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ON 5 July 1989, the first-ever episode of Seinfeld was aired, introducing us to the dysfunctional world of George, Jerry, Elaine and Kramer. While the sitcom prided itself on being a show about nothing, it really was about everything, and the “everything” often involved food. Food starred in some of the most hilarious moments on Seinfeld, serving as both trigger and punchline in many memorable episodes. We’re recapping a few morsels that are among our favourites:
The muffin tops from “The Muffin Tops” (Season 5)
A throwaway remark by Elaine as she eats a muffin — that someone should open a store where they sell only the tops — prompts Mr Lippman to launch a bakery that does just that. He calls it “Top Of The Muffin To You”. But something is not quite right and the muffin tops aren’t selling as well as he’d hoped. He offers Elaine a stake in the business if she can pinpoint the cause. Elaine samples the goods and declares that you can’t just bake the top of the muffin: to get the real deal, you have to bake the whole muffin, then separate the tops from the “stumps” (lower half) and sell the former. Mr Lippman follows Elaine’s advice and is awash in customers.
There remains one critical issue though: what to do with the stumps? Elaine tries to have them donated to a homeless shelter, but the poor refuse to eat them. Next, she asks Kramer — who is running a “reality” bus tour — to chuck the discarded muffin stumps in a garbage dump. When Kramer isn’t able to locate the dump (and inadvertently accelerates Jerry’s transformation into a werewolf), Elaine knows it’s time for desperate measures: she offers them to Newman, who chomps his way through the muffin stumps with copious quantities of milk.
The babkas from “The Dinner Party” (Season 5)
When George, Elaine, Jerry and Kramer are invited to a dinner party at a friend’s home, they decide to pick up a bottle of wine and a cake as gifts for their host. While George and Kramer proceed to have their own misadventures at a shop selling spirits (prompted in part by George’s new, overly-large and puffy Gore-Tex coat), Elaine and Jerry stop off at a bakery renowned for its chocolate babka. Unfortunately, the last loaf is snapped up by the customer just ahead of them, and the duo has to purchase a cinnamon babka instead.
Elaine is crushed about having to make do with “the lesser babka” but Jerry rebukes her for underestimating cinnamon, which he believes should be placed alongside salt and pepper shakers on dinner tables. His cinnamon advocacy hits a minor roadblock when they discover the babka they bought has a hair on it, and they have to queue up again to replace it. Another food star from this episode is a black-and-white cookie.
The éclair from “The Gymnast” (Season 6)
George is dating a woman whose mother keeps seeing him in questionable situations. It begins with him visiting his girlfriend Lindsay’s home, where her mother, Mrs Enright, is initially impressed with George. Cut towards the end of the visit when George opens the trash bin and sees “a perfectly good éclair” lying on top of a magazine that someone has only taken a small bite out of. Unable to resist the siren song of the dessert, George picks up the éclair and starts to eat it — just as Mrs Enright enters the kitchen and catches him in the act.
She is horrified, and later, another series of events — George balances a coffee cup on a parked car, spills the liquid all over the windshield, and is made to clean it with a newspaper by the angry owner — convinces her that Lindsay’s boyfriend is a vagrant. We prefer our sweets on plates and not out of a bin, but maybe we’d be a little more sympathetic to George’s predilections for pastry at all costs than Jerry later is.
The soup from “The Soup Nazi” (Season 7)
A new stand selling delicious soups opens up, and the gang stops by at various times to get their fix. Each courts the disfavour of the highly temperamental chef, Yev Kassem. George is banned for insisting on being served bread with his soup, Elaine is similarly punished for not following the correct protocol when placing her order, and Jerry has to distance himself from Sheila, his girlfriend of the moment, because Kassem is disgusted by her show of PDA while in queue.
Elaine gets the upper hand on Kassem when she discovers the recipes for all his soups in an armoire he’s given Kramer, and threatens to publicise them. Among the soup varieties that make an appearance in this episode are crab bisque, turkey chili, jambalaya, mulligatawny and chowder.
The Jewish Singles’ night buffet in “The Fatigues” (Season 8)
When Kramer gets 200 attendees at a Jewish Singles Night he’s organising, he asks Frank Costanza to help him serve authentic Jewish fare. Frank curtly refuses. It emerges that he used to be a chef for the US Army during the Korean War, but “something happened” that led him to swear off cooking, and haunts him to this day. After much probing, Kramer learns that Frank served the troops over-seasoned three-week-old meat in the mess for one of their dinners, when supplies ran thin, and “sent 16 of (his) own men to the latrines that night”.
Kramer manages to shake Frank out of his PTSD, and Costanza Senior cooks up a proper spread for the Singles Night. Everyone is enjoying the food, until Frank sees one of the guests — a colleague of Elaine’s — choking on a mouthful (a consequence of a disgruntled Elaine violently shaking him) and spirals out again.
The big salad from “The Big Salad” (Season 6)
When Elaine asks George to pick up “a big salad” for her from Monk’s — her customary order — she inadvertently sets the stage for his breakup with his girlfriend Julie. George buys the salad, but since it is Julie who hands it over to Elaine and is thanked in his stead, he simply can’t let it go. Several snarky remarks about the big salad later (it wouldn’t have been such a big deal if it was just a regular salad! as George claims), he is short one girlfriend and Elaine regrets having ever asked for the favour.
Honourable mentions:
George “double dipping” his chips, the trend of eating candy bars with a knife and fork, the Junior Mint that lands into a patient’s abdominal cavity during a surgery, the pastrami that plays a role in a risqué Costanza adventure, the antique cake (from King Edward VIII's wedding to Wallis Simpson) Elaine pilfers from Mr Peterman's fridge, and Kramer’s build-your-own-pie scheme all deserve paeans of their own. But we’re craving a Seinfeld rewatch now, so more on this later!
