Eating as I Go: Scenes from America and Abroad

YOM KIPPURS AT YUM LUK

11 New฀York,฀1950–1953 My favorite egg foo yung is the one I ate religiously—in an ammonia-scented Cantonese dive on upper Broadway—every Yom Kippur during my high school years. At Yum Luk, three crunchy “omelets,” neatly stacked and bulging with bean sprouts, onions, and diced roast pork, rose high above a sea of gluey brown sauce. Sweet and salty, crisp and moist, garlicky and pungent: the tastes fused in my nose before the first bite reached my mouth. When we initiated the ritual, more than fifty years ago, my friend Ruth and I devoured the exotic concoction in a record three and a half minutes. I can still see us, giggling and fussing with our chopsticks, shoveling it in. The moment and the meal were heavy with meaning. After a morning in the synagogue, dutifully mouthing prayers, we had opted to violate the cardinal rule of the Jewish Day of Atonement: Thou shalt not eat. It was not mere hunger that impelled us. To appease a growling stomach, a hot fudge sundae or a chocolate malted would have served quite nicely. No. The occasion offered grander possibilities . While the rest of the Jewish community was suffering through the obligatory fast, we would feast on forbidden foods. Of course we were desperately afraid of being caught. Suppose a friend of our parents’—out for a breath of air between prayers—chanced to pass Yum Luk just as we were emerging from the restaurant? Suppose my chopsticks slipped and some of that sticky sauce stained the pale yellow orlon sweater I was wearing? There would be hell to pay—not from the all-knowing God of our ancestors, whose being and behavior were matters of indifference to us, but from our parents , who would not fail to appreciate the enormity of their daughters’ rebellion. God might avert his eyes or remain silent, but we would hear from Them and feel the fullness of Their wrath. No risk, no gain, the saying goes. As a teenager I assumed that fighting my family was natural and necessary—even as I often played along with them. “We’re people who can discuss things,” my mother liked to say. “Your father and I were educated to think for ourselves.” Indeed, my New York–born, college-educated parents had rejected their immigrant parents’ orthodoxy as Old World and hideYOM ฀KIPPURS฀AT฀YUM฀LUK฀ DELICIOUS ACTS OF DEFIANCE 12 bound. Their own practice as Conservative Jews, however, was riddled with contradictions . These contradictions both delighted and enraged me. They certainly didn’t make for satisfying discussions. For example, there were the “innocent” bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches we all indulged in when eating out. Ham, however, being somehow more categorically gentile, was taboo. Occasionally, in an uncharacteristically relaxed mood, my mother would allow me to order a clean-looking ham and cheese sandwich at Chock Full o’ Nuts, frowning darkly when I did. How is it, I wondered, that some forbidden foods are less evil than others? What delusion or double standard accounted for the BLT exemption? Could it be that bacon strips are so removed in their cooked form and appearance from the corpus of the pig as to sever their connection with the “unclean” animal? Is it that the cooked-to-a-crisp slices are obviously beyond contamination by trichinosis? Perhaps for my mother, observing the spirit of kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws, at home allowed for “rewards” in restaurants, where the modern Jew could, on occasion and in moderation, relax for a minute and be cheerfully naughty? In a period and an environment in which so many risks were either unthinkable or much too dangerous, food was my frontier of choice. Sleazy Yum Luk signified “no” to God, “no” to my parents and their Jewish holidays, “no” to piety, parochialism , and the protective custody of Jewish law. Yum Luk beckoned like a way station for the outward bound. Yom Kippurs at Yum Luk were delicious acts of defiance, the beginning of a long history of infidelities to the culinary tradition in which I was raised. D ...