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Certain Yidddish expressions just naturally sit pop into the mind when I’m not even thinking. In my hot chocolate post below, instructions included a shlook of brandy. Yes: a shlook is a dollop, but it’s also a gulp. Like, shlooking Coke right out of the bottle. Or everyone gathered in the kitchen, cooking together and sneaking an occasional shlook of the cooking wine.
Another juicy Yiddishism is koch-leffel. That’s a soup ladle, but also means a gossipping busybody – someone who’s always stirring up trouble.
Tsimmis. That’s carrots, sweet potatoes, and sometimes beef, all stewed together with honey and dried fruit. It also means a complication, a situation that escalated. Like, “Everybody had a different opinion, and they were all shouting – oy, what a tsimmis!”
There’s shmaltz, of course. Chicken fat rendered with onions. Delicious to cook with, heavenly to spread lightly on a matzah – and so high in cholesterol that it’ll get you to heaven early if you don’t watch it. But apply the word to anything sentimental – that weepy old song, a three-hanky movie. Ever hear Jimmy Durante’s recording of “As Time Goes By?” Shmaltzy – but I love it!
I’ll post more Kitchen Yiddish as it occurs to me. Meantime…
Ah Gut Shabbos!
Fleigels. And polkies. We are always confusing our children’s Sephardi friends with how we ask them what part of the chicken would they prefer.
Shabbat Shalom.
Shabbat shalom!It’s always so nice to read you!I just finished to read a lovely book,a sort of italian-yiddish dictionary
by Leo Rosten!
hugs from Italy
Daniela
When anyone in my family makes potato kugel, we never use anything but a reebaizen – i.e. an old-fashioned so-called “safety grater”.
fascinating stuff – love hearing about your idioms – maybe I could incorporate some into my conversation – shlook is great onomatapeia
Hi, Daniela, can you tell me more about this book? Sounds interesting.
Leora, all my childhood years I thought that polkie was English for chicken drumstick. And I don’t even speak Yiddish, I just heard it around the house all the time.
I never properly learned to speak Yiddish, I just heard it in the house all the time. Some things just stick, though. Like I seldom use a basin, but I’ll use a shissel all the time.
You don’t like your food processor, efsher?
Hi, Johanna,
Yes, “shlook” sounds more like the real thing, as compared to the dry “chug.” Anyway, chug is what locomotives do, isn’t it?
A favorite non-kitchen Yiddishism that seems to have crept into the general vocabulary is chutzpah, meaning brassy self-assertion or downright rudeness. It comes from the Hebrew “chutz” – that which is outward. Instead of the refined way, which is to keep a certain reserve, having chutzpah means taking out and exposing one’s inner…um, unpleasantness.
That’s a helluva chutzpah, ya know what I mean?
I’m not sure why this is true – maybe it’s because there are so few ingredients (6 to be exact) that the texture really makes a difference? – but, IMHO, hand-grated potato kugel tastes SO much better than potato kugel made with a food processor.
We had shissles of applesauce on Pesach… the chainik kept the water hot on Shabbat and the.. shmitchik to peel the veggies… (actually that was generally the word we used when we couldn’t remember the word for whatever we were pointing to).
Devo,
How cute…sounds like you grew up with a lot more kitchen Yiddish than I did!
Baruch Hashem I had the Zechus to have a great-grandmother until I was almost 16 and she pretty much only spoke Yiddish. Plus both my father’s parents were Yiddish speakers so while I’m certainly nowhere near fluent, Yiddish is certainly in my every day discussion… point in fact – when talking to my son, I’m just as likely to ask him if he wants to go schluff as I am if he wants to go sleep, patch his hentelach or clap his hands or put the hat on his keppie (head).
I KNOW I should be using the Hebrew words instead if I’m going to speak a language other than English, but 20mumble years of habit is really hard to break LOL.