Kashrut dietary laws are ill-suited to lactose-intolerant Jews

Until fairly recently, all over the western world there were specialised eating places catering largely for Jews who respected the kashrut dietary laws. From family caffs to white tablecloth establishment, these called themselves ‘dairy restaurants’. They were nearly, but not quite, vegetarian, since they allowed (the kosher-defined) fish with fins and scales.

This wondrously weird, heavily illustrated book is a threnody to the now almost vanished dairy restaurant, seeing it as a kind of paradise — though as its author, the artist Ben Katchor, writes: ‘This pleasure garden, Eden, was open to the public and naturally attracted a crowd.’ The first 60 pages depict visually (and explicitly in prose) the origins of the Mosaic Law, beginning with the Garden of Eden — in which the forbidden fruit was dates (the apple was native to Kazakhstan, not to the Middle Eastern desert).

Derived from the rabbinical prohibition of ‘seething the kid in its mother’s milk’, the intricate Hebrew dietary rules gave birth to eating places where, on the whole, fish but no meat was served, honouring the belief that meat was murder in more senses than one. Did not the grain-offering Cain kill his pastoralist brother Abel, who was taking his first-born lamb to be sacrificed to JHVH —as Katchor denotes Jehovah? Not that the deity did anything more than savour the fragrance of burnt offerings.

According to Katchor, the first vegetarian restaurant was Mrs Matthews’, on Princess Street, Manchester. He illustrates almost every page of this eccentric book with his own magnificent drawings (he won a MacArthur ‘genius’ grant for cartooning), but he is a better draughtsman than scholar. For example, he accepts Rebecca Spang’s identification of the first restaurant to have opened in Paris as Roze de Chantoiseau in 1773, ignoring the claims of M. Boulanger in 1765; and the lack of footnotes or index makes it impossible to check his many other factual-sounding statements.