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.