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Miriam's Kitchen: A Memoir, by Elizabeth Ehrlich (Viking, 370 pp.; $24.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Lauren F. Winner, Kellett Scholar at Clare College, Cambridge University.

On occasion, I have joked to my boyfriend Andrew that our grandchildren will do things—culinary things—that they will not understand. They will have long forgotten—if in fact they ever knew—why they make braided whole wheat loaves every Friday, and why they eat meringues around Easter. For although I have, in becoming Christian, put aside most of the symbols and accouterments of my Jewish childhood, the ones that will not go are related to the kitchen. I have folded up and tucked away my prayer shawl, donated my Mikraot Gedolot to a local synagogue, taken to driving on Saturdays, removed the mezuzah from my doorpost. But I still bake challah every Friday afternoon, and I still concoct the crisp, unleavened cookies every Passover. It does not make any sense. Often I am not even home on Friday night to eat this challah, and it gets turned into French toast for Sunday brunch after church. But baking that bread is almost as automatic as brushing my teeth.

I have given Andrew Miriam's Kitchen to read. In fact, whatever the book's weaknesses, I felt as if it were a godsend. Literally. I have been praying that Andrew will somehow come to understand something he does not: not just why I continue to bake challah, but why my father, a good cultural Jew, is so distraught that I have become an Anglican and that therefore his descendants will not be Jewish. Why he is so troubled that his daughter is dating the son of a priest. Why I quietly fumble with the clasp at my neck and slip my cross into the pocket of my jeans when I pull into my father's driveway.

"But he doesn't believe any of it," wails Andrew. "So why does he care?" I cannot really explain why he cares any better than I can explain why I insist on eating mediocre cookies that send my cholesterol skyrocketing every spring. Miriam's Kitchen will explain it.

Elizabeth Ehrlich will probably be surprised that among her most vociferous cheerleaders is a mumar, the rabbinic term for Jews turned apostates. For her book is not a story about a movement away from Judaism, but about just the opposite. Miriam's Kitchen chronicles Ehrlich's struggles to keep a kosher kitchen. Along the way, she enrolls her children in Jewish day school, begins attending synagogue, and goes to the mikvah, the ritual bath that observant Jewish women go to every month, a week after their period ends. So keeping a kosher kitchen is the metaphor that conveys Ehrlich's growing—if at times ambivalent—commitment to observant Judaism, but it is also an end in itself.

To observe kashrut—the Jewish dietary laws—is to be reminded every day that the mundane mingles with the sacred. Keeping kosher, you really do sometimes feel as though you've sanctified this most basic aspect of daily life in a way that no brief grace before meals can manage to accomplish. But keeping kosher is also a colossal pain in the neck.

The dietary laws find their origins in the Old Testament, in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Fish must have fins and scales, otherwise they are tref—not kosher. No scallops, shrimp, lobster, mussels, or crabs. Land animals must have cloven hooves and chew their cud. No pigs or rabbits. Also no birds of prey, no snails, no creepy-crawly insects.

"You shall not boil a kid in its mother's milk," says Deuteronomy 14:21, and through the centuries of rabbinic exegesis that verse came to dictate a complete separation of all dairy products from all meat products. No cheeseburgers or chicken parmesan—but also no eating a steak on a plate that once held a grilled cheese sandwich.

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August 10 1998, Vol. 42, No. 9