#3
Post
by ghostjmf » Tue Jan 28, 2014 6:10 pm
For anyone scratching their head as to why any cheeses should be non-kosher, jarnon of course knows all this but for the rest of you, rennet, from a cow's stomach, is used to make hard cheeses (& some soft cheeses too; look at your package of chevre next time). So technically, any hard cheese is non-kosher. Doesn't matter if the cow itself was killed according to the laws of kashrut (i.e. the laws of "what's kosher"), when you mix the rennet with milk. you make the product non-kosher. Because of the bible passage about not roasting the kid in it's mother's milk, which a friend of mine once famously (to me) said would only prevent them from eating milk-roasted goat (they actually said milk-roasted lamb, but I knew what they meant).
Jewish interpretations of stuff like this are always generalized to the max, hence the extension to all cloven-hoofed, cud-chewing (the other things you need to be a kosher-food mammal) mammals. And chickens too; nobody really knows why. It's (cue the music) Tradition! That was a "stump the rabbi" question at services Yom Kippur this year at Temple Beth Shalom in Cambridge, MA, which traditionally has a "stump the rabbi" session at some point during the day.
Except nowadays, for vegetarians & observant Jews the world now has "microbial rennet", rennet that has been made in a lab, presumably close in formula to what you'd get from a cow's stomach. How good the actual resultant cheese is depends on the cheese-maker, of course, & most fancy cheeses are still made with real rennet because the makers of fancy cheese aren't going to mess with success. I've had a few good cheeses that turned out to be made with microbial rennet, though.
When I was a child, my otherwise very observant parents apparently did not conceive of anybody putting some meat-derived product into cheese, because we ate Swiss cheese, cheddar cheese, & ugh, Velveeta like everybody else. Well, I didn't eat the Velveeta. I guess I had discerning tastes even as a child.
Chicken is non-kosher unless its a disease-free animal & slaughtered by a shochet (slaughterer who's followed the biblical instructions to slit it's throat quickly & said the appropriate prayers 1st).
I cannot figure out what would make alcohol non-kosher, though. Unless it was a cocktail they'd thrown bacon in, or something. Trendy restaurants are throwing bacon & lard into everything these days. This too shall pass.
By the way, if I were sitting on the rabbinical board that decides this stuff, I would declare that something made in a lab that exactly mimics a non-kosher substance is in itself non-kosher. But I'm not on that board. Microbial rennet probably isn't exactly identical to real rennet, anyway.
And it turns out you don't even need rennet, I've read, to make hard cheese; there's vegetarian stuff you can use, which people without access to cow's stomachs presumably used to use but the process is then more uncertain.
