pots
Question
I'm a recent baal teshuvah and I'm just starting to observe the mitzvot. Can you please explain why one can not cook meat in pot that was used to cook milk and vice versa. Assuming the pot was thoroughly cleaned, the amount of milk or meat that can get in the food is certainly batel bashishim. Same question for cooking vegetables in "non-kosher" vessels. If you use hebrew in your answer, please translate so that I can learn. Much thanks, Felix
Answer
Answered by Aaron AbadiThe pot can absorb the taste of the food by heating up the food in it. If you then heat up water in the same pot, that flavor would go out into the water. That is the concept of Kashering. If the milk was cooked and seeped into the walls of the pot, and then meat was cooked in the same pot, we are afraid that there is enough milk to be more than 1/60. Today our pots seem less porous. In the old days, and with earthenware today, the walls seeped in a lot. It is still not enough to be certain that it is less than 1/60. My feelings are like yours, that how can there be more than 1/60th in the walls, but we can't change the rules based on that. I think that if we had a way to scientifically prove that it is less than that, we could probably not need to worry about it. But not the same bogus scientific proofs that they can tell you the age of fossils & dinasours. AA