In his most recent "Hey, Mr. Critic" column, Sam Sifton, the Times' restaurant critic, lets the reading public in on a little secret of my Tribe's: Trayf isn't quite trayf when it's found in Chinese food! One reader asks for a recommendation of a restaurant where she can take her Kosher boyfriend for a night of illicit rule-breaking. Sifton, who I believe is Jewish, replies, "If you want to skate close to the edge, where the ice is thin and crackly, Chinese is probably your best bet." He then quotes a former food critic for the Daily News, who says, "The Chinese cut their food into small pieces before it's cooked, disguising the nonkosher foods...My late cousin Daniel, who kept kosher, along with many other otherwise observant people I have known, happily ate roast pork fried rice and egg foo yung. 'What I can't see won't hurt me,' was Danny's attitude."
Funny enough: This joke is commonly accepted and has a long-running history! My family makes it often and even semi-abides by it. The joke also appears in "Portnoy's Complaint," that touchstone of rebellious Jewish culture. That this shows up in the Times' copy is proof that for all its worldly aspirations, the Times is actually a hometown paper. Where else but New York, where the Jewish population is the world's largest and Jewish culture the most ingrained, would this be part of the paper, understood by the readership and considered a not-foreign topic of conversation?
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