The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (13 page)

percent of the nation’s duck production. Mil ions of Pekin ducks were shipped westward each year.

Housewives made extra pin money by hatching duck eggs in their homes for five cents apiece.

Pekin, a breed of duck, is not to be confused with Peking duck, the delicate Chinese dish that wil figure prominently in this saga, though both originated in China. Local lore has it that Pekin ducks first arrived on Long Island around 1873, either when a New York merchant named Ed McGrath hatched a clutch of eggs brought back from China or when James Palmer, a shipping captain, transported two dozen white ducks from China, nine of which survived the journey.

Pekins are the snowy white ducks with orange bil s and feet of popular imagination. The most famous Pekin duck is, of course, Donald, fol owed by his entourage of Daisy, Uncle Scrooge, Huey, Dewey, and Louie. The Pekins became farmers’ favorites because they breed like bunnies (up to 150 eggs a year) and fatten up quickly. They are also not the brightest creatures, so they can be mindlessly herded, like sheep—a character trait favored by the agriculture industry.

The East End blossomed as the duck-producing capital because its environment—humid climate, sandy soil, and proximity to water—was ideal for raising Pekins.

But in the 1970s the Long Island duck industry began a precipitous decline. A combination of environmental pressures on duck farmers and tempting real estate deals brought about by eastward suburban expansion made it appealing for duck farmers to sel out and close up shop.

In 1989, a holdout, Moriches Duck Farm, closed down. The specifics are no longer clear, but it seems safe to surmise Moriches was simply fol owing the fate of the dozens of duck farms before it.

Suddenly, the nation’s kosher duck supply dried up.

“There was a short period of time where kosher ducks became

almost

nonexistent,”

recal ed

Tom

Jurgielewicz, a third-generation duck farmer whose property once bordered the Moriches farm. It might seem that there would be at least one other kosher duck supplier out there, but truth be told, the audience for kosher duck is rather limited, given the scope of American Jewish cuisine. There was only one duck farm in the United States that processed kosher ducks, and after it closed there were none.

To combat the crisis, a group of rabbis and businessmen identified a poultry producer in South Dakota. South Dakota seemed like a safe business bet, a place with few real estate pressures to drive a farmer to sel out.

The South Dakota poultry producer normal y processed geese, which are not a year-round product (think of the last time you had barbecued goose at a Fourth of July picnic), so his facility was idle for much of the year. The Jewish consortium convinced the goose processor that it would be good business to process kosher ducks when he wasn’t busy with the holiday season.

It took months for the South Dakota operation to get up to speed; processing kosher ducks is not a simple matter. In the meantime, the only remaining kosher ducks were ones already kil ed, frozen, and on their way down the supply chain. Prices immediately doubled. Kosher duck prices, like that of light sweet crude oil, are sensitive to the laws of supply and demand. While duck at the local Giant supermarket was $1 a pound, kosher duck was pushing $6 a pound. Of course, most people weren’t aware there was a kosher duck shortage. But it was Michael Mayer’s job to know. He was the mashgiach, or kosher cop, for Moshe Dragon, the first kosher Chinese restaurant in the Washington, D.C., area. He had been hired by the Rabbinical Council of Greater Washington to oversee Moshe Dragon, which had opened during Rosh Hashanah in September 1988 in Rockvil e, Maryland, with much aplomb.

Washington, unlike Baltimore, to the north, did not have a deeply rooted Orthodox community.

The population was too new and too transient, made up largely of transplants who worked in, influenced, or wrote about government. In the same way that having a hometown professional basketbal or basebal team signals that a city like Charlotte or Phoenix has arrived, a kosher Chinese restaurant signified the establishment of the Washington Orthodox Jewish community.

Political, religious, and investment capital went into bringing Moshe Dragon to the Washington area. A charismatic young rabbi sought out two successful area entrepreneurs to provide the backing, then recruited a Chinese-Cambodian immigrant, Lenny Ung, who had experience with a kosher Chinese restaurant in Philadelphia.

The opening night of Moshe Dragon in a Rockvil e strip mal drew a dense, designer-clad crowd. In the first week alone, the restaurant reportedly brought in at least $30,000 in sales.

Ung, who had the chiseled features of a Hong Kong pop star, was an immediate hit with the customers. He had a charming smile, and he embraced his customers enthusiastical y, making everyone feel like a regular (which, in an Orthodox community that kept kosher, nearly everyone was).

As the only nice sit-down kosher restaurant, Moshe Dragon became a magnet for the Orthodox business crowd, then a popular source for catered dinners. “Everyone wanted to have a duck party,”

Mayer recal ed. The obsession was striking. Mayer spent some fifty hours a week, from before the restaurant opened to after it closed, making sure that Moshe Dragon was abiding by the kosher rules. He circulated, inspected the deliveries, and kept an eye on the kitchen. No violations were going to happen on his watch.

The kosher laws, also known as kashruth, are a complex set of dietary rules rooted in religious writings; learned Jews have spent a great deal of time parsing them, with one eye on biology and the other on production. Once upon a time, most cooking was done in the family kitchen or local business, and it was relatively easy to ascertain if the product was reliably

kosher.

Today,

industrialization,

transcontinental shipping, and processed food additives have made interpreting and enforcing the dietary rules a ful -time job for a phalanx of rabbis.

Americans have the FDA and the USDA; the Jewish community has OK (Organized Kashrut) and OU

(Orthodox Union). The kashruth regulations get deep into the physiology of creatures or the minutiae of industrial food processing. The nuances can take years of training to master.

The guidance is rooted in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, from the Torah. The most wel -known rule forbids the mixing of milk and meat, an interpretation of the injunction that kids—young goats—should not be cooked in their mother’s milk.

Mammals must have split hooves and chew their cud, which excludes pigs but includes giraffes. Sea creatures must have scales and fins—which means no sharks or catfish (they lack scales), no whales (which are mammals anyway), and no shel fish. While the Torah has a list of forbidden birds, the exact translation of most of these species is no longer known.

Scavengers—such

as

vultures—are

considered nonkosher. To play it safe, the rules stick with birds known by tradition to be kosher, including chicken, goose, and duck. (There is a minor controversy about whether turkey is kosher, but most authorities maintain that it is acceptable, much to the relief of those at Thanksgiving dinner tables every year.)

There are also rules regarding how kosher meat can be slaughtered and what it can touch in the kitchen and stil remain kosher. Rabbis issue rulings al the time: cream of tartar was deemed kosher by some, while certain kinds of chewing gum, because of their emulsifiers, were not.

Some Jews take kosher rules very very seriously. Mayer was one of them. A redheaded man with soft features, he had spent years studying at a yeshiva in Baltimore and had mastered the rules enough to keep kosher in the harshest of conditions.

In the jungles of Vietnam, where he served in the military, he existed on only berries, plants, and occasional care packages of kosher C rations from his mom. He’d told Ung, “If I could keep kosher in Nam, you can keep kosher in this restaurant.”

Being a mashgiach is like being a high-pressure security guard, with a watchfulness akin to that exhibited by aviation inspectors at airports today.

Only a mashgiach doesn’t answer to the Department of Homeland Security; he answers to God.

So Mayer, having kept up with the latest kosher news, was ful y aware that there was a kosher duck shortage when he walked into Moshe Dragon at around nine A.M. on August 21, 1989. What he saw baffled him. There, in the Buick-sized commercial oven, hung thirteen smoking ducks. In the freezer sat another seventeen. Where had these ducks come from?

“You couldn’t buy it for any kind of money. It just wasn’t going to be had,” he remembered. “You can’t just open the Yel ow Pages and say, ‘I want to order a hundred pounds of kosher duck.’ ”

Mayer walked into the office and found three receipts lying on the desk. The letterhead was from Donald Chin, a local Chinese grocer and restaurant supplier, but the orders themselves were written in Chinese. Mayer didn’t read Chinese, though he knew where he could find someone who did. He walked a few doors down to the Chinese laundry and asked the man behind the counter what it said.

The man translated for him: Ducks. Ribs.

Chicken. Substantial amounts of each.

Mayer went on a mashgiach tear. Using the waiters’ receipts, he calculated the amount of duck that had been served over the past few months. He compared it to the purchase receipts of duck from the local kosher supplier, Shaul’s and Hersel’s. There was a clear duck-accounting discrepancy, not unlike what happened more recently with Enron’s books.

There was no way these amounts could be reconciled. The last duck shipment had been over a month earlier, on July 19, as both the restaurant’s and the supplier’s receipts showed. Hundreds of pounds of duck of mysterious provenance had appeared after that date.

With a sick feeling in his stomach, Mayer cal ed one of the oldest and most conservative members of the rabbinical council, a man who had total control over kashruth certification in the Washington area. “We have a problem,” Mayer told him.

They immediately impounded the ducks.

Ung, who was in Philadelphia at the time, rushed home to face accusations. The receipts belonged to a cousin of his, he claimed. Somehow they had made their way to his desk.

The rabbical council can act with the ruthlessness of a Delta strike force should a kashruth violation cal for it. In October 1989, it raided a bagel bakery at midnight, during the sandwich shift; within twenty-four hours of learning that the owner had been using its kosher kitchen to secretly package ham-on-bagel sandwiches for another vendor, it cut off the business’s kashruth certification. But the resolution to the Moshe Dragon crisis would not be that simple.

There were too many vested interests at stake. The council shut down the restaurant and began an investigation into Mayer’s charges.

Moshe Dragon reopened a week later.

During that time, the kitchen had been koshered and another mashgiach had been hired; Mayer had been placed on “paid vacation.”

Soon the local Jewish weekly picked up the scent of a larger story for the restaurant’s closure, not ful y buying Ung’s explanation about “broken air-conditioning.” Perhaps a reporter had been tipped off by someone with an agenda, though Mayer denies that it was he. The headline of
Washington Jewish
Week
’s first article, which continued over four pages, was a taste of what was to come over the next year:

“Chinese Kosher Clash at Moshe Dragon: Food Fraud or Frame-up?”

The tectonic plates within the Jewish community began to grind against each other.

Now, if you are a non-Jewish reader, you might wonder: Al this over Chinese food? A Jewish reader may read this and nod in understanding: of course, al this over Chinese food.

Six thousand miles from the Holy Land, five thousand miles from eastern Europe, eight thousand miles from China, Chinese food had become a more significant part of the Jewish-American diet than the eastern European dishes of most Jews’ immigrant ancestors. Chinese food had become, arguably, the ethnic cuisine of the American Jew.

For many Jews, Chinese food is a weekly ritual, steeped in family tradition and childhood memories. The average American Reform Jew is more likely to know how to use chopsticks than how to write the Hebrew alphabet. Chinese food on Christmas Day is as much an American Jewish ritual as the Seder on Passover (maybe even more so, once you take into account nonobservant Jews).

When my friend Orli Bahcal was growing up, her family even had takeout Chinese food for family Shabbat dinner. To this day, she associates Chinese food with the religious rituals of Shabbat.

This close relationship has been the subject of at least two academic publications and hundreds, if not thousands, of standup jokes delivered by comedians from Jackie Mason to Jerry Seinfeld.

Many share their favorite Jewish-Chinese joke, some variation of “According to the Jewish calendar, the year is 5768. According to the Chinese calendar, it’s 4705. That means for 1,063 years, Jews went without Chinese food.”