Pareve, meaning a food that’s neither milk-based nor meat, is a useful Kitchen Yiddishism to express something mild or neutral: “Last night’s date? He was nice, but not all that interesting…sort of pareve.” Or: “She’s incredibly misinformed and opinionated – but she’s the boss, so when she talks, I just murmur something pareve and keep my opinion to myself.”
To hock something is to chop it up. As in ge-hockteh herrink, chopped herring. If a person’s troubles are many, you say that they have ge-hockteh tsuris – problems chopped fine. Of course, you know what tsuris are – who doesn’t?
The basic concepts of kosher and treif (non-kosher) are easily applied to people, books, movies, life. A PG-rated movie can be kosher for a mature sort of kid, and not so kosher for a kid less so. A really graphic movie is treif!
Glatt meat undergoes the strictest kashrut supervision. You can describe people’s behavior as glatt too: “I’ll do business with Joe anytime – he’s honest and his company records are glatt – open to anyone.”
Now this an idiom I use but don’t know where it came from. To hock a chynick – teapot. As in: “Again with the trip to Europe? We can’t afford it! Stop hocking me a chynick!” Please don't hock this chynick.

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  2 Responses to “Kitchen Yiddish II”

  1. Hocking that chynick is actually an English expression… :) The original saying is “to hawk a teapot”. To quote the dictionary (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/hawk)
    To hawk = to peddle goods aggressively…
    which, of course, Jews used to do a lot in old New York. And because teapots were cheap and plentiful, and few people ever needed a new one, the last thing they wanted was someone trying to pressure them into buying one. So there, now you know… :-D

  2. I love it! Thank you, Sarah! A little gem to tuck away in my mind. My late Dad so wanted us to learn Yiddish – he was a scholar of Yiddish himself. I refused, and now I’m sorry. How rich a language, absorbing local idioms so freely and then giving back to the mainstream culture.

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