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Thought for the Day: Not Exactly A Priori Nullification, Just Sort Of

Yes, Virginia, there is ביטול/nullification; no, Corrigan, that is the wrong way to go (to fix things).

As mentioned, siman 92 of Yoreh Deah is titled: The Laws Concerning Milk Falling into a Pot of Meat, which contains nine סעיפים/sections. I also mentioned there: Also some stuff about חנ''ן -- when a leetle bit of milk or meat makes a big chunk of forbidden meat/milk combination. More about all that later, בעזרת השם.

It is later, ברוך השם.

Perhaps one of the reasons that this siman begins discussing meat falling into hot milk is because that situation is a relatively straightforward case of forbidden milk/meat mixtures. That is because the chunk of meat itself that falls into a liquid bath of milk is, of course, forbidden and must be removed from the pot. The only question is what about the remaining dairy liquid and the pot. A pot of meat, though, tends to have chunks of meat, as well as chunks of other more or less edible ingredients. (Potatoes and broccoli are more edible, brussel sprouts are less edible, IMHO.) Moreover, it is not usually a chunk of dairy (ie, cheese) that falls into a pot, but some milk, which disperses and remains in the pot.

As we all know, milk becomes בטול/nullified in meat when there is 60 times one ingredient over the other. Take a simple example: you make a cholent with 60 oz of ground beef (really good, by the way) and one oz of milk falls into the (liquidy) cholent and immediately becomes mixed into a homogeneous mixture. The magic of ביטול/nullification lets you serve that cholent. (As long as your wife doesn't see, of course; which is why I always go to get the cholent. Just in case.) That's the easy case. Another easy case is one oz of milk falling onto and absorbed into a chunk of meat that is less than 60 oz; in which case you now simply have 60 (or less) oz of forbidden milk/meat.

Things get messier when there is less than 60 oz of meat, but still 60 total oz of cholent -- when you add the barley and potatoes and whatnot. Fascinating, but not for now.

Here's some more fun: Suppose that chunk of meat is situated half in the cholent and half above. (You know, that piece you try to grab before anyone else notices!) In that case we have a machlokes Rashi and the Ri (one of his grandsons, one of the Ba'alie Tosafos). According to Rashi we need to be strict and consider that chunk as completely outside the cholent. Since nearly any splatter of milk will be more than 1/60th of any particular chunk, that chunk needs to be removed. On the other hand, if that chunk had been submerged, or if we hadn't noticed and had stirred or covered the pot, then the milk would be בטול/nullified in the mixture. In fact, according to the Ri, as long as part of the chunk was submerged, we take on that the heat of the cholent and the meat essentially mixes everything immediately; it is immediately considered as if the chunk had been stirred in or the pot covered.

Hmm...

Usually we would be strict like Rashi since it is a machlokes about a Torah prohibition. In this case, though, since Rashi really is an obvious stringency, in the case of a large loss, we can be lenient and just stir the meat through, cover the pot, and serve it up. (מעדני השלחן צב:ב ס''ק כ''ו)

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