[Sca-cooks] Kishka etc

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Seton1355 at aol.com wrote:

> --
> [ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ]
> I thought kishka was a generic term for guts, but by extension, sausage of
> just
>
>>about any kind.
>>I always thought thet the term *derma* was just english for *kisha*.  Any
>>
> Yiddishists out there?  I think I;ll drop a note to the SCA_Jewish list and
> see what they say.  But you are right Master A, kishka is the Yiddish word
> for guts.


Okay, here's wazzup. Bearing in mind my Gentile upbringing, I'll mention
information I acquired in the order in which I acquired it. Living in a
city with a lot of Kosher delis, I became familiar with the sight of
something called "stuffed derma", normally a thick slice of a starchy,
meatless sausage, looking as if it might have been cooked in a beef
casing and then peeled. Often served with a brown gravy. It basic
composition looks a bit like what you'd get if you cooked matzoh balls
in a sausage casing so they couldn't puff up to any great extent.

Subsequently, I learned from Polish speakers, butchers and the like, who
may or may not have been Jews, that the generic Polish term for sausage
is kielbasa, but then there was this other stuff, filled with fat and
grain, but with little or no muscle meat, which they called kishka.
Based on what I've heard, I deduce the following:

Kishka is guts. How you stuff them is up to you. They can be meat
sausages or a meatless, starchy thing a bit like bread poultry stuffing
in a sausage casing.

General Ashkanazik (sorry if I mangle the spelling, but everybody seems
to spell it differently anyway) tradition seems to be that kishka is
guts, and they can be stuffed with anything, but while Poles and perhaps
Russians (possibly even those who are Christians) refer to meat sausages
by some meat-sausage-specific name such as kielbasa, and grainy sausages
as kishka, other Jews, possibly of more Germanic ancestry, seem to refer
to the generic stuffed gut as kishka, be it meat or grain, while they
sometimes refer to the starchy kind as stuffed derma.

After doing a quick web search, I read that "kishka" is what you stuff
"derma" with. I don't really buy this.


Could the Jewish tradition be that kishka is a) guts, and b) any fresh sausage, as opposed to, say any of a number of kinds of cured or dried sausages like Kosher salami, say. Qualifying "derma" as a subset of both a) and b) would then make some sense.


I


>>I thought that was derma (which appears to me to be Jewish white pudding,
>>BTW);
>>
> When the word pudding is mentioned, I can't help but think of Jell-o pudding.
> So what is  *Jewish white pudding*?


Hah! You've fallen into my elaborate linguistic trap! BWA Ha ha!

See, "pudding" is an English (IIRC) word meaning "gut". Puddings were
originally stuffed into guts (puddings) for boiling, later in cloths,
such as a Christmas plum pudding, obviously still retaining the name
even after the gut was abandoned.

So, if you look at English recipes for puddings (since pudding is an
English word, this is not really Anglo-centrism so much as simple
reality), you'll find that many, many of them are savory, sausage-y
foods such as black puddings, also known as blood sausage, white
puddings, which usually involve fat and a starchy food like rice or
grain, but which could also contain cream, eggs, or even a
finely-chopped white meat such as pork, veal, or even chicken or capon.
Also, and similar, liver puddings, rice puddings, Lenten ising puddings
stuffed into the guts of the ising or sturgeon, etc.

The concept of the sweet, creamy, custardy blancmange [blancmange in the
modern sense, not the medieval chicken-almond-rice dish] being known as
pudding is a fairly late devlopment, although sweet dishes known as
puddings are quite old, but they were generally more cake-ey in texture
and concept. I think perhaps the evolution is the result of serving any
of several sweet, dessert dishes as part of the dinner course known in
England as "pudding", and then calling them by that name. Somewhere in
between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I would think, the
pudding course seems to have moved from near the beginning of dinner to
  near, or at, the end, and non-pudding dishes such as blancmange
custard, for example, only a very distant relative of medieval
blankmager, at this point, is a kind of dish you would serve for
pudding, so pudding it becomes. From there to chocolate pudding is but a
short step,


>>while meat sausages are kielbasa.
>>
>
> When you say *white meat* do you mean pork of chicken?  I thought that
> chicken filled sausage cassings were an relativly new and YUPPIE kind of
> food. Has chicken sausage been around for a hundred years? (I'm serious. Was
> it around in the 1800s?


Okay, I'll answer your question and yell at you _later_. ;-) Chicken
sausage appears in, I believe, at least one medieval Arabic source, and
chicken is a major ingredient in several white pudding recipes at least
as far back as the 17th century, perhaps earlier. Markham, for example,
is pretty early seventeenth century, and may well have been reprinted
from earlier sources, so the foods he describes could easily have been
known in sixteenth-century England. However, what I said, and what you
quote above, was the phrase, "WHILE meat sausages", not "white meat".
Obviously this could a big source of confusion, but I just type 'em:
don't blame me, I only work here ;-).



Adamantius

--
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com

"It was so blatant that Roger threw at him.  Clemens gets away with
things that get other people thrown out of games.  As long as they
let him get away with it, it's going  to continue." -- Joe Torre, 9/98