Of self-cleaning onions and gendered dishes

[taylweaver]

So dinner on Friday night at mbarr's was rather nice - and occasionally rather entertaining as well.

One moment in particular that stuck in my head was when the words "self-cleaning onion" came up in conversation between two people, and the words got passed, by repetition, further down the table. It seems someone meant to say "self-cleaning oven," but self-cleaning onion is a far more interesting concept. It seems that such an item, though consumable, could be used along with both dairy and meat, which is not normally possible with onions (because once you have touched the onion with, say, a dairy knife, it absorbs the essence of the dairy-ness and becomes dairy).

This, interestingly, led to a discussion of the genders of dishes. (Because onions, like dishes, take on gender.) It occurred to me that, with dishes, instead of asking "what is the status of this dish?" or "what is this dish used for?" when we want to know whether a dish is for dairy or for meat, we tend to ask, "what is the gender of this dish?"

Which, of course, led to a discussion of gendered dishes. And the realization that though there are only two normative genders when it comes to people (there are other genders that came up - including androgynous and hermaphrodite- but those are not normative), there are actually four normative genders when it comes to dishes: dairy, meat, parve (neutral), and not kosher. And then, if you add in Passover, you get at least five or six... (i.e. passover dairy and passover meat)

Anyway, it was quite the entertaining conversation - and oddly philosophical as well.

Isn't it fun to keep kosher? :)

Comments

[margavriel.livejournal.com]

I used to say "What parity is this dish?" (you know, as in positive and negative) to ask about milk vs. meat. However, I have since switched it to "What denomination is this dish?", probably due to the influence of DJR (do you know whom I mean?).

[shirei-shibolim.livejournal.com]

We talk about the ilk of dishes in our home, but I've heard gender as well.