Introducing: The N.O.S.H. Test

Unspooling the WNBA’s knish problem (or: "why I write”)

I have nothing to say about the playoff readiness of the New York Liberty. But last month, Brooklyn’s own WNBA squad showed me: 

1. A very good time, if you’re looking to buy tickets

2. The only pro sports mascot and/or elephant featured in Vogue

3. Aged 40+ hip thrusts from a senior dance squad called the Timeless Torches

4. The worst potato knish of my life

The New York Liberty mascot, Ellie the Elephant, answering me when I ask why Barclays serves such bad knishes

In their defense, the Barclays Center slings the same beige-on-beige brick of a knish that you’ll find pictured on the exterior of your preferred hot dog stand. It’s a rounded rectangle of a soggy egg roll, filled border-to-border with a glue of intensely peppery mashed taters. It’s fine with mustard. 

I walked away from that sad knish more impressed. Not with the knish, but with its survival. 

Of course good Jewish foods like haroset or challah survive: they’re delicious. But knishes persist, despite failing Schmutz’s cardinal rule of Jewish food criticism: the N.O.S.H. Test.

How does this test work? Just ask yourself:

Am I reaching for a particular Jewish food just because it’s Jewish — i.e. Nostalgic — or because it’s actually Scrumptious?

This is a purely personal test. No Jewish dish is inherently unscrumptious, and the Nostalgia factor depends on your family’s path through the diaspora. 

Some of you might debate me on the Scrumptiousness of a knish. But I’m most interested in those Jewish foods so unanimously beloved that they enter into the general public’s Scrumptious lane.

Take bagels. Most American kids meet a frozen pizza Bagel Bite before they meet a Jew. Great British Bake-Off contestants are competing to make bagels (or, at least, trying). Bagels are even becoming a trendy student snack in China and Japan, where they’re made with local favorites like pork char siu or purple sweet potatoes. 

This same spirit of Universal Scrumptiousness came to a front last week when The New York Times released their list of New York’s 57 best sandwiches. Almost 20% just so happen to be Jewish (wagyu pastrami sandos and beyond).

Ok, citing the NYT as a non-Jewish source may be a stretch

Why am I so interested in convincing other people that Jewish food deserves to exist?

First, I’m not alone. Look at Breads Bakery. Their latest viral hit is a black-and-white cookie made entirely of croissant dough. It’s incredible, but at what point does this stop being a black-and-white?

My answer: Whenever we stop calling it one. 

Jewish food is not a dish, it’s a direction. It’s the process of making food more Jewish. Food becomes Jewish when, as food writer Claudia Roden says, “Jews bring it with us.”

Jewish food is hanging on to a Roman paste of fruits, nuts, and spices for 1800 years until I sell a thousand pounds of it under a later name: haroset. 

Jewish food is inventing a circular croissant and icing it black and white just because there’s some redeemable spark of Scrumptiousness in the public’s idea of a black and white.

I want non-Jewish friends, or those self-described Jew-ish friends, who didn’t grow up loving Jewish food, to see enough potential in the idea of Jewish food to give it another shot.

That could mean cooking Jewish food or simply buying it—but I’m trying to undo the resistance to Jewish food so many people feel if they grew up eating god-awful knishes, or gefilte fish, or borscht.

Martin Buber, famous Jewish philosopher, split the world into two parts: the sacred and the not-yet-sacred. I split Jewish food into two parts: the scrumptious and the not-yet-scrumptious. 

Every week, on this jewsletter, I try to redeem the not-yet-scrumptious among the nostalgic — with the hopes of spotlighting what could be the next bagel.

Something so scrumptious that we, and the world, can’t help but bring it with us.

Next week, I’m building a knish to pass the N.O.S.H. Test. I’ll see you there.

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