Skip to main content

Thought for the Day: Sh'i'ah, Chazarah, Tanur Kira -- Ovens Today

Of course I know that wood burning stoves don't have knobs to adjust the temperature.  Of course I also never really thought about what that meant for bakeries in days gone by.  Baruch HaShem, I had the z'chus to once hear first hand from someone who lived in pre-war Europe and who's mother ran a bakery.  There are all sorts of "little" details.  For example, not only was there no way manually to adjust the temperature, there was also no way to turn it on and off.  You started a fire and let it go till the end; wood is an expensive resource, after all.  The process he described took careful planning and then about a week of execution.  Breads at the beginning of the week when the fire was hottest, then cakes and kugels as the temperature came down, finally pastries and other delicacies that required lower temperatures at the end of the week.  That's a heck of a lot more than "no temperature dial".

That insight, I found, has been very helpful in understanding the laws of sh'i'ah (leaving food on/in the oven over Shabbos) and chazara (returning food to same).  To make things more complex, the Shulchan Aruch discusses three kinds of ovens: kira, tanur, and kupa.  Besides the fact that they were wood/coal fired and had no dials, they also were open on top and the pots were lowered into them.  Basically, they didn't look much like our modern gas/electric ovens that open from the side.  Also, just so you don't get bored, these halachos are based on a machlokes Chananya and Rabanan that has no resolution, so the poskim have had to try and cover all bases.  Siman 253 (which contains the bulk of this discussion) is only five s'ifim; very long and complex s'ifim.  The Dirshu Mishna Brura on this siman, which usually has up to one page of expounding on the Mishna Brura, adds additional full pages in the text which then continue onto another few pages added as and appendix.  Not for the faint of heart.

This is obviously not the venue to go through all that, but I did finally realize that there are two basic concerns driving the the discussions which helped me to manage all the details.  The two basic concerns are:
  1. Safeguards to prevent one from accidentally stirring the coals.
  2. Preventing situations that look like the normal way of cooking.
To take a small example: suppose you want to leave one burner on through Shabbos.  There are no coals there, but clearly adjusting the dials is similar to stirring the coals, so you might think that simply covering/removing/locking the dials would be enough.  However, putting a pot on an uncovered burner the the normal way of cooking.  Most poskim, therefore, require a blech that both covers the burner and protects the dials from being (easily) adjusted.  For a crock pot, that means lining the heating receptacle with foil (not a thin layer, but enough to effect a temperature difference) and taping the knob.

Oh wait... then there are also hatmana (insulating) issues.  Darn!  Out of time and space.  Have a wonderful Shabbos and Chag Kasher v'Samei'ach!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thought for the Day: Pizza, Uncrustables, and Stuff -- What Bracha?

Many years ago (in fact, more than two decades ago), I called R' Fuerst from my desk at work as I sat down to lunch.  I had a piece of (quite delicious) homemade pizza for lunch.  I nearly always eat at my desk as I am working (or writing TftD...), so my lunch at work cannot in any way be considered as sitting down to a formal meal; aka קביעת סעודה.  That being the case, I wasn't sure whether to wash, say ha'motzi, and bentch; or was the pizza downgraded to a m'zonos.  He told if it was a snack, then it's m'zonos; if a meal the ha'motzi.  Which what I have always done since then.  I recently found out how/why that works. The Shulchan Aruch, 168:17 discusses פשטיד''א, which is describes as a baked dough with meat or fish or cheese.  In other words: pizza.  Note: while the dough doesn't not need to be baked together with the meat/fish/cheese, it is  required that they dough was baked with the intention of making this concoction. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Thought for the Day: What Category of Muktzeh are Our Candles?

As discussed in a recent TftD , a p'sak halacha quite surprising to many, that one may -- even לכתחילה -- decorate a birthday cake with (unlit, obviously) birthday candles on Shabbos. That p'sak is predicated on another p'sak halacha; namely, that our candles are muktzeh because they are a כלי שמלאכתו לאיסור and not  מוקצה מחמת גופו/intrinsically set aside from any use on Shabbos. They point there was that using the candle as a decoration qualifies as a need that allows one to utilize a כלי שמלאכתו לאיסור. Today we will discuss the issue of concluding that our candles are , in fact, a כלי שמלאכתו לאיסור and not מוקצה מחמת גופו. Along the way we'll also (again) how important it is to have personal relationship with your rav/posek, the importance of precision in vocabulary, and how to interpret the Mishna Brura.  Buckle up. After reviewing siman 308 and the Mishna Brura there, I concluded that it should be permissible to use birthday candles to decorate a cake on Sha...
Post a Comment
Read more

Thought for the Day: אוושא מילתא Debases Yours Shabbos

My granddaughter came home with a list the girls and phone numbers in her first grade class.  It was cute because they had made it an arts and crafts project by pasting the list to piece of construction paper cut out to look like an old desk phone and a receiver attached by a pipe cleaner.  I realized, though, that the cuteness was entirely lost on her.  She, of course, has never seen a desk phone with a receiver.  When they pretend to talk on the phone, it is on any relatively flat, rectangular object they find.  (In fact, her 18 month old brother turns every  relatively flat, rectangular object into a phone and walks around babbling into it.  Not much different than the rest of us, except his train of thought is not interrupted by someone else babbling into his ear.) I was reminded of that when my chavrusa (who has children my grandchildrens age) and I were learning about אוושא מילתא.  It came up because of a quote from the Shulchan Aru...
Post a Comment
Read more