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Comedian Nik Rabinowitz recalls a childhood spent eating forbidden foods and murdering guinea fowl. (Read with salt. A pinch of it)

Comedian Nik Rabinowitz shares his childhood recollections of eating forbidden foods.

Prior to my first sleepover at Merv Merris’s house, his mother asked a question she would regret: “Nik, what’s your favourite food?” For reasons that will shortly become clear, I replied “guinea fowl casserole”. She said: “That is both treif and hard to come by.” Which is possibly why we ended up having chip rolls.

Years later, on the town square of Arequipa, Peru, I accidentally ate guinea pig (or “quwi” [do not try in Scrabble, will not get points] in the local Quechua language). Minutes after shouting

“Cooee!” to attract the waiter’s attention, I unknowingly found myself eating treif.

“Treif” is Yiddish for “haram”, which is Arabic for “not kosher”, which is now standard English for things like spaghetti carbonara, home-made lockdown wine, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s dye-job and anything else people consider “dodgy”.

My culinary love affair with treif began at an early age. Bacon and eggs, crayfish bouillabaisse, and rabbit stew (which we called chicken, if any real Jews asked).

Our diet was more Jew-ish than Jewish.

During my first trip to Spain,

I developed a weakness for jamón. When a young Jewish man finds himself eating a jamón sandwich in a bar filled with actual whole pigs dangling from the ceiling, he comes to realise that he has strayed very far from Hashem’s light.

But back to the guinea pig, which: a) isn’t from Guinea, b) is in fact a rodent, not a pig, and c) isn’t kosher to eat, but is kosher to keep as a pet. Guinea fowl are from Guinea, but are still treif because, according to the Orthodox Union of America, “it has not obtained testimony from experts about permissibility”.

It’s taken Jews five millennia to establish that chickens, Cornish hens, ducks, geese and turkeys are kosher, but the Jewry is still out on guinea fowl. A loophole that legitimises an important time in my adolescence.

As a teenager, I was obsessed with Roald Dahl’s Danny, the Champion of the World. Danny, a young English (non-Jewish) boy discovers a technique for catching pheasants by stuffing their favourite food (raisins) with ground-up sleeping pills.

For weeks, I’d lie in bed listening to guinea fowl roosting in the nearby pine trees and fantasise about their mass sedation. The problem was I had no way of procuring sleeping pills as I wasn’t yet married to a doctor.

Fortunately, my father’s pottery assistant, uNcamekile Kokane, was happy to loan his guinea fowl trap to an aspirant young Hebrew poacher in exchange for a copy of the Torah and a gallon of chicken soup. (I’m still not sure what a “gallon” is or what uNcamekile did with the Torah.)

After a neck-wringing demonstration by fowl-slaughtering expert uNonzwakazi Virginia Kutwana, I was en route to becoming the most successful under-15 modern-day poacher in the history of the Constantia Valley. Imagine a freshly bar mitzva’d teenager feeding his entire family in the early 90s without the help of Woolies. Unheard of! But it wasn’t all plain sailing. On days when my hunting prowess let me down, my parents would have to trek to the supermarket, a hardship we endured more often than my wounded pride would have liked. Sometimes you hunt, and sometimes you gather.

By age 15 I’d had a change of heart. While I found providing for my family quite satisfying, the hunting had failed to get me a mention in The Jewish Chronicle and with fame no longer within my grasp, as a family, we put an end to the killing spree.

Which brings me to my point. If you, like me, ever find yourself chalishing for a little pheasant meat, and Woolies is right out of stock, pick up a bag of raisins and a box of sleeping pills from your local pharmacy. Then head to your nearest forest to see if you can figure out the answer to my favourite thought experiment: if a guinea fowl falls from a tree without making a sound, and there’s no rabbi around to see you eat it, is it still

not kosher?

It’s taken Jews five millennia to establish that hens, ducks, geese and turkeys are kosher, but the Jewry is still out on guinea fowl”

nikrabinowitz.co.za, @nikrabinowitz

* Please note: both TASTE and Woolworths take Nik’s recollections as seriously as he should take our promise to supply him with a lifetime quota of ham.