Who knows from this parve?

Parve. Merriam-Webster defines it as "made without milk, meat, or their derivatives." Meaning, it counts as neither meat -- a.k.a. fleishik -- or milk -- a.k.a. milchik. Parve is my best friend, the ultimate loophole.



So, OK, what's parve? There's the obvious: vegetables, fruit, grains (like pasta), juice, alcohol.

Then there are the foods that will trick you. The ones that, logically speaking, should be meat, but that are, in fact, parve: fish and eggs.


*Note: Mexican walking fish not actually kosher*

And then there ones that masquerade as milk, but that are parve, too: mayonnaise, margarine, all soy "milk" products, like yogurt, milk, and cheese.

The concept of parve is vital because anything that you make with parve ingredients can be served with either a meat OR a milk meal.

For instance:

• Mashed potatoes made with margarine - can be served alongside steak, brisket, roast chicken, etc
• Soy margarine or yogurt that takes the place of butter or buttermilk in baking, so you can serve cornbread (or whatever) with meat chili
• Dark chocolate (check to be sure). Melted, it can be mixed with parve margarine, flour and egg whites to make a delicious fondant - an amazing, loophole-to-end-all-loopholes dessert to follow a meat meal

Parve is generally denoted by a P on food products. If you don't care about the heksher, then check the ingredients yourself. Kind of amazing what you'll find -- like cochineal, a nice way of referring to the red bugs from whence red M&Ms get their color.

Nightmare of Passover

Pesach flummoxed my mother. She'd never learned the 'right' way to do it, and so relied on an outdated and somewhat ridiculous copy of the Kosher Cookbook for Sabbath and Holidays. I remember a Pesach cake she made falling to the floor and crumbling into a million pieces. Like sand. When it happened, she threw the knife across the room. It hit the breakfront, left a dent. Grabbed her Tictacs - remember those? it was the 80s and she'd recently stopped smoking - and ran out, slamming the front door.

She came back, of course. And the cake would've been bad anyway. But she never tried to make another Pesadich dessert again. So when I got older, I did. Felt the shame/necessity of making up where my mother hadn't been able to do enough. The cake is sufficiently tasty to prepare even when it isn't Pesach. Or for people who say 'Passover' instead of 'Pesach' and who wouldn't give a crap if you served them leaven. Most important, it works for your fundamentalist mother-in-law, assuming your kitchen is properly kashered, of course.

In France, they call it fondant. We'll call it flourless chocolate cake.

Recipe after the jump.