Which came first?

After my post yesterday, we were talking in the office about the different intentions behind the rules of kashrut.

What eventually came out of the discussion, was my long-standing and rather peculiar belief that schnitzel, breaded chicken breast, is nearly always unkosher.

To make schnitzel, even according to our web site’s own recipe, one generally must:

Dredge [chicken] cutlets and tenders in flour, then egg, then bread crumb mixture.

One of the most basic tenants of kashrut is “do not cook a kid in its mother’s milk.” In the case of schnitzel, we are cooking the mother in what could have been its child.

Now I am not deeply dedicated to the cause of animal rights, nor am I a vegetarian. But there is something that deeply disturbs me about the practice of cooking a chicken breast in egg.

It seems that in all of the clarifications and trivialities of kashrut, there are ways to keep kosher yet still go against the intentions of the law itself.