was treife, but the breading parve. Whaaat? Since I got off the plane, I've encountered quite a few people with three sets of dishes--meat, dairy, and treif--and I've seen "kosher style" restaurants but "kosher-style" chicken on Friday night?! Must be a southern thing.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Not so weird. Lots of people keep kosher in the sense that they don't eat forbidden species, or mix meat with milk - or keep kosher enough in their homes to have more observant guests, even if they themselves indulge in non-kosher

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I can see that, but to insist on parve side dishes to accompany the non-kosher chicken in an OFFICIAL "Hillel" event?! I guess I'm still not flexible or American enough...

Unknown said...

It's also ironic that they chose treif chicken...about the only guaranteed-to-find kosher meat product in any Publix I've been to is...da da dum: frozen Empire chicken. So it would have been pretty easy to make the meal kosher. Did you speak up? Or is your part of the South so benighted that it lacks even for froz. Emp.? (My sympathies if that's so.)

The Publix'es around here have started carrying some frozen Mealmart ground beef, and a few even now carry 'fresh' Mealmart vacuum packaged beef. At prices I can't really afford...like ~$10/lb grnd beef.

gritty grits said...

wooow! $10 for beef? Our beef's at half that. My Publix has a ton of kosher products, and I also "shop the pig", although I like that less. So, there is chicken to be had and the meat shortage hasn't reached us yet. And yeah, it's expensive but either you're a Hillel or you aren't, no?