May 21, 2012

Salami

by Simi Monheit

February 14, 2011

 

The very best lunch I could ever hope for was a salami sandwich. On those extremely rare occasions when my mother tried, impossibly, to surprise me by packing a salami sandwich into the brown paper bag in which I carried my lunch, the wait for lunch time was unbearable. I would be sitting in my morning religion classes for endless hours, poring over ancient Biblical text. Sometimes we would be entertained by the somewhat salacious stories of King David, other times we’d be intrigued by the frenzied antics of the hormonally charged and fertility focused wives of Jacob, but sadly, most often, we were subjected to the mind numbing, torpidly mystifying intricate minutia of what constituted an acceptable Red Cow.

 

My teacher would be very solemn, his beard quivering with the emotion he could scarcely contain as he tried to convey the significance of the elusive Red Heifer to a classroom of twentieth century inner-city school girls. Did we not appreciate that the redemption of the Jewish people, in fact, the fate of the entire world, depended on finding that perfect beast? The despair of thousands of years of displacement would be eradicated; we would finally be allowed to return to the Holy Land to rebuild our Holy Temple!  All that was needed, the single missing ingredient required for attaining Biblical purity, was fulfillment of the God-ordained commandment to sprinkle the ashes of an unblemished red cow upon the new priestly class, thereby releasing them from the state of ritual impurity they have endured since the Temple was destroyed. Only then would they would achieve the ritual fitness required to perform their holy duties on our behalf.

 

I would close my eyes in an earnest attempt to envision herds of scarlet cows grazing languorously in the desert. It seemed an unlikely scenario to me, a child reared in the concrete jungles of the Jewish Diaspora who knew nothing of animal husbandry. Camels, goats, ram, most definitely, but cows? I had seen cows on my family’s occasional excursions out of the city. They appeared to be indolent, fat creatures that grazed lazily on the green fields easily within their reach. My blind faith was never strong enough for me to accept the image of robust ruby cows clustering among the sand dunes of the desert that I pictured my ancestors inhabiting.

 

My teacher would drone on reverently about the need to ascertain the fitness of the Red Cow’s hoofs and hair follicles, assuming one had been found, but never once did he display a helpful chart of bovine anatomy like the ones in my mother’s cookbooks. The most distressing aspect of this incomprehensible study was the underlying acceptance that should the magnificent animal ever reveal herself, it would only be through her slaughter, followed by fire, applied with exacting mystifying instructions, and the subsequent systematic scattering of her ashes, that biblical purification would be attained. There was additional cryptic detail about how the purification process itself contaminated the purifiers. But by this time I had given up. My mind was consumed with thoughts of my own little stash of red meat waiting in my lunch bag, donated, I was certain, by an unworthy mottled cow of no particular merit.

 

As my eyes glazed over the curled Hebrew letters I would smell the delicious savory oily garlicky scent of that soon, but not soon enough, to be devoured, no, I corrected myself, savored, tantalizing salami sandwich. I could envision it, the two, or hopefully  three, unevenly cut chunky salami slices, the oil congealing and mixing into the garishly yellow mustard, all of it oozing into the porous surface of the thinly sliced rye bread, the entire sandwich becoming thinner and wetter, heavier with flavor and texture.  All of my mental space was taken up by  this vision, while somewhere in the background those ancient biblical words were being chanted, describing in vexing detail the need to carefully inspect the hindquarters of the Para Adumah, that highly exalted sacrificial beast.

 

Sometimes I would intentionally drop my pencil to the ground, just so I could sneak a peek at the brown bag, blotchy with oil spots, resting on the built-in shelf beneath my seat. If I felt particularly brazen, or if my teacher appeared about to enter a mystical Red Cow induced trance, I might even venture to open the bag and inhale deeply, almost tasting the mysterious white bits stuck in the salami. I anticipated how they would stick between my teeth long after the sandwich was gone, allowing me to prolong the delectable salami sensation well into the afternoon. The salami afterglow would linger on, to be enjoyed in my secular English class, an environment where my appetite for learning something tangible might even be satisfied.

 

Most days my lunches were egg salad or cheese sandwiches, often sardines, that poor, much disdained relative of Tuna Fish. Those were paltry sandwiches, instantly forgettable. They contained none of the rich complexity: the deep color, the intense aroma, and the lingering flavor, of the greasy salami I so preferred. There was always an apple in my brown bag which I never ate. It would reappear the following day and the next day after that, until finally at the end of the week it would disappear to have finally been peeled, cored, and sliced, no longer meant for my lunch bag but intended for the fruit compote my mother made faithfully from the week’s rapidly decomposing lunch fruit.

 

Occasionally my mother would sneak in a pepper and butter sandwich. A green pepper would have been quartered, its innards discarded, and then, ignoring the natural protruding roundness of its shape, my mother would smash the pepper ruthlessly between two thinly buttered pieces of rye slice. The pepper pieces never fit; they would slide off the buttery bread, lonely limp green slabs lying desolately on the slippery and utterly useless wax paper that surrounded my sandwich.

 

I lusted for salami. I lusted for silver-foil. Despite knowing better, I succumbed to the envy the Torah specifically warned against. To my right and left sat other girls more fortunate than me. I longed for their silver foiled, tidily wrapped, beautifully prepared, lunch sandwiches. I would easily forego the luxury of the lunch boxes that some of my more entitled classmates carried, if only I could have the silver foil. I knew that within those lunch boxes there might be napkins, carefully folded, and accompanying dainty snacks. Some of the snacks might even be wrapped in silver-foil! But I didn’t care for those. All I wanted, all I dreamed of, was a steady diet of greasy salami, soaked in rich yellow mustard, seeping onto two pieces of rye slice, wrapped in reliable silver foil. For such purity of flavor, so excellently contained, I would happily scour to the ends of the earth, in search of the perfect red cow. 

 

 

 

Simi Monheit lives in Northern California in the heart of Silicon Valley.  After years in High Tech she is finally giving in to her first love: writing about her vivid Brooklyn childhood.  She enjoys Torah chanting and entertaining her teen-aged daughter with her colorful stories. Though a strong believer in Tikun Olam, she has never been a vegetarian.