“The Joys of Burning Blinis” by Hindi Krinsky

AUTHOR QUESTIONS:

• In this piece, the narrator experiences food in two very different ways. One way is communal, in a spirit of connectedness, while the other is individualistic and totally disconnected from the consumer. Is there enough juxtaposition of these two types of culinary interactions? What commentary does the author provide us with?
• What role does Hawai‘i play in this story? How do the physical environment and local people affect the narrator and flavor her experience?

The blinis were burning.

Though I didn’t quite know what a blini was, let alone how it was properly cooked, even I, in my limited culinary expertise, knew that the charcoal texture beginning to form on the bottom of the pan should not be there. While it was the first time I was making (and burning) blinis, it was also, more importantly, the first and only time I was hired to cater a kosher Jewish wedding at the Hilton Hawaiian Village.

This was a particularly odd circumstance because I do not work in the food industry, I do not live in Hawai‘i, and I don’t usually make a habit of spontaneously hiring myself out to cater weddings. Yet, somehow, despite all these emphatic and resolute no’s, there I was, whisked off the beaches of my paradise vacation, fighting with the blini gods in the hellish heat of an industrial kitchen.

So just how did a New York City girl find herself making Russian crepes in Hawai‘i?

I had been to Hawai‘i before, but this was the first time I was taking the trip with my husband, Dovid. Hawai‘i means a lot of things to me, mostly touristy-things like surfing, sun, lava flows, and hula, but with Dovid it has also taken on a new meaning. It’s our meeting place: that one earthly place where we, as two separately wandering people, collided long enough to become meaningfully attached. Dovid was living there as an impoverished undergraduate, and I, not quite as impoverished, had been looking for a tan to show off to my snow-ridden friends. Somehow, though we grew up only a short distance from each other, it took traveling thousands of miles to Hawai‘i for our two very different paths to cross.

Three years later, we were finally making our return voyage. This trip was very different from my first. Now, I had a half-local-ish-feeling man who would not, under any circumstances, allow me to happily roast on tourist-infested Waikīkī Beach. Instead, we rented a car and drove around the island. We drank kava, ate taro, met up with Dovid’s old college friends, and surfed at ‘Ewa Beach.

Dovid even convinced me to attend the local synagogue services at the Ala Moana Hotel. I am decisively a once-a-year-Yom-Kippur-only-synagogue-attending-type-of-Jew. My disinterest in synagogue services is probably only surpassed by my disinterest in Jewish cooking. It’s not the food itself that’s bad; in fact, it can be decidedly delicious to an Eastern European oriented tongue. For me, it’s the repetition that’s tiresome, the traditional routine of eating the same foods each week that renders even the most flavorful gefilte fish and kugel dull and tiresome. Traditions often have this effect on me. All warm and familiar, associated with all the fuzzy memories of my personal and collective identities, they can unexpectedly become too familiar, too warm, and empty of meaning. So while Shabbat food is delicious, I had little interest in eating my mother’s food in exotic Hawai‘i. Despite my hesitations and disinterest, visiting the shul seemed very important to Dovid and so, like a dutiful wife who knows she can bank this acquiescence for some extra points later, I agreed to go.

Walking into the shul, I realized immediately that the attendees and services were a lot more interesting than back home. The gabaii (beadle) was a mammoth French-Moroccan man with a booming voice, who unnecessarily wore an enormous Lincolnesque top hat. One man arrived completely swathed in linens, and, very untraditionally, barefoot. And women, beautifully dressed in a kaleidoscope of colors, rhythmically swayed to the prayers, visibly preoccupied with the moment.

After services, we sat in long tables and ate challah, and gefilte fish, and chicken soup. We ate bowls of cholent, steaming kugel, and tzimmis. This was the food I was weaned on. Food that my grandmother’s grandmother’s hands grew wrinkled from making. It was so traditionally old-school Ashkenazik cooking that many young Ashkenazik Jews, now firmly removed from the shtetl and planted in the flavorfully diverse Americas, have largely grown tired of and sadly abandoned it, refreshing their own Shabbat menus with the colors unseen in Eastern Europe. And while traditions must always be reinvented and repossessed, there was something so simplistic, so essential about this particular meal in a location so un-Jewish that just struck a discordant chord within me.

It was odd sitting there, witnessing this very narrow culinary approach being enjoyed by a room of exotic expats: a group of tourists visiting from Belgium, a pair of yeshiva students traveling in an RV, an Israeli family who recently moved to Kailua, an Ethiopian Moloka‘i-based fisherman, and an ex-movie producer whose life navigated him away from Hollywood and to the hills of Mānoa. It was a strange feeling, at once familiar and not. Together, we ate food that spoke to my essential life experience; but at the same time, sitting there with them added a layer of exotic complexity and inexplicable nuance. It somehow made the familiar unfamiliar, the old, new, and imbued fresh flavors into dishes that had been lost on my skeptical palate.

We stayed for much longer than we had intended. It was a moment of connecting. All of us coming from our own uniquely spiced life paths, bobbing together like matzo balls in a bowl of chicken soup.

I was curious to meet the chef of it all, the guy whose cooking inspired people enough to come out of their homes and vacations to eat and pray together. Wondering into the kitchen I found that Yudi was not at all what I was expecting. First off, he was British and had a quick smile. Second, he was a slight man with a huge red beard, paddling an enormous pot of cholent over a tired-looking warmer.

Like so many people in Hawai‘i, Yudi and Dovid, who had met years before, quickly seemed like long-lost friends. Remarkably, he, his wife, a lovely local girl named Esti, and his two children live an Orthodox, kosher life in the Jewish boondocks of Hawai‘i. They not only maintain their culinary culture, but provide gourmet kosher food to the local community and its many visitors.

Within minutes, I found myself responding to their warmth and, perhaps a little too quickly, agreed to help Yudi cater his first kosher Jewish wedding at the Hilton the next day.

Though initially I was hired to simply wipe plates and count tableware, the next day I was quickly sucked into the vortex of food preparation, particularly kosher food preparation. As per Jewish law, the yeshiva rabbinical students first had to kasher the Hilton kitchen. This involves pouring pots of boiling water down every surface, firing it all over with a blow torch, and covering most surfaces with aluminum foil. This process is part of Kashruth, a set of Jewish dietary laws that observant Jews undertake with little comprehension; it is simply accepted as an “engraved commandment,” enigmatically etched into the foundations of Jewish identity. While there are some deeper explanations for the observance of Kashruth, ranging from a mystical diet to a tool for social cohesion, Kashruth has helped Jewish communities develop their own unique culinary culture, oftentimes influenced by but independent of their neighboring gentile societies.

Kashruth involves a million details, all of which needed to be accounted for that day. So it was only after the young rabbis created their aluminum-foil wonderland, inspected all the food products, and created shifts to continuously monitor the food preparation that the non-kosher kitchen was rendered fit and ready for kosher cooking. Of course, this all took way longer than anyone expected.

Hours behind, I felt my heart begin to palpitate. How quickly could we fillet all that onaga? How much time would we need to deep-fry all the egg rolls in that tiny Easy-Bake-like deep fryer? Where was the sushi guy? Ironically, while my tension built and exploded like a rioting volcano, Yudi and his hulking Israeli sous-chef, Tzaki, didn’t seem panicked at all. Cool as twin summer breezes, they took rotating smoking breaks and laughed at my “mainland” attitude.

When the call came that the bride really wanted blinis at her reception and would it be possible to magically, pretty please, make them, Yudi didn’t miss a beat. Running to the hotel lobby, he printed off a Google-recipe and handed it to me. I almost cried. Please, I pleaded, don’t make me responsible for ruining the bride’s favorite dish on her wedding day. But Yudi and Tzaki insisted. How hard could it be to make a baby pancake? I was handed a manhole cover of a frying pan, given a space on the stove top, and sent off with my freshly printed recipe.

I burnt the first batch to a crisp so badly that I thought the smoke would affect the sauce bubbling on the neighboring pilot. Yudi told me to start again. I was sweating. As I dolloped out the batter a second time, my hands were on fire from the heated oil. One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand . . . I counted the seconds before I had to flip them over, determined not to mess up another time. And then, the first good batch was out of the pan. I kept going, focusing on the batter, determined not to fail my new Hawaiian friends and the bride who forgot she loved blinis when she was creating her wedding menu.

Finally, it was over. Without warning, the waitstaff swooped in and placed my shameful blinis with the other hors d’œuvre on gleaming trays. They were different sizes, shapes, and most were of varying shades of brown. Like a flock of well-practiced birds, the waiters carried the trays out of the sweating kitchen and passed them among the well-dressed guests on the cool, serene lanai.

Whether the bride enjoyed my amateurish interpretation of her favorite dish, I never found out. But making my way back to the hotel that night with aching feet, cracked nails, and a new collection of burns, I could not stop smiling.

© 2011 by Hindi Krinsky