My favorite comment about Wise Sons' Saturday-only deli came from my sister, who wrote on Facebook, "Your grandfather, may he rest in peace, he didn't eat at delis that popped up. He married a balaboosta and SHE cooked for him."

Too true! Growing up, everything at our Passover Seders was made from scratch in my grandmother Fae's kitchen, from the gefilte fish to the brisket to the spongecake. (The exception was Passover brownies, which my 7-year-old self loved to whip up from the box of Manischewitz mix. My grandmother was a true balaboosta--Yiddish for perfect housewife & mother--and she knew how to keep a kid out of her hair when she was busy making chicken soup for 20.)

I had high hopes of finally making my own gefilte fish (chilled fish balls, typically made from carp, pike, and whitefish mixed with onion and matzoh meal and poached in fish stock, a kind of Mitteleuropa quenelle) from scratch this year. My mother even sent me the recipe she'd used, torn out of her well-splattered copy of From My Mother's Kitchen by longtime New York Times writer Mimi Sheraton. Time and deadlines, alas, will preclude this from happening for Monday's Seder, but sometime during the rest of the week, who knows? I could have a carp swimming in my bathtub yet.

Gefilte fish cupcake. Photo: J. Pollack Photography

However, you don't need to make your fish balls to present Stefani Pollack's fabulous (or terrifying) Gefilte Fish Cupcakes from The Cupcake Project. Just buy a jar of fish balls, mash them into a cupcake liner, and top with a big, tempting swirl of...wait! That's not strawberry icing, it's HORSERADISH WHIPPED CREAM! Oh, the horror. As my friend Molly said, just start saving for the kids' therapy now.

Passover, like Thanksgiving, only happens once a year, and so I've found that people really don't need something new and wild on the table, especially during the first two festive Seder nights. (The holiday itself goes on for 8 days, so I can understand that you might want to get a little crazy by the 5th or 6th night.) I can vouch for the deliciousness and complete ease of Gourmet's brisket recipe with one suggestion: Ditch the brisket, get the chuck roast. The weird, webby-stringy texture of brisket has always put me off, along with its tendency to dryness. Moist, slow-cooked chuck roast, by contrast, falls apart in perfectly succulent shreds at the poke of a fork. This is an especially good dish for Passover, because it's easily made ahead of time. In a heavy covered pot, it can keep warm in a slow oven for the time it takes to do the blessings and hide the afikomen.

I used to give myself major tsuris trying to reproduce the perfection that was Grandma Fae's spongecake, until I realized that, tradition aside, what everyone at my table really wanted was flourless chocolate cake, made with good chocolate, finely ground almonds, and lots of eggs whipped to fluffiness. This, plus strawberries, a few macaroons and maybe some jelly rings, is all anyone will have room for.

But what about after the Seder? A few days of leftovers, and then, it's a week of Atkins, with only matzoh and potatoes for starch, since all other kinds of bread and grains are forbidden during the holiday. By day five of crumbling tuna-on-matzoh sandwiches, I can well understand why Robin of Doves & Figs might want to soak her matzoh in wine before frying up a Drunken Passover Grilled Cheese.

And then, you probably want to get out of the house and let someone else do the cooking. If you're not strictly observant of the kosher-for-passover dietary laws, several Bay Area restaurants are doing menus this week inspired by Passover dishes from around the world (if by "around the world" we mean Italy.)

From April 19 through April 26, Delfina will be featuring its annual array of Passover-themed dishes. They're not doing a Seder, just adding a rotating selection of special seasonal items to the regular menu. Selections will change daily, but you can probably count on finding some kind of brisket, fried artichokes (a classic of Roman Jewish cuisine), veal tongue, chef-owner Craig Stoll's family recipe for matzoh ball soup, and an "edible Seder plate" with farm egg salad, charoset (apple-walnut dip) and lamb-shank crostini. (But going to Delfina while forgoing pasta? That would take more willpower than I can muster.)

Maror Cocktail. Photo courtesy of The Sipping Seder

And finally, let's not forget the required drinking. Yes, four glasses of wine are mandated at each Seder, but in between, why stick to Manischewitz (or even Baron Herzog) when you can knock back a beet-and-horseradish Maror cocktail instead? As Irwin Keller writes in his introduction to The Sipping Seder,

The seder asks us to retell the story of the exodus from Egypt as if we had been there in person. It’s hard to imagine enduring generations of slavery and a slew of plagues, only to flee our homes in the dead of night and run straight into the sea with the world’s fiercest army in hot pursuit. If we managed somehow to survive the experience, what would we do when at last we reached safety? Perhaps we lack the fortitude of our ancestors, but we can easily imagine being ready for a good stiff drink. Maybe two.

The six cocktails on the site, each of which corresponds to a ritual item on the Seder plate, are the inventions of Rob Corwin and Danny Jacobs. Even better, they're currently working with Umberto Gibin, co-owner of Perbacco, to debut the cocktails at the downtown restaurant during Passover. (To make your own, try searching out our local Distillery No. 209's kosher-for-passover gin, made with sugarcane instead of grain.

Perbacco will also be continuing its tradition of offering an Italian-style Passover meal cooked by executive chef Staffan Terje with former Square One chef and cookbook author Joyce Goldstein on the 3rd night of Passover, Wed., April 20.

Wise Sons is doing a pop-up Traditional Passover Seder at Coffee Bar Monday, April 18 and Tuesday April 19. Tuesday is sold out but reservations for Monday are still available. Saul's in Berkeley will be hosting a prix fixe Seder dinner on Friday, April 22, while Firefly in San Francisco's Noe Valley will turn its whole menu into a celebration of Passover dishes from April 18-26. Mission Beach Cafe will also offer a Passover dinner on April 25. Palio D'Asti is doing a "What Would Jesus Eat?" Holy Week mash-up from April 18-23, whipping up dishes from Italian Passover and Easter traditions.

And to that, l'chaim!

Bring me your bialys, your chocolate babkas, your lox, capers, and schmears yearning to be free! It's a cliche, perhaps, to kvetch about the Bay Area's lack of decent Jewish deli food, when we can find just about everything else here from Burmese tea salad to Himalayan momos. But try telling that to a nostalgic deli-lover. An empanada is not a knish; a wonton is not a kreplach; a morning bun, however glorious, is not a slice of babka.

Yes, there are pockets here and there: Saul's in Berkeley, of course, and Miller's East Coast Deli on Polk Street in SF, a few halfway-decent bagel shops, the Russian grocery stores and bakeries on Clement Street that stock sour pickles, rye bread, farmer cheese and stuffed cabbage. But where to bask in the kibbitzing atmosphere of Manhattan's Barney Greengrass on a Saturday morning, where platters of salami-and-eggs or whitefish salad are smacked down on Formica tables? Where can we inhale a perfume like the heady aroma inside Russ and Daughters on a Friday afternoon, equal parts smoked fish and buttery-cinnamony rugalach, with a hint of onion bagel?

But the Bay Area is a land more attuned to kale and lardo than chicken liver and schmaltz. Then again, if every other ethnic cuisine, no matter how obscure, can find its niche, why not this one? So far, the success of Wise Sons Deli, Evan Bloom's and Leo Beckerman's 10-week-old pop-up restaurant, bodes well for saving the deli. Started as a popular offering at Off the Grid, Beckerman and Bloom are now setting up shop at Jackie's Cafe on every Saturday morning from 9am to 2pm, turning the marble-tabled Valencia Street spot into their own version of Langer's.

The menu is short, a mixture of specials (mushroom-and-barley soup, corned-beef knishes) and staples (schmaltz on rye, housemade corned beef and pastrami sandwiches). No egg creams or Cel-Ray tonic, just Bolyan's sodas, De La Paz coffee and Mexican Cokes. Neither Wise Son has a restaurant background (Bloom has a degree in architecture; Beckerman worked in public health) but they're learning fast. Beckerman takes the orders while Bloom and his small crew slices pastrami and assembles sandwiches in a plugged-in, makeshift semi-kitchen where a bucket of potato salad jostles against a bin of bialys near a couple of Reubens toasting on a jerry-rigged griddle.

It's not an ideal set-up (says Bloom dryly, "I'd like to be able to boil water") but somehow, everything comes out delicious: thick-cut, lavishly fatty corned beef and pastrami sandwiches on springy, caraway-flecked sour rye bread, buttressed with heaps of fresh and crunchy coleslaw and sour pickles; a yeasty-chewy toasted bialy slathered with caper cream cheese and red onions, piled lavishly with Acme smoked salmon from the Polish neighborhood of Greenpoint in Brooklyn; plates of sunny yellow noodle kugel and hunks of babka densely ribboned with chocolate and caramel. They're working hard to rehabilitate schmaltz (chicken fat); after all, why should lardo and duck fat get all the foodie love? Already, regulars are asking to have their Reubens griddled in schmaltz. "We're like In-N-Out! It's our animal style," they laugh.

All the prep work--baking the breads, brining and smoking the meats, making the kugels, and more--is done in the community kitchens at La Cocina. Working there, they share the kitchens with an international mix of small-scale entrepreneurs, many of them women from Central and South America. It makes them think of all kinds of Mission-ready mash-ups--why not a corned beef pupusa? Or a dulce de leche hamantashen? A kale knish? How about a meatless Reuben stuffed with smoked shiitake mushrooms? (These last two have already been adopted on the menu, with great success.)

"I'd say the majority of our clientele isn't Jewish," says Bloom, and doing a quick one-over of the room on a recent Saturday morning, I'd agree with him; the mix is a resolutely urban one, united in a love for corned beef. Beckerman and Bloom have plans to get bigger and better. "We'd like to be open more than just on Shabbas," jokes Beckerman, although they're certainly positioned to scoop up the after-services crowd from nearby Congregation Sha'ar Zahav. They've been pounding the pavement looking for a permanent location in the Mission for the past six months, and will be hosting a Passover Seder dinner at Coffee Bar on Tuesday, April 19th. They've also got a full Passover catering menu in place for April 18th and 19th, the first two nights of Passover. Let all who are hungry, come and eat brisket.

Wise Sons Deli, 105 Valencia at McCoppin Sts, SF. Saturday, 9am-2pm. Cash only. Phone: 415 787-DELI.
Twitter: @WiseSonsDeli

The last turkey sandwiches and scraps of pumpkin pie are gone, the final breakfast of hot coffee and cold stuffing finished, and suddenly, another holiday is sending you back into the kitchen, this time to fry, fry, fry. Chanukah, the Jewish Festival of Lights, comes early this year, starting the evening of Wednesday, December 1st and ending 8 days later on December 9th.

Last year, I passed along all my must-have tips for latkes, the potato pancakes that are the festive centerpiece of family dinners during this holiday. Now, onto the borscht!

You wouldn't necessarily think, given how many people (Barack Obama included) shudder at the very thought of a beet, that a pot of beet-and-cabbage soup could best a platter of crispy, greasy, fried potatoes slathered in sour cream and applesauce, but I've seen it happen.

Every year at my annual Chanukah party, folks come for the latkes but stay for the borscht. Waiting for the next round of potato pancakes to come out of the frying pan, they drift over to the big pot of magenta soup at the back of the stove, scoop out a bowlful, dollop on the sour cream, and before I know it, they're at my elbow, demanding to know "what is in this soup??"

They don't really believe me when I tell them it's nothing but dowdy root vegetables like turnips and parsnips, dill, a little cider vinegar and a whole bunch of beets and cabbage. Inspired by the dreamy borscht served at the marvelously glamorous, original incarnation of the Russian Tea Room in New York City, my borscht has adapted over the years, to where there's hardly even a recipe to follow.

Onions, leeks, and garlic are sauteed to start with, then followed by a bowlful of whatever could survive a Russian winter, usually a combination of carrots, parsnips, turnips, celery root, and rutabaga, then chopped or grated beets and finely sliced red cabbage, all seasoned with plenty of salt, caraway seed, and a few twigs of sage or thyme. Because I usually make my borscht vegetarian, I add a big can of diced tomatoes (Muir Glen's fire-roasted tomatoes are particularly nice) to give body and a bit of acidity to all that root-vegetable sweetness. Water to make up however much liquid is needed, and then, the crucial splash of red-wine or apple-cider vinegar for tartness. A gentle simmer for 45 minutes or so, an adjustment of salt or vinegar, a hefty stir-in of chopped fresh dill, and the borscht is ready. Like every winter soup, it improves with age, and can be made a day or two ahead of time.

My Polish landlord has promised to have me over for borscht sometime this winter. The red borscht that I know, he says, is a specialty of eastern Poland and Ukraine. In western Poland, however, they make a white borscht with sausage, potatoes, and zur, a tart, cloudy liquid fermented from rye meal and rye-bread crusts. I haven't yet tried this kind, since it sounds like it needs a freezing-cold, months-long Eastern European winter to properly accompany it.

In my Jewish experience, there are two kinds of borscht: the cold kind, made only with beets, that you mix with sour cream to a lurid hot-pinkness and drink from a glass, and the belly-filling winter kind, chock full of cabbage, beets, and root vegetables, served with a dollop of sour cream on top, challah or rye bread on the side.

I generally make mine vegetarian, since I'm usually making borscht for a crowd, but many cooks make theirs with meat, chunks of fatty, tough but flavorful beef cooked on the bone to give body to the broth. A shot of vinegar keeps winter's appetite sharp, although now that everyone's madly pickling, you could add in some naturally fermented sauerkraut juice, perhaps and some sauerkraut, too, or a few diced pickled beets with their juice.

Winter Borscht
It's impossible to make a small amount of borscht. Anyway, why would you want to? It keeps well and can sustain you for days. The amounts listed here are approximate, since the amount of borscht you make should be constrained only by the size of the biggest pot you have.

Serves: 8

Ingredients:
2 tbsp oil or butter
1 large onion, peeled and chopped, and/or 1 large leek, trimmed and chopped
3 to 5 cloves garlic, chopped
2 carrots, chopped
1 parsnip, chopped
1 turnip, chopped
1 rutabaga, chopped (optional)
1 celery root, chopped
3 beets, peeled and chopped or grated
1/2 head of red cabbage, thinly sliced
1 cup cooked small white beans, optional
1 28-oz can diced tomatoes and juice
water as needed
1 - 2 tsp salt, to taste
2 tsp caraway seed
1 tsp dill seed (optional)
1 tsp dried thyme or several branches of fresh thyme or sage
2 tbsp apple-cider or red-wine vinegar, or to taste

Garnish:
1 small bunch fresh dill, minced
Sour cream--the real stuff, with no additives, and definitely NOT "lite" or nonfat. If you truly won't (or can't) bear the full-fatness, use non- or lowfat Greek yogurt instead.

Preparation:
1. Over medium heat, heat oil in a large, heavy soup pot. Reduce heat, add onions, leek, and garlic. Cook, stirring, until softened and translucent but not browned, 5 to 8 minutes.

2. Add chopped carrots, parsnips, turnip, celery root and rutabaga and cook, stirring, until vegetables are slightly softened, 8-10 minutes. Add beets and cabbage and cook for another few minutes.

3. Add salt, caraway, and thyme. Add tomatoes and juice, white beans if using, and enough water to cover vegetables. Add vinegar to taste. Bring to a simmer, then reduce heat to keep soup at a gentle simmer. Partially cover and let cook until vegetables are tender and flavors have blended, about 45 minutes.

4. Adjust salt and vinegar. To serve, top each bowlful with a generous sprinkle of fresh dill and a dollop of sour cream.

Photograph by Stephane von Stephane

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, begins this year on Wednesday night. This holiday is a bridge stretched between the past and the future. As I understand it, the two-week period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement, is a time for personal and spiritual clean-up. You look back at everything you did (or failed to do) during the past year, and you make amends: settle your debts, ask for forgiveness, leave old habits behind.

And to help blow the cobwebs out of your brain, and get you up and ready to do what needs to be done, comes the blast of the shofar, or ram's horn. It's a real ram's horn, blown at the end of the day's services, with a sound that's deeply weird and thrilling. It's rare that any experience comes to us unmitigated across the centuries, much less the millennia. Nothing we eat now tastes like it would have two hundred or even a hundred years ago; cooking methods, animal breeds and plant varieties, even ways of measuring ingredients have all changed and evolved, and while old recipes may give us a sense of how previous generations ate, we'll never know exactly what their bread or their apples tasted like.

Sounds, though, might remain true. A ram's horn is a ram's horn, and when it's blown, the tone rings as Biblical as manna, a tradition that reverberates down through some five thousand years. (By the Jewish calender, the upcoming year is 5771.)

As a lunar holiday, the exact date of Rosh Hashanah moves around from year to year, but it usually falls sometime between early and mid-September. The timing is perfect to fulfill the injunction to eat new fruits, part of a holiday tradition of serving sweet foods to guarantee a sweet year.

Honey, too, is always on the menu at Rosh Hashanah, scooped up with apple slices and used to sweeten round domes of raisin-studded challah bread. With the resurgence of interest in beekeeping, and especially in urban beekeeping, now is the time to find out what your neighborhood tastes like, to a bee. I'm always trying out different local honeys, so on my table this year will be Eggman Family's pomegranate-blossom honey (sold at the Saturday Alemany Farmers' Market in San Francisco) next to the "Marin Mix" honey from Marshall's Farm (widely available at many local grocery stores, as well as the Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market and the Marin Farmers' Market.)

You can also drop by Saul's in Berkeley next week for Adventures in the Honey Harvest, a panel discussion and local honey tasting with Helene Marshall of Marshall's Farm Honey, Jen Radtke of Biofuel Oasis, which offers classes in urban beekeeping, and Saul's co-owner and home beekeeper Peter Levitt.

Right now, the farmers' markets are rich with the first fruits of autumn. Peaches, melons, and berries still have their allure, but this week my eyes suddenly noticed the plumpness of green and purple late-harvest figs, the golden swell of Bartlett and Asian pears, the red-striped Gravenstein apples, the first pomegranates, and in particular, the amber-skinned Italian sugar plums and dusky indigo French prune plums. These small, oval plums, harbingers of fall, are nothing like summer's juice-dripping flavor bombs made for slurpy out-of-hand eating; instead, their dense, sugary flesh and tart skins are enhanced by baking.

And this simple plum cake shows them off. It's a great family dessert that can easily double as a lazy morning coffee cake. Cinnamon seems to have a nice affinity with plums, but so does cardamom and anise. Adding a little buckwheat flour gives the cake a pleasant heft and nuttiness; you could also replace the white flour completely with whole-wheat pastry flour, or a wheat-free combination of equal parts oat and barley flours.

Not being a fan of traditional honey cake, an upside-down apple gingerbread has been my go-to holiday dessert for quite a while. But with the long-delayed warmth of summer finally upon us, something a little lighter, with the kiss of the last stone fruits upon it, seems to offer the perfect sweetness for the year to come.

Plum Cake
You could also try this with other fruits, such as sliced peaches, sliced poached quinces, or halved fresh figs.

Makes 1 cake, to serve 8

Ingredients
1/2 cup (8 tbsp) butter, softened
3/4 cup sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp ground cardamom (optional)
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup buckwheat flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup chopped walnuts or pecans, toasted
24 small Italian plums or 12 French prune plums, halved lengthwise and pitted
1 tbsp sugar mixed with 1/4 tsp cinnamon or 1/4 tsp anise seeds

Preparation

1. Grease and flour a 9" cake pan. Preheat oven to 350F.

2. Cream butter and sugar until fluffy. Beat in egg and vanilla.

3. In a small bowl, sift together flours, cardamom (if using), baking powder, and salt.

4. Stir half of flour mixture into butter. Add milk and stir gently to mix. Add remaining flour and stir until just smooth. Stir in all but 1 tablespoon of the nuts.

5. Spread batter in prepared pan. Arrange plums, skin side up, in concentric circles over batter. Sprinkle with nuts and cinnamon sugar or sugar and anise seeds.

6. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes, until cake is slightly puffed and golden brown. Let cool 10-15 minutes, then release from pan and let cool on a rack.

Adventures in the Honey Harvest will be held at Saul's Restaurant & Deli, 1475 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, on Sept. 14 from 7-8:30pm. Tickets are $5.

Happy almost-Passover! Today I am eyeing my tiny living room (soon to be dining room), counting the chairs and wineglasses, wondering who I can call to borrow another folding table and hoping there'll be enough cloth napkins and bowls to go around, since, after all, the eggs in salt water must be followed immediately by the matzoh ball soup.

This is the pre-Seder countdown familiar to anyone cobbling together an urban Passover dinner. Just as at Thanksgiving, a successful Seder menu must teeter along the line between Grandma's Traditions and The Way We Eat Now.

For example, what would happen if I went all Manhattan-chic and served tiny, peel-your-own speckled quail eggs with smoked paprika and sea salt for dipping instead of those typically rubbery hard-boiled eggs in salt water? Can the roast chicken be rubbed with Moroccan chermoula paste, made with cilantro, cumin, garlic, and my own preserved Meyer lemons? Do I want to risk all the magenta splatters (and dyed fingers) that come along with the now-traditional pomegranate beet salad with blood oranges and olive oil? Will my garden plot give up enough karpas (spring greens) for everyone?

Should this be the year I finally get around to making my own gefilte fish like my mother and grandmother did, or would the frozen Ungar's logs from Mollie Stone's be just as good? Will my grandmother's savory matzoh kugel, really an onion-celery-mushroom stuffing at heart, made with sheets of matzoh instead of bread, be out of place among these spiced and oiled updates? And the final question: flourless chocolate or Passover angel-food cake? Jelly rings or Barton's almond kisses? Can I hold fast to my loathing of coconut, or must there be macaroons?

As you can tell, I look forward every year to Passover, the eight-day celebration of the Jews' exodus from Egypt, and the accompanying dinner ritual known as the Seder, which begins the holiday this Monday at sundown. Like the crew that started the now-traditional Obama Seder, I see no reason to let a lack of chairs or matching wineglasses deter me from welcoming all who are hungry to come and eat. 13 people in a studio apartment? Bring up your piano bench and that extra card table, and we're in business! I've gone to Marxist Seders, lesbian-feminist Seders, a grandly traditional one overlooking Central Park West and one in Berkeley where the kugel, brisket and charoseth were all whipped up by the Swedish au pair. (I did, however, decline an invitation to a nude Seder one year. Seders can be many things, but naked is not one of them, at least for me.)

Sometimes the Seders were vegetarian, with a golden dill-and-garlic broth bathing the matzoh balls and a "paschal yam" (instead of lamb) on the Seder plate. I tried making sponge cake one year; as it cooled upside down to keep it light, chunks of cake started breaking loose and hitting the counter in clods. My old friend Jen called to tell me she was having doubts about her kugel; I told her I was sitting shiva (the traditional Jewish rite of mourning) for my spongecake.

Much of the food comes with built-in nostalgia, since many dishes are eaten at this time of year and no other. The sinus-clearing blast of horseradish, in particular, is hard-wired to Passover in my brain, no matter how many hip chefs add it to their braised-beef jus or mashed potatoes. Charoseth, a finely chopped mix of apples, walnuts, cinnamon, and sweet kosher wine (and it must be made with that nasty Concord-grape Manischevitz, or it doesn't taste right, right meaning like my grandmother's) is delicious and could be made at any time, but still remains confined to the Seder, where it symbolizes the mortar used by the Hebrew slaves as they built the pyramids, brick by brick.

Every year, I can look around the table and see friends who have been coming for years. The apartments change, the hair may get a little grayer, but each spring, we come back together to celebrate the achievement of freedom, to toast both its fragility and its tenacity, to learn once again that with it comes both responsibility and joy.

And breakfast. In newspapers and magazines, most Passover recipe features tend to focus almost exclusively on the Big Event, forgetting that there are eight days of breakfasts and lunches to get through after the soup and brisket. Since grains, flours, and leavening are the big no-no's during the holiday, baking Jews like myself must get creative once the charm of matzoh wears off around day three.

Now, a large and lucky group of you love Passover for the matzoh brei alone. However, the allure of a frittata fried up with crumbled bits of matzoh remains a mystery to me, hence my reliance on matzoh rolls and matzoh pancakes for my morning-starch needs. Now, there's no denying that everything baked during Passover ends up tasting like eggs and matzoh meal, and these rolls are no exception, but served hot and well-slathered with jam or apple butter, they do the trick.

Passover Rolls
Being very dependent on my morning toast-and-coffee routine, I had to find something else worth getting up for during these eight bread-free days. These take about as much effort as whipping up a batch of muffins, and they're quite tasty. The technique is similar to making the dough for cream puffs.

Ingredients
1 cup water
1/2 cup vegetable oil or melted butter
1/2 tsp salt
1 tbsp sugar
1 1/3 cups matzoh meal
4 eggs

Preparation
1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Lightly grease a baking sheet or line with baking parchment.

2. Bring water, oil, salt and sugar to a boil in a medium-sized pot. Add matzoh meal and stir over medium heat until dough forms a ball and comes away from the sides of the pot. Remove from heat and let cool for a few minutes.

3. Beat eggs into matzoh mixture one at a time, making sure each one is well-absorbed before adding the next.

4. Drop by egg-sized lumps onto prepared baking sheet. Bake for 15 minutes, then turn down heat to 350F and bake for another 5-10 minutes, until well-puffed and browned. Serve warm with butter and jam.

Who guards the culinary heritage of a culture? Where does authenticity reside, and who decides what it is? Can traditional foods change with the times, and if they do, are they still traditional? Can handmade salami made from grass-fed beef still call up memories of Grandma's Saturday-morning scrambled eggs and salami? In this age of massive multinational conglomerates, does brand loyalty mean anything anymore?

What's better-- the Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray tonic in the bottle you remember Grandpa drinking, now with high-fructose corn syrup included, or homemade celery soda infused with real celery seed, with less sugar and no packaging? How much do we pay-- in food miles, in feedlots, in calories-- for nostalgia?

All these questions, and more, were in the air at the Jewish Community Center of the East Bay in early February, as an overflow crowd squeezed into the main auditorium for a panel discussion on "Referendum on The Deli Menu" (Can the Jewish Deli be sustainable?) sponsored by Saul's. Saul's, for those of you born without cravings for matzoh ball soup, is Berkeley's big, busy, much-loved Jewish deli. But ever since Karen Adelman and her husband Peter Levitt bought the deli in 1995, they've had what they call "a stealthy, secret mission" operating alongside their dedication to borscht and blintzes, corned beef and chicken in a pot. Their secret? A desire to pull the deli in line with contemporary attitudes about food and consumption, rather than letting it ossify like gefilte fish left too long in the fridge.

To this end, towering sandwiches were slimmed down, no longer stacked with jaw-defying stacks of meat. Meats became sustainably ranched, grass-fed when possible. Vegetables started to come from local farms. Corn-syruped drinks were out; housemade sodas were in. Most recently, salami was dropped from the menu; Hebrew National, the only widely available brand of all-beef salami, is now owned by giant Con Agra.

This being Berkeley, you'd think pasture-raised chicken soup would earn nothing but mazel tovs. But not everyone, it seemed, wanted consciousness-raising alongside their blintzes and brisket. There was pushback from some customers, and an overall question: How much could a deli change and still be a deli?

Hence the referendum, featuring Karen and Paul in conversation with Saul's regular and local superstar Michael Pollan; green-business maven Gil Friend, City Slickers Farms founder (and self-described "pastrami addict" Willow Rosenthal, the whole moderated by Evan Kleinman, host of KRCW's Good Food.

Having heard the phrase "2 Jews, 3 opinions" tossed around by my opinionated, argue-for-the-sake-of-it relatives all my life, I was ready for some Talmudic-level conflict, some heated words exchanged in the interest of radical change vs. How Bubbe Did It.

Alas, though, everyone on the panel agreed on nearly everything. Nostalgia is no excuse for a lack of conscience; if you care about eating locally, organically, sustainably and/or humanely at home, why should a Jewish deli give you a free pass to wallow in feedlot beef or syrupy soda?

Said Peter, "We started with not wanting to sell meat we wouldn't eat. We want to drag the deli out of the museum, let it breathe with the seasons for a change." Right now, his challenge is corned beef: the grass-fed beef from local Marin Sun Farms, delicious as it is, isn't holding up to the 2- to 3-week brining process. It's been coming out dry and crumbly, probably due to being more muscled and less fatty that typical feedlot beef.

And then there's the menu problem: Saul's, like most delis, has a huge menu. There's the everyday menu, an equally long, but more international, seasonally-inspired specials menu, and then the "secret" menu of the more hard-core, Old World items--flanken, kishkes, things made with schmaltz and braised in gravy. Peter would like to see the menu shortened and made more manageable (and cost-effective); if that means no cold beet borscht in winter, so be it.

Says Karen, "I think we should be leading, not just reacting. We're hungry for meaning and community, along with comfort food. We need to connect with our future as well as our past. I promise, no one will leave hungry!"

Of course, even in Berkeley, there's room to toe more than one party line. If this were New York City, or Los Angeles, where deli culture, while battered, is still alive, one deli's decision to nix the salami would hardly generate SRO crowds at the 92nd St Y. But delis are few in the Bay Area, and so Saul's clientele takes any changes personally . But if there are Hebrew National fans and lox diehards out there, they're keeping quiet; the crowd claps and nods along with just about everything Pollan, Rosenthal, and Friend present, even recoiling a little in genteel horror at brightly colored slides of jaw-defying pastrami sandwiches teetering higher than Lady Gaga's heels. Those massive sandwiches, long the symbol of post-war abundance, a meaty slap in the face to immigrant privation, are no longer sustainable; as Peter points out, there's no way to provide that much meat, particularly if it's good, humanely raised meat, at a price regular customers can bear. "Those huge sandwiches are killing the deli. You can't make money selling 12 oz of meat for $10 or $15. At a steakhouse, you'd pay $30 or $40 for that much meat, and you'd buy a bottle of wine." Instead, Karen and Peter want to offer their customers alternatives that taste good, with a little patient explanation to help it along. Already, the menu emphasizes smoked trout (farmed) over overfished salmon, and more and more Mediterranean inspired salads and vegetable dishes to go along with the potato pancakes and cheesecake.

Pollan, for one, sees the democratization of the food movement as a very good thing. "Getting sustainable food into delis, taquerias, cheaper places, that's great because it makes it more accessible to everyone." Agrees Friend, "We vote with our dollars every day."

If the deli is our secular synagogue, as Pollan muses, clearly this one is reform, maybe even reconstructionist. So fizz up an egg cream or raise a glass of borscht, and toast the new deli.

VIDEO CLIP OF EVENT:

Photos provided by Saul's

Related Posts:
Saul's got SOLE: The Jewish deli in Berkeley evolves
by Marc R. aka Mental Masala at The Ethicurean

Referendum on the Deli Menu at Saul's Restaurant and Delicatessen: What is Tradition?
by Vanessa Barrington at Civil Eats

When it comes to latkes, a lot of quibbles come up before the first potato is even peeled. Thick and hefty, or crispy-lacy? Do you hand-grate the potato or process it to mush? Squeeze out the liquid or let it be? Par-boil the potatoes, or avoid the potato altogether and head for the untrammeled wilds of zucchini with parmesan or yams with ginger? Can bacon be involved?

But all of these questions are nothing compared to the Big One. Which is, of course, OMG these latkes are SO GOOD why don't you make them EVERY NIGHT???

This, of course, is a question for sages and Jewish mothers everywhere to contemplate. The answer may become clear in the aftermath of a good latke fry-up, when bits of shredded potato are shriveling to blackness all over the counter, and a fine mist of splattered oil surrounds the stove.

Right now, though, Chanukah has just begun, and latke enthusiasm is at its height. Why potato pancakes for Chanukah, you ask? First, there's the holiday's celebration of scrappiness trumping might, the humble potato standing in for the outnumbered, outpowered but triumphant Maccabees. Able to reclaim their desecrated temple, so the story goes, the Jews found only one day's worth of oil for light, with the nearest source of consecrated oil a week's journey away. Then the little miracle: the one day's worth of oil burned for 8 days, hence the 8 days of Chanukah, and the dictum to fry, fry, fry.

Anything fried will work, and Jews around the world fry up all kinds of different things. In Israel, the go-to Chanukah treat is soufganiot, jelly-filled doughnuts dusted with powdered sugar. In Eastern Europe, however, winter meant root vegetables, most likely fried in chicken or goose fat, served with applesauce for sweetness.

Here in the Bay Area, we can do a little of each: potatoes for cultural tradition, fried in olive oil for religious significance, or just because it's local and we use olive oil for everything, anyway. If you have chicken fat or goose fat or duck fat lying around looking for trouble, use it by all means, perhaps half-and-half with a mild vegetable oil like canola so that the simple potato taste isn't clobbered by poultry-ness.

Now, on to technique. Since I am not your mother, or (more importantly) your new Jewish husband's mother, nothing I tell you need influence your latke-making in the least if you already love your latkes,. But if, sadly, you've been relying all these years on those nasty frozen ones that taste like wadded-up flannel pajamas , or your children have suddenly reached latke-eating age and you feel compelled to hand down a little tradition, even if otherwise you order in pad thai, burritos or aloo gohbi every night of the week, here is everything you need to know.

First, if you're going to fry, fry for a crowd. Making latkes is a festive event, and the more people around, the less you'll notice what a giant mess all that spattering oil has made of your kitchen.

Once you start in with the latkes, you won't have the focus or energy for anything else. Since most people's appetite for potato pancakes is limitless, especially if they're only made once a year, you should put together some satisfying one-pot thing the night before, like hot beet borscht or a crock-pot brisket, with challah or rye bread on the side. This also gives you something to throw at your guests as they start circling the stove and eyeing your spatula like starving hyenas, drawn by the irresistible diner whiff of sizzling potatoes, onion, and grease.

Second, grate by hand. Like writing thank you notes or taking off your mascara before bed, this process looms much larger in the imagination than in actual minutes spent. Use the coarse holes on a big box grater, and you'll get perfect texture and minimal clean-up. No need to peel the potatoes, especially if you're using organic spuds.

Alternate onion and potato as you grate, since the onion juices will help keep the potato shreds from oxidizing into gray yuck as you go. Another thing: don't grate more than you can fry up in a few batches. If you're frying for a crowd, don't be tempted to grate up ahead of time. Liquid will seep, potatoes will blacken, and you'll end up with a bowl of unpleasant, gray-black soupy sludge that even frying cannot redeem. Instead, grate, mix, fry, repeat. (See "Why don't we have these every night?", above.)

Once your potatoes and onions are grated, scoop the shreds into a large colander set over a big bowl. Now, get your hands into that potato mound and act like you're wringing a pair of very wet socks. Squeeze and wring, squeeze and wring, releasing as much liquid as possible. Sex educator and cultural critic Susie Bright, a woman who knows how to find the right tool for the job, swears by a potato ricer for this; others load their taters into clean tea towels and wring away. Me, I'm a two-hands, no-equipment kind of lady, but follow your inclinations. When all the potatoes look well-wrung, step back and let the liquid collected in the bowl stand for a couple of minutes.

Meanwhile, separate your eggs, dropping the egg whites into a big bowl and putting the yolks aside. Hand the egg white to a helpful guest, and ask them to whisk them into stiff peaks. Here, technology helps; like natural childbirth, whisking egg whites with nothing but muscle tone and a whisk is admirable but achingly slow. If you don't have a hand-held electric mixer, just tell people to pass the whisk along when they tire out. Line a cookie sheet with paper towels and place it near (but not within catching-on-fire range of) the stove.

Lift up your colander of potatoes and onion. Underneath, you'll see a pool of brownish liquid with a squeaky layer of pinkish-tan potato starch at the bottom. Pour off the liquid, then dump the grated potato on top of the starch. Add the egg yolks, the matzoh meal or flour, and plenty of salt and pepper. Mix it all together, being sure to scrape up the extra starch from the bottom of the bowl. Track down that bowl of egg whites. Quickly, scoop the whites onto the potato mixture, and using a down-and-around motion, fold the whites into the grated potato.

Heat up a couple of wide, heavy frying pans (cast iron works best). Add about 1/2 inch of oil to each one, and get that oil really good and hot. (Buy a fresh bottle of oil for this endeavor. You'll need a lot more than you think.) When a shred of potato sputters and bubbles, slide as many large spoonfuls of potato as you can fit into the pan without crowding. Fry, turning once, until pancakes are a rich mahogany brown. Drain on paper towels, blotting off as much grease as possible so they'll stay crisp. If necessary, keep the first batch warm in a 250°F oven while you fry up another round.

As you fry, your friends and family will exhort you to come, sit down, eat. Ignore them. This is the martyrdom known to every latke maker: you must stand and work while others sit and enjoy. (See "Why don't we have these every night?", above.) Serve with sour cream and applesauce. You might think you could go all California and use salsa or fig chutney instead, but you would be wrong. Or not; maybe latkes are sensational with fig chutney. (Gravy, I've been told, is wonderful on matzoh balls.) But try trusting your inner grandmother first.

Latkes
This recipe makes thin, crispy latkes, more hash brown than hockey puck, because you can always make room for one more latke when they're light.

Ingredients:
2 1/2 lbs potatoes, well scrubbed
1 large yellow onion, peeled
2 eggs, separated
3 tablespoons flour or matzoh meal
1 tsp salt, or to taste
freshly ground pepper
Vegetable oil, for frying, or whatever fat you want (Yes, I'm sure bacon fat would be delicious, but really, must you?)
Sour cream and applesauce, for serving

Preparation:
1. Grate potatoes and onion alternately. Scoop grated mixture into a large colander suspended over a large bowl.

2. Squeeze and wring excess liquid out of potato mixture. Let potato mixture drain for a few minutes. Lift up colander, and pour off excess liquid below, reserving the layer of potato starch at the bottom. Dump grated potatoes on top of potato starch, and mix in egg yolks, flour, salt, and pepper, making sure to scrape the layer of potato starch into the mixture.

3. Beat egg whites to stiff peaks. Fold egg whites into potato mixture.

4. Heat 1/2 inch of vegetable oil in a heavy frying pan. Drop in a shred of potato; when it sizzles and bubbles, slide in as many large spoonfuls of potato mixture as you can without crowding. Fry over medium-high heat, turning once, until pancakes are well-browned. Add more oil as necessary for subsequent batches, but make sure to get it good and hot before adding the potatoes.

5. Drain on paper towels and serve immediately with sour cream and applesauce.

Makes about 20 latkes.

Happy (post-) Purim. I should have written this post last week but, frankly, I forgot all about Purim this year. I'm not good with dates. And I'm not a Jew, though I have been told many times by Jewish friends that I am, in fact, Jew-ish.

And that makes me exceptionally happy.

Now, I bet you are wondering, "Why the photo of the lady with the enormous décolletage and the even more enormous hat? What on earth does it have to do with Purim or those delicious, Purim-related delicacies, Hamantaschen?"

Please let me explain...

Nine years ago this month, I had never even heard of Purim until I received a phone call from my friend Tricia.

"Are you free tonight?" she asked. "Want to go to a Purim party?"

I said yes, of course. And then I asked, "What the hell is a Purim party?"

She admitted that she really had no idea. As a Mexican-Scottish agnostic, she wasn't exactly up on Jewish religious tradition. Her fiancé was, however, in his second year of Rabbinical school and she was boning up on her holidays. She told me that, unlike Yom Kippur, this was one of the fun holidays, where people dressed up, ate, drank, and made a lot of noise. Being rather good at all of the above, I became rather excited about it-- especially when she told me we needed to go in costume.

I had approximately six hours to come up with costumes for the two of us to attend a party at a temple in which I'd never been, celebrating a holiday I never knew existed. I did a little research, called her back and said, "Just show up here at six in a black turtleneck."

For those of you who still don't know what Purim is about, let me explain as briefly as possible.

Purim, for Dummies

Purim is a rather joyous holiday-- one celebrating the Jews' deliverance from extermination by the King of Persia's evil advisor, Haman. Haman despised the Jews because of their otherness-- they refused to bow to him, the king, or anyone but their own God.

Fortunately, the king's favorite wife, Esther (who was the adopted daughter of Mordecai, a man who once saved the the king by revealing a plot against his life) was a Jew, though closeted at the request of her father. When Esther learned of Haman's plans to exterminate her people, she revealed herself as a Jew and argued that, should Haman have his way, both she (his favorite wife) and Mordecai (his savior) would be murdered as a result. Tables were turned, Haman was himself killed, and the Jews were allowed to exact reprisals upon Haman's people-- essentially freeing themselves from their famous Babylonian Captivity.

It's amazing how freeing coming out of the closet can be, whatever one's secret. In this case, quite literally.

Oh, It Needs a Hat

I was at a loss as to what to wear to the party. How many Esthers, Mordecais, and Hamans would show up? I imagined people with a poor grasp on historical costuming showing up in togas or basic burlap. Thanks to a little time and Googling, I came across several recipes for Purim cookies, or Hamantaschen, which are supposed to represent Haman's hat or, as some would argue, ears.

As a literal-minded man who loves to put things on his head, I found the notion of making a hat-inspired cookie into a cookie-inspired hat rather delicious. I spent the rest of the afternoon making giant Hamantaschen headwear.

Dressed as The Hamantaschen Twins, Tricia and I were a hit at Temple Sha'ar Zahav. After the noise-making and game show-themed events, the evening culminated in costume judging. We came in second place, much to our delight, beating out the less-inspiring costumes and, inexplicably, a woman wearing a giant vagina suit. I have since blotted from my memory the costume which stole our thunder.

We celebrated by strolling into the Castro wearing our hats. Most of the people on the street looked at us with utter confusion. A few people, however, smiled and gave us the thumbs up sign. "Jews," we thought, "They dig us."

We settled into a bar table at Harvey's, where I drank my first, second, third, fourth, and last ever Lemon Drop. Why? Because we were wearing big hats, that's why. We chatted up a table of gay softball players next to us. I was rather (unsuccessfully) fixated on one fellow there celebrating his birthday. Tricia was occupied by another, more interesting gentleman. When a drag queen handed us pencils and stapled sheets of copy paper, we realized it was trivia night, so we in our giant hats joined tables and forces with the jocks.

And, this time, there was no second place for us-- we won, even though none of us could name more than one porn star out of the many represented on our test papers. Fortunately, we were good at geography and disco hits of the 1970's.

I went home that evening rather high from all the contest-winning and Lemon Drops, but I came away with much more than that-- I met one of the best friends I've ever had that night chatting and playing trivia games, all the while savoring the time I was able to share with one of my oldest friends-- a girl who, at 13, I asked to go to Europe with me as gravely as any other shy boy might ask another girl to go to the prom.

And all thanks to our giant, conversation-starting Hamantaschen hats.

The hat was somewhat worse for wear by the time I gave it to my next door neighbor-- a Jew who loved playing dress up more than any straight man I've ever met. God only knows whatever became of it. Or him. Fortunately, the friendships are still around, however tattered and frayed by life and stress and distance they may have become at times. They are sometimes shelved, but they are always there. A little more glue or glitter or TLC, and they are as good as new-- more durable than any styrofoam, brown paper, and satin that a hot glue gun could ever put together. I'd be a fool to give those two away like I did that damned hat. I don't care how many cookies you offered me.

Hamantaschen

In German, the word tasche means "pocket", which is essentially what these cookies are all about-- there is a pocket made for jams or other pastes like those made of poppy seeds or prunes (lekvar). How they are meant to represent a hat worn by Haman, I have no idea. Three cornered hats were favored by European gentlemen of the 18th Century C.E., not Central Asian ones in the 6th Century B.C.E.. The European Jews of the 18th Century may not have had much of a knack for historically-appropriate head gear, but they did come up with a rather delicious cookie.

While trawling for recipes, I landed on the one that sounded the most delicious (to me)-- that of a very popular food blogger who shall not be cited here. There was something about her non-traditional use of both butter and (especially) cream cheese in the dough that told me these were the ones to bake.

They didn't turn out so well.

While they were as delicious and tender as I suspected they would be, I followed the recipe too blindly as I am wont to do whenever I bake anything new. I should have read all the comments attatched to the post before my baking venture to get a little more insight. For example, the dough should have been rolled more thinly, too much jam (even for this jam lover) in the center, the oven temperature was not high enough, and the baking time, which was suggested at 20 minutes, was more like 30. Oh, lots of problems, but that is another blog topic altogether. Sadly, the walls of these little Jerichos came tumbling down with the weight of all that bubbling confiture. Some of them looked remarkably like gaping wounds. But, like I said, they tasted rather good.

Of course, it could have been my own, simple lameness. But I very much doubt it.

I should have stayed with Mark Bittman.

Although I didn't make it Saul's Deli this year for their annual Neverending Latke sidewalk fest, a lingering craving for piles of crispy potato cakes convinced my husband to brave the task of grating and frying.

He more or less followed a straightforward recipe from Gourmet and managed to deliver, with his first try, a most excellent feast. Some crème fraiche, homemade applesauce and leftover oil from donut frying may have gilded the latkes, but they're so good, we don't really need much more than a plate or fork. Of course, some of us who hover around the cook right at the stove don't even need those.

Everyone and their bubbie guard special tricks to making the best latkes in the world. Mine involves one of the most important tools in my kitchen: a beloved grater. My Bluffton Slaw Cutter, named for the Ohio village of just over 3,000 people where the company has been producing their crazy sharp graters since 1915, ensures thin, delicate, crisp shavings of potato. As anyone who works with good tools knows, the best ones are simply constructed, made to last decades and respond to each individual user. With the Bluffton grater, you can vary the length and thickness of your vegetable strips depending on the strength and angle you use.

Mine is just over 20 years old. Nothing fancy, it's one thin but strong piece of metal with edges bent over a single length of thick-gauge wire that -- oh beautiful simple tools! -- curves to become a handle. It's long enough to lie over a bowl. And most importantly of all, a special process of hand-hammering the holes creates edges that become sharper the more you grate. Sorry, not holes, knives. Etched into the metal is a warning: "HOLD THE FINGERS SO THAT THEY DO NOT COME IN CONTACT WITH THE KNIVES."

You can find older versions of the grater at flea markets -- look for "Bluffton, Ohio" or "Bluffton Slaw Cutter" somewhere on the face of it -- or you can order a set your own to start sharpening with cabbage, carrots and potatoes. You can get all three for only $16.

My husband learned the hard way that my grater is indeed very sharp. The last batch of latkes have a bit of his skin and, maybe, a few drops of blood. (What are the laws of kashrut on that?) I reminded him to use my other secret tool for the best latkes ever: the glove.

It's an exfoliating glove from the Japanese dollar store. You can find them for a few bucks at any drugstore or bath shop. I store one next to the oyster knife for shucking, while the other sleeps next to my grater. They're thin and flexible enough to allow nimble maneuvering of even the most recalcitrant bivalve, and also strong and sturdy enough to deflect sharp edges. Easy to use, wash, dry and store, the gloves have helped me slash my Band-Aid budget by at least 75 percent. I suppose less scarring on my hands is one indirect benefit of repurposed beauty aids.

And if, after reading all of this, you're still wondering why I don't pull out my food processor to grate the latkes, then you apparently like yours mushy and bruised. Give me a hand-grated potato cake any day over cleaning potato from the crevices of a plastic processor lid.

Latkes

Makes: Enough for 2 hungry or 4 overly modest eaters

Ingredients:
2 large potatoes, peeled
1 small onion, diced small
2 eggs, lightly beaten
Salt to taste
Pure olive oil or peanut oil
Crème fraiche and applesauce

Preparation:
Grate potatoes into a bowl of water. Drain well and then spread in a thin layer on a clean kitchen towel. Roll up and then twist the towel to wring as much liquid as possible from the potato shreds.

Dry out the bowl and in it combine the potato, onion, egg and salt. Stir until evenly coated.

Heat 2 inches of oil in a wide, heavy pan over medium-high heat until it begins to shimmer. With a fork, form small rounds of the potato batter in a large spoon and then slip them into the hot fat. Continue shaping the latkes in the pan, if needed, with a fork. Cook until golden brown on both sides, 4 to 5 minutes per side.

If the cook is keeping guests out of the kitchen while cooking in a desperate attempt to shore up latke supplies, they can be kept warm in a low oven. Spread them on a rack placed over a sheet pan and place in a 250-degree oven.

The documentary film, Chez Schwartz, enjoyed a quiet if savory U.S. premier at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center earlier this week. It has yet to be picked up for wider distribution, but keep an eye out for it. Or, if you can't wait, order a DVD and see for yourself why this little "Charcuterie Hebraique" is the place to eat in Montréal.

Garry Beitel, a Montréal-based documentary filmmaker, recorded the day-to-day rhythms of Schwartz's Deli over the course of an entire year. He managed to whittle his footage down to a poetic study of its workers. As one season melts into another, Beitel teases out the stories of the diverse men — from the dishwasher in the back of the house to the waiters in the front, from the general manager down to the gentlemanly panhandlers. They each describe their unique role in the extended family anchored by this tiny, 75-year-old restaurant. Through their stories, we see how years slip into decades and how one long-lived business adapts to a changing world.

Unusual in a film about ethnic food, there's an "overcast" feel throughout the documentary. In the end we wonder what happens to individuals such as newly promoted Alex or sweet, ailing Ryan. (Anyone interested in degrees of separation and ground-breaking animation should watch this award-winning short about Ryan.) The power of Chez Schwartz lies in Beitel's understated directing, Marc Gadoury's intimate camera, André Boisvert's amazingly natural sound, Robert Marcel Lepage's music and — ultimately — the simple, direct oral history of the workers themselves.

At the head of the line, hungry pilgrims can catch glimpses of smoked meat, freshly sliced by hand and ready to go at the sandwich counter. Joao (Johnny) Gonçalves, meat cutter, prepares some without the usual bright yellow mustard.

I remember the first time I bit into smoked meat at Schwartz's. Everyone does. In the film, two women gasp in rapture while sharing their first sandwich right there at the counter, and another diner is struck speechless while remembering his own first taste as a teenager. It may seem strange, perhaps even laughable to the uninitiated. But like any religion, only the converted truly understand.

During my year of exile in Vermont, I drove across the border every month to eat in Montréal. While dinner restaurants varied — rilettes at l'Express with my own jar of cornichons or maybe noodles in Chinatown — I always started with an early lunch at Schwartz's.

The neighborhood surrounding the deli draws immigrants from around the world. Historically the heart of Montréal's Jewish community, the road on which the deli sits has also been the symbolic division between the city's east and west streets, its French and English languages.

After five years as the busboy, Alexandre "007" Lebel gets promoted to waiter. To help with the stress of a fast-paced deli, he composes poems on clean paper place mats during precious down time.

If you arrive at 3895 Boulevard St. Laurent anywhere near the middle of the day, you'll stand in line on the sidewalk with a couple of dozen other meat lovers, separated by mere glass from stacks and stacks of brisket still warm from the massive steamer. You'll be able to smell the smoky, salt-tinged meat and listen to the same order over and over again in two different languages: a "medium" with fries, cole slaw, fresh pickle and black cherry soda. Around 400 to 500 other diners a day will order a steak from Peter at the grill; it arrives accompanied by a slice of calf liver and two diminutive sausages. The grill is a relic of the past: open flame right in the dining room, arm's length from innocent diners.

Grill man Peter Christianis (left) has been searing steaks and calf livers at the same station for 40 years, while waiter Mike Nelli has been a member of the Chez Schwartz family going on 7 years now.

Upstairs in the marinating bins and inside the smoker in the back are where the magic happens. The very secret recipe results in über-meat that's juicy and tender, savory and smoky, fatty and flavorful. It's not quite pastrami (there's a dry rather than wet cure) and it's way beyond corned beef (behold that spice-flocked, smoke-lacquered exterior). So everyone just calls it for what it is: smoked meat.

Frank Silva, general manager, knows the business inside and out. He's hefted and sliced so many briskets during his twenty years at the deli that his arm is starting to give out.

Schwartz's sandwiches have no need to rise to Carnegie heights nor does the owner, Hy Diamond, feel pressure to expand the menu beyond one type of meat sandwich, a steak and a few sides. As Peter Levitt and Karen Adelman, co-owners of Saul's Deli in Berkeley know well, this is a rare and precious thing.

After the film's screening on Thursday night, the two moderated an enlightening discussion about the future of Jewish delicatessens in the U.S. How does a meat-centered restaurant survive in a health-conscious, politically aware, option-filled world? How does Saul's modest amount of Niman Ranch beef compete with super-stacked, industrially raised pastrami from tourist-driven, New York delis? And how does a younger generation begin transforming a cuisine frozen in time into a meaningful, relevant, profitable business?

It's not about the size: Saul's uses "clean meat" from Niman Ranch in its pastrami sandwiches.

Anyone who hangs around chefs knows that, generally, they survive on the razor's edge of profit margins and see the cloud behind every silver lining. Peter and Karen were refreshingly honest about the challenges of running the deli, from the need to cater to the economics of not smoking your own meat to the impossibility of guaranteeing a kosher establishment. (People want milk with their coffee, after all, and don't even think about getting rid of the Reuben!)

They named their own favorite delis: Langer's in LA, Katz's in NYC, and Manny's in Chicago all made the short list. Most intriguing, though, were hints of a possible "Jewish bistro" in their future. The two hope to reinterpret and reinvent the vernacular of Jewish food with dishes from around the world using local, seasonal, organic ingredients.

For the time being, I'll continue enjoying my favorites at Saul's. From personal experience, I can vouch for the chopped liver (on both rye and matzo with plenty of mustard), the chicken soup and the pastrami sandwich. I also enjoyed more than my fair share of half-sour pickles and, of course, a bottle of Cel-Ray to wash everything down.

SAUL'S RESTAURANT & DELICATESSEN
1475 Shattuck Ave
Berkeley, CA 94709
(510) 848-3354