From Kitchen to Kitsch Food, style, decor. This season, revel in schmaltz with a holiday party planner that will feed your soul
This holiday season, revel in schmaltz — chicken fat for the soul
yOU CAN SPREAD IT like butter on bread, and you can watch it up on the silver screen. You can fry potato pancakes in it at Hanukkah, and you can hear it ad nauseum on your radio at Christmas. I speak of schmaltz, the ancient Eastern European foodstuff that somehow became a meme for anything extravagantly sentimental or maudlin. My own father loved eating schmaltz but couldn’t abide any music that contained too much schmaltz. How did schmaltz pull off the trick? The word schmaltz is originally German and Yiddish, derived from the middle-high German schmaltz, meaning “rendered animal fat,” itself derived from the high German verb smeltan, meaning “to melt” (hence the modern English verb “to smelt”). Brought to North America by Ashkenazi Jews in the early 20th century, schmaltz referred specifically to chicken or goose fat. Barred from butter for cooking fat because of dietary laws and without the olive or sesame oil available to their Sephardic cousins, Ashkenzis turned to poultry fat instead. (Geese were actually overfed to produce more fat; a byproduct was Europe’s first foie gras.)
The first published use of schmaltz meaning oversentimentality appeared not in Europe but in a Vanity Fair article in 1935: “Schmaltz (cf. the German schmaltz, meaning grease) is a derogatory term used to describe straight jazz.” Straight jazz in this case was ballroom jazz, far, well, schmaltzier than swing, the coming hot thing. Schmaltzy as “greasy” gradually gave way to schmaltzy as “sticky” or “cloying” or “treacly” – all cookbook words themselves.
Did the food ever conflate with the feeling, the kitchen with the kitsch? Maybe the kitchen was the kitsch. Discussing schmaltz on his website blog.inkyfool.com, Mark Forsyth wrote, “Schmaltz isn’t just fat; it’s family.” I finally got what he meant this past Rosh Hashanah. Previously, spooked by cholesterol, I had abstained from schmaltz. (Even my father called it “a heart attack on toast.”) But this year, while the chicken soup was cooling, I scooped up a spoonful of the fat congealing on top and spread it on a piece of challah.
It was good. More than good. Surrounded by our extended clan, maybe even something to get sentimental about. —Jay Teitel