A kosher Lent

There are so many sources of wistful regret to choose from, so many different clocks to mark time. — Elizabeth Ehrlich, Miriam’s Kitchen

With the imposition of ashes imminent—this stark ritual signalling the onset of a season starker still in its confrontations with mortality and its fleshly (and fleshy) deprivations—I am reading about food. Glorious food.

Miriam’s Kitchen is the 1997 memoir of Elizabeth Ehrlich, a smart, skeptical, secular Jew who, in her mid-30s,  found herself, despite herself, drawn to kashrut—the dietary laws of Judaism. Her gentle yet resolute mother-in-law, Miriam, and the memories of her grandmothers’ kosher Brooklyn kitchens beckon Erhlich toward a way of eating—a way of life—that causes her to wonder: “have I consented to my own oppression?”