How weird that I would meet this new (for me) word twice in the same day and in two totally different contexts!
The first time was while I was looking up Jewish Ashkenazi recipes, kneidlachs and such, for one of my previous posts about the Jewish New Year.
I don’t think I had ever heard my mother use that word in Yiddish, but then, as she was the only Yiddish-speaking person in our household, maybe she would not have used it.
On Stricktly Kosher Style, it is defined as
Chicken fat. Although it sounds corny, schmaltz is used instead of butter for cooking in kosher meat dishes.
Some time later, I was checking out Loose Poodle, who had a post entitled Hubba-Hubba-Hubba, mentioning movies with one of my favourite actresses, Gene Tierney, and one of my favourite movies of all times, The Ghost and Mrs Muir, two excellent reasons, to read that post, besides the fact that I like Loose Poodle where I must admit I am a lurker.
But enough rambling!
Lo and behold, I came across the word schmaltz again, but obviously, it couldn’t mean the same thing.
Loose Poodle wrote:
It [The Ghost and Mrs Muir]
was also made at Fox, probably under Newman’s supervision. In spite of Hermann’s secret passion for the schmaltz (another thing I am alone in thinking) he is very careful compared to Newman, and his dialogue work shows many more marks of the craft,…
So I googled it, and
Yiddish) excessive sentimentality in art or music
which perfectly fit what Losse Poodle said.
I like the idea that on the day when I was reminiscing about the New Year’s Days of my youth, I learnt a Yiddish origin word.
You do me great honor (UK spelling-honour), now I must run away and blush.
Blush as much as you like! But please, don’t run away
Ah, Schmaltz, that brings back childhood memories. Wish I could still eat it, it tastes sooo good.
I’m also a fan of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir! We rented a DVD of it, and just at the crucial part (I won’t give it away . . .) the image froze, and we were unable to get it moving! This was the first time my daughter was seeing it, so it was doubly frustrating.
Chicken or goose shmaltz, sometimes with sauted onion in it, was my grandmother’s and grandfather’s fleishdig (meat) “butter”. Since keeping kosher required complete separation of milk and meat, what better way to have a slide of bread at a meat meal than to spread some shmaltz on it or to add some in mashed potatoes. Yum!
(What a great topic to talk about just before the meal before Yom Kippur fast. Pardon me, I’m going to go eat now.)
One of my favorite words !
Its a good word! I have used it a lot in my life even though I’m a Catholic from the midwest.
Oh, how my grandmother deep-fried with abandon chicken livers in shmaltz! Even had people then known what we have since learned about these classic artery cloggers, would they have bowed to intelligence and forsaken the taste of the divine? Thanks for the memories. I often find that Yiddish links people who might otherwise think they are unrelated, even bitter foes. It’s not called mama loshen (mother tongue) for nothing!
Here, dear — more yiddish you’ll like!
NYTimes Language Column: Schlep
Cheers from Out West.
Many years ago when I did a lot of cooking, one of the things I did was make my own “schmaltz. I took the fat from the chicken carcass and sauteed it with some onions. ( I rendered the fat.)
When I made chopped liver, schmaltz and the sauteed onions were the ingredients that made the liver taste so good!
Now if I want chopped liver, I buy it.
Only in Florida does it come close to the real thing.
I’ve used the word “Schmaltz” since my College days but never heard the food definition. We used it to describe something that was excessive…such as, “she has more schmaltz than common sense.”
so you see, claude, yiddish has made quite an inroad to expressive language here. one place it seems the french have really missed out!