Kashrut

Kashrut is the Jewish dietary-law system that shapes Devorah’s meals from childhood through marriage, regulating ingredients, supervision, food preparation, and the separation of meat and dairy. In her family, these rules are practiced through small, concrete decisions: a chocolate bar is rejected despite being marked kosher, walnuts are cracked by hand for Passover, and mistakes in the kitchen become grounds for marital arguments. The rules give religious commitment a daily form, but Devorah’s growing willingness to cross them also makes food a measure of her changing relationship to authority and choice.

Certification and the Limits of a Label

As a child, Devorah receives a Hershey’s bar from Stephanie, another Jewish girl. She first checks that Stephanie is Jewish, believing that this makes the gift safe for her to accept. The wrapper complicates that assumption. Mimi points out its OUD mark: the chocolate is certified as kosher dairy, but not cholov Yisroel, which requires rabbinical supervision of the milk. A product can therefore bear a kosher designation and still fail to meet the stricter standard observed in Devorah’s household.

Mimi explains that Jewish identity alone does not ensure that someone keeps kosher, and that observance itself has different levels. The distinction is consequential rather than abstract: she takes the chocolate from Devorah and throws it away, promising to bring her a kosher La-Hit wafer instead. The episode teaches the child to read food packaging as evidence of religious oversight, while showing that family practice can impose a narrower boundary than a label or another person’s assurance would suggest. Devorah’s wish for the Hershey’s bar is also entangled with her longing for a father like the imagined Hershey whose name appears on the wrapper, so the rejected candy carries both an emotional meaning and a question of permitted food.

Preparation, Passover, and Household Labor

Kashrut is presented alongside other food-related religious obligations, especially in the preparations for Passover. For the seder, Zeidy forbids using ready-shelled walnuts because they might have come into contact with chametz. Devorah cracks the nuts herself for the charoses, using a nutcracker that has already raised blisters in her palm. The rule turns a possible, unseen contact into additional domestic work: the family does not rely on a prepared ingredient when its history cannot be guaranteed.

The preparation is shared unevenly. Bubby grates horseradish for the bitter marror while Devorah works through the walnuts, and Bubby’s chores include making borscht, souring pickles, and preparing food from scratch. The book places religious care within this repeated labor rather than presenting it only as a set of prohibitions. The rules are maintained through hands-on practices and household routines, with Devorah taking part in the work that makes the seder possible.

At the seder, the family also follows the ritual sequence of kiddush and drinks wine from individual silver goblets. The scene situates eating within a larger religious ceremony, though the specific Kashrut rule emphasized elsewhere is the separation of meat and dairy. The contrast matters: food observance in the household combines rules about what may be used with practices that give the meal its ritual setting.

Separation of Meat and Dairy

At Shavuos, the family’s separation of dairy and meat is explicitly connected to the Jews’ acceptance of the Torah at Mount Sinai. They eat cheesecake and cheese-filled kreplach, wait half an hour, and then begin a meat meal of smoked turkey, chicken, and chopped liver. Zeidy explains the interval and separation as symbolic of the commitment to observe the Torah’s laws, including the commandment to keep milk and meat apart. He invokes the words “We will do and we will hear,” presenting acceptance of the obligations as preceding full understanding.

The account makes the rule both practical and theological. It determines the order of a family meal, but Zeidy also uses it to assert that every Jewish soul was present at Sinai and accepted responsibility for the covenant. By that reasoning, refusing even one law would be hypocrisy. Devorah privately wonders whether her own imagined assent came from a wish to fit in. Her question does not erase the force the teaching has in her household; it exposes the gap between Zeidy’s confident account of inherited consent and a child’s uncertainty about whether she chose anything at all.

A smaller kitchen scene shows how food classifications shape play as well as formal meals. When Devorah and Moshe roast kosher marshmallows on the metal skewers Bubby uses for shish kebab, the skewers make the marshmallows fleishig. That classification means they cannot be eaten with the chocolate syrup and milk mixture the children have prepared. Even a treat made during an informal visit is sorted through the household’s meat-and-dairy distinctions.

Marriage, Food, and Domestic Authority

Years later, Kashrut enters Devorah’s marriage as a source of criticism. Eli objects to the way she prepares food, including occasions when she sets a meat knife on the dairy counter. Devorah distinguishes this from a more serious breach, such as putting the knife into hot dairy food; in that case, she says, both the food and knife would have to be discarded. Her account presents a graded practice, in which an error can be frowned upon without necessarily making the meal forbidden.

Devorah answers Eli by arguing that a rabbi would place shalom bayis, peace in the household, above Kashrut. His criticism turns the meal she has worked to prepare into an argument, displacing the appreciation she expects for her cooking. The conflict is not simply over whether a rule exists; it concerns how religious priorities are interpreted and who gets to judge her work. Devorah also notes that a rule against sex during a quarrel can allow her to refuse intimacy until Eli apologizes. In this domestic context, religious law is part of an ongoing negotiation over responsibility and conduct, not a neutral list of dietary instructions.

Transgression and the Testing of Inherited Beliefs

During a restaurant outing with Polly, Devorah tries prosciutto, which she recognizes as pork. Her teachers had led her to expect that eating chazer would make a person vomit, so she goes to the bathroom to wait for that reaction. It does not come. She returns to the table and samples lamb spring rolls, beef carpaccio, and salmon ceviche, describing the unfamiliar food as an experience of eating outside the rules she has known.

The scene does not present a new dietary practice or a settled rejection of Kashrut. Instead, it records a test: Devorah acts against a prohibition and discovers that the consequence predicted by her teachers does not occur. Her return to the table, followed by the purchase of tortoiseshell sunglasses, links the meal to a temporary image of herself as a glamorous rebel. Food thus becomes one of the clearest ways the narrative measures the distance between instruction and experience. From the discarded chocolate to the restaurant dishes she chooses to sample, Kashrut remains a lived boundary—first enforced by family, later questioned by Devorah, and never reduced to a mere abstract doctrine.