If you eat chulent.........

Posted: Mon, Jul 23 2012, 4:45 pm Post subject: re: If you eat chulent.........

We never made cholent at home when I was growing up though we did enjoy it when we ate over at friends' homes on Shabbat and at kiddushim in shul. My mother didn't grow up frum and it wasn't in her culinary repertoire.
I was shocked, however, when I discovered that my MIL, who is right wing conservative, had never even heard of cholent and was unfamiliar with the entire concept! One would have thought that she would have encountered it (at least in theory) at some point over the course of her lifetime...

Posted: Mon, Jul 23 2012, 4:46 pm Post subject: re: If you eat chulent.........

By us Shabbos is just not Shabbos without cholent. Chicken soup I only make in the winter, but cholent I make every single week.
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Posted: Mon, Jul 23 2012, 7:21 pm Post subject: re: If you eat chulent.........

Another vote for all year. It just doesn't feel like shabbos without it. Plus it's easy to keep everything hot. I put kugel and kishka inside. No need for hotplate because I keep the oven on Friday night on timer and need a way to keep food hot for the day.

Gold Member Joined: Feb 05 2008 Posts: 2428 Location: UK

Every week. And we eat the exact same foods every single shabbos. No variety other than perhaps the sauce on the chicken, the type of kugel or different salads.

To us the ma'achalei shabbos that our grandfathers ate and instituted are very important. There are reasons behind each spoonful and we stick to the menu.

We look forward to shabbos food all week.
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Posted: Tue, Jul 24 2012, 5:08 am Post subject: re: If you eat chulent.........

We don't have it every week, neither of us grew up with it, but we are just as likely to have it in the summer as in the winter. We do have hot food every week, and we almost always have soup (although not chicken soup). The only time I actually remember not having soup was last week when dh said he wasn't that hungry, please don't make soup. All of us enjoy soup so we have it year round, and in the winter often Shabbot day also.
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Posted: Tue, Jul 24 2012, 5:49 am Post subject: re: If you eat chulent.........

I don't usually eat it, winter or summer but I do make it, the vast majority of the time.
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Posted: Tue, Jul 24 2012, 7:59 am Post subject: re: If you eat chulent.........

apologies, batmelech, your comment is very clear when I re-read it.

Posted: Tue, Jul 24 2012, 8:33 am Post subject: re: If you eat chulent.........

I make it for the winter but not in the summer. We have soup friday night until really recently when it was just too hot, I'll go back to it iy"h for the yomim tovim.

My cholent is 1) pareve 2) no fat 3) healthy and easy to prepare but it may not resemble any cholent you know.

Take black, red, green and yellow lentils and soak overnight. Wash and rinse. Take dried split peas. Take three big potatoes, carrots, an onion, and prepare salt, curcum, paprika, garlic. Then honey.

Put lentils and peas in pot. Peel vegs, cut potatoes in half, keep onion as is, cut carrots into chunks add to pot. Add salt (for those who can) lots of curcum, paprika and garlic. cover with water and bring to a boil. Skim off scum. Is this beginning to sound like soup? We add lots of water and also use it as soup btw. But this is the cholent version. When it boils out add a bit more water and a tablespoon of honey. If you want, put a few eggs into it to cook. We have vegetarians in the family so we leave it like this but if you want you can add meat or chicken on top (cooked). You can also add rice in the cloth bags for those who like. Keep it lightly covered with water and keep on the blech all shabbos until by the morning it gets crusty.

Fight children for who gets the best part of the crust.
Fight children for who has to clean the pot on motzaei shabbos.
Enjoy.
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Posted: Tue, Jul 24 2012, 2:09 pm Post subject: re: If you eat chulent.........

Each week DH and I decide what I will make on Shabbat depending on who is coming, how much time and energy I have, what we feel like, what is going on in the shul etc. We go through times of mostly having chulent and times of mostly not having it. We have it more in the winter than the summer but it is based on our preference that week not a shita.

Posted: Tue, Jul 24 2012, 2:18 pm Post subject: re: If you eat chulent.........

Many people have never tasted chulent.
I love it.

We strive to have at least one traditional/family dish for shabbes, and as many as possible (ideally, all) for yontef. This is chinuch, too. Learn the name of the dish, how it's made, where it comes from, who it comes from.
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Gold Member Joined: Feb 05 2008 Posts: 2428 Location: UK

Posted: Wed, Jul 25 2012, 6:19 am Post subject: re: If you eat chulent.........

Are you saying that there is anything inherently Jewish/traditional in this stuff? A lot of it has to do with a particular area and somehting being cheap or plentiful, which it was not and is not elsewhere.

For example, money. Cholent/hamin or whatever you want to call it is made of the cheapest of ingredients because that's what people who couldn't afford the "real stuff", aka ROAST MEAT - could afford. So by eating cholent what we are basically doing is commemorating our ancestors' poverty!

Compote, particularly from plums - certain northern and eastern european areas only had certain fruit available, these were cheap. As soon as such families moved elsewhere, such as to the southers areas where lots of different varieties of fruit were abundant, they dropped the "plums only" or "prune stuff" (because dried plumbs are....prunes. And that's how they could have fruit in the cold when nothing grew) as fast as they could. Who would eat a prune if they could have a fresh peach, orange, mango, etc? So by eating this we are commemorating that they were stuck in areas with no variety in food and the minute they actually could, many of them got out to better and healthier areas.

Kugels are like cholent. Cheap. Made out of flour products basically with a bit of egg and fat.

And basically very little of this stuff is healthy. Eastern european Jewish food is, as many know, a heart attack in the making.

So...why are we eating this kind of stuff when we, Boruch Hashem, have so many healthier alternatives around?

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Gold Member Joined: Feb 05 2008 Posts: 2428 Location: UK

Yes I'm saying that there is a minhag in these foods.

Might be only a chassisic minhag, but definitely one that was instituted by the Rebbes, and there was a concept behind each of the particular foods chosen.

Why was egg added to the onion and not to the chicken, I don't know, but whoever decided on this definitely did know, and a great part of chassidus is following the minhagim of our grandparents and Rebbe's and we consider this 'Minhag K'din hu'.

You don't have to like it, but this is what I follow and commit to so don't bother with your disdain.

Silver Member Joined: Nov 18 2009 Posts: 672

Why the putting down? Like smilethere said this what we eat, cuz this is our minhag. Yes, it comes from our grandparents. We also don't eat a lot of things on Pesach cuz our grandparents didn't, but they didn't have these products in those days, so according to what you're saying we could whatever we want on pesach. But we don't cuz its a minhag. and we hold that a minhag is like halacha.