My grandfather (age 66) tells me that his mother would not allow him to drink milk and eat fish at the same meal. Apparently, something very grave would occur if he did. Grandpa’s friend Dale (age 63)also supports his claim. Does anyone know where this paranoia originated?
If it wasn’t for some religious reason (I believe there are Jewish regulations about milk with meat, but I’m not sure about milk and fish), then I’d say it sounds like it might be something like a food-combining diet like the ‘Hay diet’ where the theory is that certain food type combinations are specifically beneficial, while others are detrimental.
Not sure if there’s any scientific basis for the Hay diet though.
Nothing wrong with milk and fish…
Zev Steinhardt
zev, there’s a little more to the story than that - there is in fact a Jewish regulation about combining milk and fish, but it’s not so clearcut.
(Note: most of the following is from memory, so I hope that some of our resident Torah scholars will correct any misstatements of mine.)
The Talmud (Pesachim 76b) states that it’s unhealthy to eat fish that was roasted together with meat. Based on this, the Code of Jewish Law (Yoreh Deah 116) rules that one should clean his mouth, by eating and drinking something, between fish and meat (even if they weren’t cooked together).
R’ Moses Isserles, in his glosses there, adds that one should not eat fish and milk together. The later commentaries discuss this at length; some of them conclude that “milk” is a slip of the pen for “meat” and that there is no problem with fish and milk, while others uphold the version of R’ Isserles’ statement that we have, and find various sources to support it.
In practice, even those who do follow this latter opinion generally limit its applicability only to cooking fish with milk (and, IIRC, there are varying customs about cooking fish with butter or other dairy products).
RedNaxela
My mother-in-law believes this rule, too.
I have no idea where she gets it from, since she’s not Jewish, and not following any type of special diet.
(JFTR, she’s ignor…umm, uneducated)
She thinks it will make you very sick (diarrhea and vomiting).
For the record, my personal experience indicates that there seem to be no physically detrimental effects of eating fish with milk at the same meal, or from cooking fish in milk (I often poach fish in milk and It’s never caused me any harm).
yes, in my original post i was remiss. i should’ve added that grandpa’s mother was not jewish (they were southern baptists). there were no limitations diet-wise, but for their poverty.
It has to be some sort of Southern thing. My wife and her mother (Irish, raised in Texas) both pitched a fit the first time I ate a tuna fish sandwich and milk in their presence.
I just wanted to thank everyone for an extremely interesting thread. I was fully aware of the Hassidic prohibition of serving a creature in its mother’s milk (i.e., no cheeseburgers!)*. I was mystified about the service of fish and milk though. As an aside, seafood served with lemon comes from the false belief that the citric acid would dissolve any fishbones caught in the craw of the diner.
This one is really interesting. I can see the possible, but incorrect connection about two rich foods. Fish is not a very rich food, so the excess of fish and milk seems faulty at best.
- And this is where bagels and lox comes from. It is my true belief that this dish approximates most closely the equivalent of the Jewish cheeseburger. You have a meat (smoked salmon) and cheese (cream cheese) together on something nearly approximately a bun (a bagel). There you have it whacko dietary history in a nutshell.
Um, Zenster, I’m as non-Hasidic as they come, and I wouldn’t serve a creature in it’s mother’s milk. (Or any meat anywhere near anything dairy, for that matter.) There’s a huge difference between “Hasidic” and “Orthodox”, and the two aren’t at all interchangeable. (As a rule, Hasidic people are Orthodox, but Orthodox people aren’t necessarily Hasidic. Think “apple” and “fruit”. Not interchangeable terms.)
As far as Jews not cooking fish and milk together, it depends which opinion they follow, as related by RedNaxela above. There are widely accepted halachik authorities on both sides. (I do cook them together, and I’d guess that zev does as well.) Fish and meat are kept separate, but not as strictly as meat and dairy.
Hmm, so I’ve been eating replacement cheeseburgers all my life on Sunday mornings? Never thought of it that way.
how did the beliefs of orthodox jews end up in the culinary habits of my great-grandmother? well, besides the old testament . . .
I bet she wasn’t from New England.
Clams would be considered a shellfish, wouldn’t they?
That’s unorthodox enough.
Then throw in milk, butter and cheese and you’re on your way to clam chowder.
Could her belief be geographical?
In the 1954 theatrical movie “Dragnet,” Sgt. Friday, puffing away on a cigarette chides partner Officer Smith for having eating fish and milk together because (paraphrase) “that’s one of the worst things you can do.”
Quoth Zenster:
Huh. And here, I’ve always thought that that was because it tastes good. Lemon juice seems to take some of the edge off of the “fishy” flavor.
Maybe it is a southern thing. I still get it from the southern half of my family (especially the older ones), even though I feed milk and fish to my kids all the time. There are demonstrably no ill effects. Plus I have a lot of fish recipes that have cheese in them.
My parents would never serve us kids milk with a fish dish. They, of course, got this habit from their parents.
The supposition was that consuming milk and fish would make you sick to your stomach.