[Avodah] Boys Being Taught How to Cook

[Zev Sero]

T613K at aol.com wrote:

> When the angels came to Avraham he had Sarah bake cake and had "the 
> na'ar" -- Yishmael -- cook the meat.  Ber. 18:6-8

1. I had understood it to mean that Yishmael was to shecht the calves.
In the next pasuk it implies that Avraham "asah" ("tiken") each calf
and served it as soon as it was done.

2. If your reading is correct, then it shows that Yishmael and Esav
were cooks.  But Yaacov Ish Tam was a yeshivah bochur and never learned
how.  When he thought that perhaps Esav's derech had something going
for it -- after all, his father seemed to like it -- he tried his hand
at cooking something simple.  "How hard can it be to cook lentils?", he
must have thought.  "Put them in a pot with some water, put it on the
fire, and go back to the gemara."   (There is a children's book about
my great-great-uncle Mendel Deitch trying to cook "porridge", which
drags this premise out for 20 illustrated pages or so.)

But when he needed to turn a pair of raw goats into "mat'amim", that
was a job for his mother.

-- 
Zev Sero                      The trouble with socialism is that you
zev at sero.name                 eventually run out of other people’s money
                                                     - Margaret Thatcher