Kosher Meat: An Introduction
Once it's slaughtered in accordance with Jewish law, what makes—and
keeps—meat kosher?
By Rabbi Louis Jacobs
This brief survey of
how the meat of kosher animals is prepared, including its separation from milk
products, is not an exhaustive guide. Those wishing to observe these
regulations should seek guidance from a rabbi or someone else familiar with the
laws and practice of kashrut.
Reprinted with permission from The Jewish Religion: A Companion,
published by Oxford University Press.
The strict prohibition of blood in the Bible (Leviticus 7:26-27; 17:10-14) is the basis for the laws
governing the preparation of the meat of animals and birds for food. The usual
practice is first to soak the meat in cold water for half an hour and then to
salt it thoroughly and leave it covered in salt on a draining-board so that as
much as possible of the blood is drained off. An alternative method is to roast
the meat over a naked flame. In many communities, nowadays, the butcher
attends to this process, relieving his customers from having to do it
themselves. The blood of fishes is permitted so there is no process of
"salting" for fish.
The biblical text repeats three
times the prohibition of "seething a kid in its mother's milk"
(Exodus 23:19; 34:26; Deuteronomy 14:21). This might originally have been
intended to prohibit an act of such callousness or to ban any attempt at
influencing nature by some kind of sympathetic magic, but in the rabbinic
tradition, the prohibition means that no meat of any animal may be cooked in
any milk (the "kid" and the milk of the "mother" referring
only to the type of the forbidden mixture, i.e. the milk and meat of animals
like a "kid" and its "mother"). As for the threefold
repetition, this is said to forbid the initial cooking-together of meat and
milk; to forbid the eating of meat and milk cooked together; and to forbid any
benefit from the mixture (by selling it, for example, to a non-Jew to whom
these laws do not apply).
According to one opinion in the
Talmud, it is permitted to cook the meat of birds in milk but the accepted
opinion is that this, too, is forbidden by rabbinic law on the grounds that if
such is permitted, people may conclude that it is also permitted to cook in
milk the meat of animals. This is an example of the rabbinic principle of
"making a fence around the Torah." A further rabbinic extension is to
forbid the eating of meat and milk together even when they have not been cooked
or boiled together; for example, to have a glass of milk together with meat, or
to eat meat together with buttered bread.
Derived from this is the current
practice of waiting, after a meat meal, before having a dairy meal. Some devout
Jews wait for one hour between a meat and a dairy meal; in Anglo-Jewry, people
often wait for three hours; and, in the usual custom among Orthodox Jews, the
waiting period is as long as six hours. The basic reason for this waiting
period is to make sure that no meat is lodged in the teeth, and so it is
permitted to have a meat meal almost immediately after a dairy meal (generally
after only half an hour). Because of these rules, it is the usual practice
among Orthodox [and other observant] Jews to have two separate sets of cooking
utensils, crockery, and cutlery for meat and dairy meals.
Because of the verse prohibiting
[the eating of] the sciatic nerve (Genesis 32:33),
this nerve must be removed from the animal by the process known as
"porging." In communities like that of Anglo-Jewry, where there is a
lack of skilled porgers, the hindquarter meat is not eaten at all. In Israel
and most other countries, porging is done and the meat of the hindquarters
eaten, though the fat of the stomach and that on the kidneys is forbidden,
since these were offered as a sacrifice in Temple times (see Leviticus 7:22-24).
Louis Jacobs, a
prominent British rabbi and theologian and a prolific author of popular and
scholarly works, was born in Manchester in 1920. He served for decades as a
congregational rabbi in London and has held appointments as a professor of
Jewish studies in several British universities. The Chief Rabbi's veto of his
appointment as principal of Jews' College in 1960 precipitated a controversy
that led Jacobs and much of his congregation to split off from Orthodoxy.
© Louis Jacobs, 1995.
Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this
material may be stored, transmitted, retransmitted, lent, or reproduced in any
form or medium without the permission of Oxford University
