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Eyerlekh



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Amarante




 
 
    
 

Post Wed, Sep 11 2019, 9:27 am
Not sure exactly where this would go.

I am browsing a fun book called The 100 Most Jewish Foods which is a collection of short essays by various writers - some famous cookbook writers such as Joan Nathan and others just essayists.

I came across this as I had no idea these even had a name - Yiddish or scientific. I don't know what I called them when I was a child but luckily I didn't have to fight anyone else for them as I was the one home alone with my Bubbe when she cooked and even if there were potential cousins around, she would have saved for me. Very Happy

I do remember wondering what my belly button was also called the pipek because a chicken had no belly button but it was one of the mysteries of Yiddish. Very Happy

Eyerlekh

Excerpt From: Alana Newhouse - The 100 Most Jewish Foods

By Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

In the days when my mother and paternal grandmother would buy the whole chicken from the kosher butcher—my mother was from Brisk (Brześć nad Bugiem), in what is now Belarus, and my grandmother was from Apt (Opatów), Poland—they would get everything: The feet were essential for the chicken soup (you had to clip the claws and scrape off the outer yellow skin with boiling water) and beloved for their rubbery texture, the best part being the “palm” of the foot. The helzl (neck) was its own delicacy, both the gorgl (neck bones), which went into the soup, and the skin, which was stuffed with flour and chopped chicken fat, the ends stitched closed with white cotton thread, and roasted with the chicken to golden-crisp perfection. In the old country, once you sucked all the goodness from the neck bones, you could take them apart and use them to play jacks.

Then there were the treasures inside the chicken: the pipek (gizzard), chicken liver, heart, and—treasure of treasures—the eyerlekh, or what we called eggies. To be technical, they are oocytes, on their way to becoming the eggs with whites and shells that hens will lay. Drop them into di goldene yoykh, the golden broth otherwise known as chicken soup, and they solidify into the most delicate and delectable pale yellow yolks. As children growing up in downtown Toronto’s immigrant neighborhood, my siblings and I fought over them. The chicken might have two feet, but it never had enough eyerlekh, and my mother would parcel them out carefully as we kids made our own calculations. Eventually, she gave in to our pleas and asked the butcher for several necks and extra eyerlekh, although this always seemed to me like cheating.

Today eyerlekh are nowhere to be found—almost. Not in the supermarket nor at the butchers, and not even in Poland, where it is illegal to sell them today because, I was told, they cannot be tested for salmonella. But they can still be bought in New York’s Chinatown, where nothing inside the chicken goes to waste. And they have been rediscovered by experimental chefs, notably Dan Barber of Blue Hill in New York. Nothing, however, will ever compare with the delicate flavor and texture of eyerlekh gently poached in di goldene yoykh.
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Elfrida




 
 
    
 

Post Wed, Sep 11 2019, 10:08 am
Leaving out the Yiddish terminology which didn't get passed down to my generation, I remember that these were my grandmother's favourites. She died when I was just eight, so it must have made quite an impression.

I can see them being part of the chicken you would kosher yourself, or maybe even one that the butcher would kosher for you. But never in ready koshered, cleaned and frozen chicken. Until five minutes ago I'd completely forgotten their existence.
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Blessing1




 
 
    
 

Post Wed, Sep 11 2019, 10:23 am
Why did I think eyerlekh was eggnog??
There's a similar sounding yiddish word for eggnog.
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Wife1




 
 
    
 

Post Wed, Sep 11 2019, 10:26 am
It's not eggnog it's prelayed eggs

Yes heard of this from my Zaidy
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