So just imagine, for a moment, that you’re an orthodox Jewish person living in a small village in 1872, somewhere in Poland. Somewhere cold. Near the Arctic. Even though Poland is nowhere near the Arctic, it fucking feels like it is for about 8 months of the year. Hence the big, fur hats, long black coats which they now still wear in Marbella in August.

And every Friday night, at sunset, the sabbath comes in. So from then, til sunset on Saturday night, you have a list of rules, or ‘can’t do’s’, that would stretch from Omsk to Zielona Gora. And back. You, basically, can’t do anything. Praying is ok, everything else is verboten. Like driving. Wasn’t a problem back then, especially as you were too poor to buy the paper to write the word ‘car’ upon. Lighting fires is out of the question, much as today switching on lights is not something any Orthodox Jew would do on the sabbath. So how ya gonna cook a meal? You go to synagogue on Saturday morning, the whole village is there, kvetching and arguing and doing business deals (“I’ll swap you one egg for 17 ears of corn, but Moshe gets one ear of corn for putting the deal together…) and trying to arrange marriages for their children. Of which there were many. It was all very ‘Fiddler on the Roof’. But that won’t feed ya.

Somebody, we’ll call him Shlomo, came up with a brilliant idea for getting a hot, cooked meal for lunch of Saturday, without breaking any of the 17,346 rules against ‘doing things’. You put the food into a big pot on Friday night, and then just leave it on all night and the next morning until you return from synagogue and whole family can enjoy a hot meal in the frozen winter days. But what do you cook? What can survive being, essentially, cooked to death?

Shlomo prayed for an answer, having tried a chicken (the cremation was a success, the family starved), bread (later used for building an extension on the hut) and vegetables (ended life as a vile pulp of de-vitiminised sludge which stuck to the pan and took a week to scrub off). And the Lord said to him “invent cholent, ya schmuck, Jesus, do I have to think of everything!!!!?”

So Schlomo put in a big pot the cheapest meat he could find, which was ‘shin’, (because everyone was piss poor), potatoes, barley, beans and threw in a few beef bones too, onions, whatever, and left it there for 18 hours. And what came out was the food of God. Albeit a rather insulting and non-empathetic God. It tasted wonderful. Was rich, wholesome and hot.

And here, just 150 years later, we still eat it. Ok, not every Saturday, because, as with most European Jewish food, it can ruin a heart in 2 years, but it has that comforting and timeless fabulousness which comes from the days before serving one sliced radish on a plate, drizzled with balsamic vinegar was considered anything but a joke.

Someone made me a cholent last night. And it was wonderful. And I’m still alive.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx