Searching for Kishke King
by Karen Resta
Manhattan was the starting point for my search. Kishke isn’t easy to find, but I’d checked ahead and knew this place was one of the last Jewish delis that served it. One might call kishke an exclusive item, in a sense. Hard to find. Niche. Was it a luxury item? I’d soon find out.
The line of people waiting to get in that day stretched the length of the block, as usual. Houston Street reached toward Soho one way, the Manhattan Bridge the other way. The puny trees in the center median were drooping from heat, the brick tenements on the north side gave off a certain Lower East Side ambiance as they stood firmly representing generations past, present, and future of unaffordable tiny apartments in buildings decorated with hard-earned graffiti and traffic grime.
Almost everyone waiting in the long line alongside me were tourists who talked about pastrami sandwiches when they talked at all, but the long wait in the muggy weather had mostly silenced us. Every once in a while someone would try to peer through the big windows pasted over with 1940s posters saying to “Send a salami to your boy in the Army” but the glass of the windows had a permanent fog either as part of its nature or its nurture, and it was impossible to see inside.
Finally, my turn! I took my ticket from the guard, walked inside and looked for a sign saying “kishke”. How high are the ceilings in this place? Immensely high, and the restaurant space itself is huge. Everything in the main room is bound together in a glowing yellow light that matches the exact shade of light in the diner of Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks”. There’s a small back room off the larger space in a corner with an aura of speakeasy. The scene showing through the tiny entry door raises a lush spectral sense of poker players, cigar smoke, wise guys, maybe even murder. I can’t lose the ticket the guard gave me, I remind myself—or I’ll get in trouble.
The place is like Grand Central at rush hour, people rumpled, children underfoot.
The deli men behind the long high glass counter move with a perfect quick agility only New York City deli-men have as they slice, dice, pile high, place their offerings on the countertops, endlessly calling out orders over the constant steam rising from the pastramis. The scratched up tables filling the space are emptied then immediately filled with people en masse. The smell is amazing.
I can’t find the kishke sign so I go up front to the cash cashier, who stands next to a big sign saying “Cash Only”. She looks at me like there’s something wrong with me for not walking up and giving her some cash. “Where can I get kishke?” I ask her, and she gestures towards the back dismissively. I walk toward the back and get in the wrong line because when it’s my turn the counter guy says “I don’t have that.” I walk further back to the end of the counter, where there’s another cashier and I ask her.
“What?” she says. “Kishke? What’s that?” She looks dubious. She hands me a menu, where I find it in tiny print. When I point it out to her, she says “I don’t know what that is,” and calls the nearest counter guy over, a big guy, a bruiser-type. “What?” he yells, “Kishke! Kishke?” He bursts out laughing, a true belly-laugh, bending slightly to catch his breath. He loves this. “Never heard of it in my life!” he yells toward the ceiling, then raises his eyes as if to pray for understanding. “What even is that?” He walks away laughing, shaking his head in disbelief. I’ve made his day with this obviously bizarre idea of kishke. The cashier waves her hand at me sort of like I don’t exist. I myself am a kishke, unknown, not of this world. Nobody has time for this, I should just get in line for a pastrami sandwich like everyone else.
Looking more closely at the sticky white plastic menu I note that kishke is listed under hot dogs (franks, frankfurters), so I wade through the crowd again. The hot dog line is much shorter than the pastrami lines. When I get to the front I yell out like I know what I’m doing, “Kishke!” Reaching into a small below-counter refrigerator, the counter guy takes out a plate topped with an approximately four inch in diameter dark brown lump and cuts off a couple of slices of it, places the two slices on a smaller plate, scoops a spoon of lighter brown gravy onto the slices from another container he takes from the fridge, then puts the plate in the microwave. I’m a bit shocked because my real life kishke isn’t living up to my idea of what it should be, but I try to wait nonchalantly until suddenly I can’t stand the tourists speaking so softly to the counter men who literally can’t hear them so I yell “And an egg cream, chocolate! And some pickles!” at the top of my lungs.
Out comes the plate from the microwave, onto the plastic tray it goes with my egg cream and some pickles. I’m trying to act pleased but this kishke basically looks like a piece of shit. Of course I’ve already given my heart to this thing, or to the idea of it anyway, and have to go through with it. At my tiny table I stare down at the cinnamon-scented (was it really cinnamon? I’d never seen a recipe including it) brown rounds, telling myself not to be disappointed. I use the supremely lightweight aluminum fork and knife on my tray to cut into the thing, through the casing, which at first doesn’t want to yield but then falls away from the center filling and sits there looking like thin plastic wrap.
At first I thought the inside of the kishke resembled stuffing from a Thanksgiving turkey but darker, and texture-less. Then I realized the kishke did have a subtle texture. It was a rich mouth-feel more than anything else. I couldn’t think of a single thing I’d ever eaten that compared to this texture. This mouth-feel was the single most outstanding note in the kishke. Otherwise, it was kind of bready and mildly spicy. The gravy on top didn’t stand out, but it gave the kishke a homey appeal—or at least it made it slightly more desirable to me. I wasn’t really hungry, New York City summers tend to have that effect on me, and I had no reason to eat this thing at all, apart from trying to see if I could locate a possibly-lost identity through the idea of tasting a certain food.
After my third bite, I felt a stabbing pain near my heart. This was a good excuse to stop eating. I wondered what caused that pain, and also wondered what created the texture of the kishke, then I thought, excitedly, that the texture might be from schmaltz! Schmaltz, if you don’t already know, is pure rendered chicken fat. If I ever decide to have a crush on a Jewish food besides kishke, it will be schmaltz. The word “schmaltz”, like the word “kishke”, holds certain ideas. If you say something is “schmaltzy”, it means it’s excessively sentimental. At this point I realized the pain near my heart could be from the schmaltz, since it’s not part of my usual diet and it’s probably indigestible. I forced myself to eat a few more miniscule bites of my kishke then gave up and covered my plate with a wadded up paper napkin so I wouldn’t have to look at it.
Kings, Viandes, and Art – Daily News, Brooklyn Section, May 29, 1949
From “Kishke King Puts Real Art in Ancient Viand in Cafe” by David Gordon: “I looked around,” said Jacob, “and I thought: How sad, the kishke is not getting the proper respect. Nobody was selling the kishke off the stand, and we figured we would bring it to the people. Sure, you could find it in Jewish restaurants, but to get it from an open counter off the street – that was a dream!”
“The kishke must be handled with care,” says Jacob. “We take the gut of a steer, only the best steers, and we use a secret recipe that goes back to my ancestors in Masbich, in the province of Kominetz. We use flour, chicken fat, carrots, onions, garlic and spices, and we make it right here in our kitchen.”
“Think of it,” Jacob says in an awed tone. “4000 pounds a week, and people coming from all over the city to eat our kishkes!”
“Ah,” he sighs. “The kishke is to be eaten slowly, not gulped. The true lover of kishke never goes at it like he’s running to a fire. He eats it delicately, takes a nibble at the casing.”
On Saturdays and Sundays, the busiest days, the kishke sells in huge quantities. The 14 employees of the “Kishke King” work like beavers as the cry “Kishke!” is sung in Pitkin Avenue, and Jacob himself stands behind the open counter, handing out kishke with pride.
N. Jay Jaffee’s photograph “Kishke King 1953” basically screams “Brooklyn” of a certain time and place. Held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian Museum, and the Jewish Museum, the photo is of a corner restaurant in Brownsville named “Kishke King”. The three-story building is entirely covered top to bottom with carnivalesque ads that entice any passers-by: “Kishke King”; “A Frank Built for Two”; “LONG-STRETCH-FRANK”; “14 Bites; 10 Inches Long!”. The word for “kosher” is painted in huge white Hebrew letters up near the roof at one corner of the building.
Kishke King didn’t last forever. The neighborhood changed—as neighborhoods do in the city. Kishke King closed its doors in 1970, and since then kishke has never again experienced this high level of hyperbolic adoration and attention.
There are Belarusian, Czech, Polish, Slovak, Romanian, Russian, Lithuanian, and Hungarian kishkes, and though they’re all named kishke, each is made from different ingredients: blood in some iterations, liver, potatoes, barley, vegetables in others. What any individual kishke ends up being depends on where it comes from, what ingredients it’s made from and whether or not it’s kashrut. Jewish kishkes are usually made from matzoh meal, flour, schmaltz, spices, paprika and onion, then shaped into a sausage wrapped in beef casings.
Kishkes were mentioned in halachic literature (which comprises Jewish law) at least 700 years ago—and until recently, having a kishke on the table at all significant celebrations of Jewish life was an important ritual—even if the other foods on the table weren’t kosher. The kishke was there to remind people of their Jewishness.
“Kishke” translated literally means “gut” or “intestines”, which leads one to believe kishke was named for its outside casings made from beef intestines. But there’s more to kishke than that, as prominent Jewish food scholar Gil Marks writes in The Encyclopedia of Jewish Food. “The dish is actually named after the stuffing, not the body part.”
He says kishke is actually the inside of the dish, not the outside of the dish. But then again, kishke in Yiddish means “guts”, which is the outside of the dish. Marks tells us more: “The term kishkes has not only the literal connotation of guts, but also the figurative implication of profound emotion.” Kishkes can refer to a bad feeling, a sense of discomfort that hovers inside the body, finally settling in the lower stomach. You can say “I felt it right in my kishkes.”
I do feel the idea of kishke right in my kishkes. Kishke, at this moment, happens to be my way of questioning who I really am, and whether the person I am is Jewish.
This whole kishke thing started quite recently, as I was crossing Second Avenue at 10th Street on my way to the Bowery. It wasn’t the first time a ghost of the past has taken shape right in front of me—that happens all over the city, though more in some neighborhoods than others. Time layers up on top of itself, the then and the now, and I’m in both places at the exact same moment.
As I crossed the street, it was suddenly about 50 years ago and I was sitting with Michael at the Second Avenue Deli. An entire city of food was on the table. In the center an enormous pastrami skyscraper was balanced on soft rye, some slapped-on yellow mustard at the edge. A mountain range of matzoh balls in a lake of trembling golden broth stood next to the skyscraper. There was mushroom barley soup, reminiscent of fairy tales, witches’ cauldrons and winter storms. There was gefilte fish, chopped liver, cans of cel-ray soda and black cherry soda, glasses of chocolate and vanilla egg cream with winking bubbles of foam. And of course there were pickles—their aroma biting and severe. My boyfriend Michael started naming all the different foods. He claimed the gefilte fish wouldn’t be as good as his mothers. Then he pointed at something and said “Stuffed derma,” and I said “What?!” and he said “I know it sounds disgusting, but it’s really good.”
Michael and I lived together in a tiny triangular apartment in a building right at the edge of downtown Brooklyn. Back then I had red hair and freckles, I was short and slight of build, I was a runaway/throwaway working as a file clerk at a midtown temp agency with a fake ID that said I was 16 years old, though I’d actually just turned 14. Michael was a skinny guy with long hair of a noncommittal color, tall, a jazz musician who played the trumpet mostly for studio gigs and as backup for Machito, James Brown, the Brecker Brothers. Michael didn’t need a fake ID because he was 26 years old.
We were at the Second Avenue Deli that day because the previous week I’d randomly picked up the phone book and saw my father’s name listed—an unusual one, so I knew it had to be him—and he apparently lived about ten blocks away. I’d been looking for that name in phone books my entire life, so I decided to go see him to see what he was like.
Morty’s last name—which was also my last name—was on the buzzer at the building close to the end of Montague Street near the Promenade. It was an older building with one of those gray-white New York City limestone facades that radiate “pompous” while also emanating “full of secrets”. He buzzed me in without asking who it was so I took the elevator up and knocked on his door. An old guy wearing jeans and a checked flannel shirt opened the door then stood there, looking at me, saying nothing. Maybe he was waiting for me to sell him some Girl Scout cookies? I told him he was my father.
“Hi. Are you so-and-do? You’re my father. I’m your daughter.” That didn’t faze him a bit, maybe he blinked twice then within a few seconds he even guessed the name of my mother. “Oh. Hi. Who’s your mother? So-and-so? You’d better come in.” His apartment was small and it started to feel awkward after a few rounds of stilted conversation so we went to a nearby cafe. “You’re Jewish, you know,” he said after we’d ordered from an ancient waitress in tortured orthotic shoes—me, a BLT—him, coffee. His blue eyes mirrored mine while revealing nothing. “Because I’m Jewish . . . I don’t know if your mother ever told you.”
This was like being told I had the same nose as my father—I did, now that I saw it—but since I didn’t know him, it meant nothing. Same nose. Same hands. Now Jewish. Michael was Jewish too—though not a newly-minted Jew like me—so when he heard what my father had said, he decided he had to take me to the Second Avenue Deli and introduce me to the foods of my people.
“Stuffed derma,” Michael had said that day long ago, but in the waking dream happening to me all these years later I couldn’t exactly remember what stuffed derma was so I googled it and the definition said “kishke”. The moment I saw that word I felt kind of funny inside, like someone was tickling the area right underneath my heart with a feather. I couldn’t stop thinking of it. Kishke, what a beautiful word! It led me on and now I heard kishke, shiksa, yenta, kasha, knish. Nosh, putz, schmooze, shvitz.
Names of things matter. For example, my father told me I was Jewish because he was Jewish. Over time I’ve had reason to question this, and it surprises me that he even said that to me. I wish he could see the scene every time the Mitzvah Tanks come around. The Mitzvah Tanks are a form of outreach created by the Chabad-Lubavitchers, an ultra-orthodox sect of Haredi Judaism. Based in Brooklyn, they drive around the city during holidays blasting klezmer music, searching for unaffiliated Jews to bring back into the fold. “Chabad” is an acronym of three Hebrew words representing wisdom, understanding, and knowledge. “Lubavitch” is the place in Russia where the movement began. The philosophy of the Chabad Lubavitchers is “Ahavat Yisrael”, or “love for the fellow Jew”. When the Mitzvah Tanks are out I’m certain I’m going to be stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and questioned.
“Are you Jewish?” A black-suited bearded guy wearing a black hat calls out at me as I walk through the space on the sidewalk next to the wildly-overdecorated Mitzvah Tank totally encompassed in klezmer music.
“Half,” I call back. I keep walking. I know he’ll follow me.
He turns toward another black-suited guy while at the same time not easily letting me go past him. He interrupts the other guy who’s also calling out “Are you Jewish?” to people then gestures toward me.
“She’s half,” he says.
“Which half?” the other guy says, turning his head and looking me up and down from head to toe, as if I’ll suddenly turn into one of those cookbook illustrations of meat that show which part is which.
I smile widely at them both, and say “My father,” and they look at each other.
Then one or the other shakes his head at me.
“Wrong half,” he says gruffly, and they both look at me for a full two-second beat in a slightly accusing manner before turning completely away.
Because this has been happening for years now, I say “Yeah, I know,” fairly loudly, so they have to hear it. Maybe I even walk a few steps closer to the nicer one.
There’s always the nicer one, the one with regrets about things.
“Too bad, you guys can’t count me,” I say. They both glance at me once again.
“We can’t count you,” the one who’s not the nicer one says, roughly, closing the deal.
I continue along the sidewalk, basking in the glimmer of the holiday lights, taking in the aromas of hot pretzels, roast chestnuts, dirty water dogs. Morty might not like how the Mitzvah Tanks just plowed up and wrote him right out of my story. But this isn’t a story about Morty, it’s a story about kishke. Morty is just the guy who started the story—the story both of me and of my maybe-Jewishness. Then he disappears.
Morty was raised in an Orthodox home smack dab in the center of Brooklyn, surely he knew who got to be Jewish and who didn’t. Names include, names exclude. They say “You belong,” or “You don’t belong.” They make us happy, or not. I think of the naming of kishke and what it means. The casing vs. the stuffing. Then I think nature vs. nurture. Inside the box vs. outside the box. Environment vs. the inner self. Gifts of birth vs. gifts of personal abilities and talents. “Versus”. It’s a whole vibe. But kishkes hit different. A kishke is both inside(r) and outside(r) at the same time.
Things disappear. Fathers and mothers disappear, lovers too, restaurants, entire neighborhoods people know well, sometimes spouses and children disappear, ancient waitresses with tortured orthotic shoes disappear, whole ways of being disappear. Cultures disappear, names of things disappear, things we accept as our rights disappear. And things to eat also disappear. Suddenly, they’re just not there anymore, and the city itself is a constantly changing myth.
The day my father told me I was Jewish, my Now-Being-Jewish was a surface thing. It lacked context. Morty is gone, I only knew him for a few years after I knocked on his door, and we never got close. Michael is gone. Actually Michael is so far gone that I can’t even remember what it was I wanted to write about him. My mother is gone, the runaway/throwaway I was isn’t completely gone, she’s here still, a ghost I recognize now and then.
I may have imagined (in the depths of my soul where logic has no say in anything, really) that eating kishke could make me feel like I was right there in the Kishke King 1953 photograph. That I belonged to something. That I could enter a world where everyone would be welcomed to the counter for a delicious kishke. But a zeitgeist can’t be summoned with a whistle.
There are all those pesky questions of belonging—or not. Identity—or not. I log into 23andMe and there it says my primary identity based on DNA is Ashkenazi Jewish.
The Mitzvah Tank guys say I’m not Jewish. My father said I was, but maybe he was bullshitting me, to make me feel more like he’d been in some way a thing I’d never personally experienced: a father?
Kishke has been my conduit. I pursued this kishke crush of mine, and we ended up together at last. At first, when I stared at the kishke before me, I thought I discerned the rich beautiful scent of cinnamon—but that may have been a fantasy. Then I was held captive by the astonishing texture of schmaltz—or at least what I believed might be schmaltz. At one point my heart pained me pretty badly for a split second, and at the end I was momentarily embarrassed by the whole thing.
I think it’s over, but maybe it’s not. Someone told me recently kishke’s only really good when eaten with cholent. I’ve never had cholent, so maybe I’ll try it. It’s possible this experience answered none of my original questions. The taste of kishke was just plain confusing, if not terrible, in ways. But it did bring me a few gifts, or maybe call them mitzvahs. That amazing photograph by N. Jay Jaffee ”Kishke King 1953” is one, and the experience of eating kishke on the Lower East Side is another. Those are things that will never disappear.
N. Jay Jaffee, Kishke King, 1953, printed 1984, selenium-toned gelatin silver print, sheet: 11 x 14 in. (27.9 x 35.5 cm.), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the artist, 1993.16.1, © 1976, N. Jay Jaffee
Karen Resta writes about food, belonging, and culture. Her work can be found in Best American Food and Travel Writing 2024, Gourmet, Cake Zine, Lucky Peach, and more. She’s a long-time Brooklyn resident and former executive chef for Goldman Sachs Partners’ Dining.