J
ews who keep kosher do not cook
meat with milk or eat meat cooked
with milk or even make use of
meat cooked with milk. Imagine how dis-
turbing it feels for a kosher-keeping Jew
to get served a piece of chicken swim-
ming in what looks like milk! The trick
that makes this possible: The chef uses
almond milk. Chicken in almond milk
was a delicacy and, centuries ago, often
served on Purim.
Rabbi Shelomo Luria (1510-1573)
mentions that “on Purim and such occa-
sions, when we usually eat chicken in
almond milk,” we must “put almonds
beside it and on it, as a sign.”
Rabbi Luria, known as Maharshal,
wants to make sure that we do not
mislead people into thinking
think we have cooked the
chicken in animal milk, which would, by
rabbinic law, not be kosher (quoted in
Siftei Cohen note 6 to Shulhan Arukh,
Yoreh Deah 87:3).
His contemporary, Rabbi Moshe
Isserles, (Poland, born about 1520 or 30,
died 1572) disagrees about the need for
a garnish: “and they are accustomed to
make milk out of almonds, and put in it
the meat of fowl . . . and we do not need
to put almonds on it.”
After all, chicken in animal milk
is itself only rabbinically forbidden.
Requiring the almond garnish to ward
off suspicious onlookers would be
excessive.
Later, Rabbi Yonatan Eybuschutz
(1690-1764, Prague and Hamburg) also
skips the garnish, because “people are
unlikely to make a mistake,” since “it is
common to cook chicken with almond
milk.” Rabbi Eybuschutz adds, “and
extremely delicious.”
Anyway, almond milk is not milk at all,
but only the liquid extracted from a nut.
Whether we need to garnish the dish
with almonds or not, chicken in almond
milk belonged in the Purim feast.
The rabbis do not give us a recipe for
this Purim treat, but we do have several
earlier recipes for similar dishes. In about
1390, King Richard II of England asked
his master cooks to write down their
best recipes, and they produced a
cookbook called The Forme of
Cury. Their chicken in
38 |
PURIM
What did our ancestors serve at a Purim feast?
How about Chicken in Almond Milk?
A Purim Recipe
from the Past
LOUIS FINKELMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER
LO
UIS
FINK
ELM
AN