The Stein Family Pet Naming Tradition: A Comprehensive History

Our dog is named Matzah Ball Soup. Before him, our beagle was named Kugel. The hamsters were Falafel and Babka. Our family has been naming pets after Jewish foods since the shtetl.

We currently have a chihuahua/Jack Russell mix named Matzah Ball Soup. We call him Soup for short. He’s a good dog, enthusiastic, loyal, prone to eating things he shouldn’t. When we’re at the vet and they call “Matzah Ball Soup Stein,” I watch the other pet owners try to maintain neutral expressions.

People ask me why we do this.

The answer is simple: we’ve always done this. The Stein family has been naming pets after Jewish foods for at least six generations, possibly more. I’ve done the genealogical research. The records are surprisingly detailed.

Before Soup, we had a beagle named Kugel. Before Kugel, I had two hamsters named Falafel and Babka. Falafel was the best hamster. Babka ran away after just a few days. We never found him.

My father’s generation continued the tradition with similar restraint. His childhood dog was named Challah, a golden retriever with a braided leather collar, which everyone agreed was too on-the-nose but also kind of perfect. His sister had a cat named Brisket who lived to be nineteen and spent the last four years unable to jump but unwilling to acknowledge this limitation. They’d find Brisket on the floor next to furniture, looking betrayed.

My grandfather’s generation had a rooster named Schmaltz.

Zayde Herman kept this rooster in Brooklyn in the 1940s, which was apparently a time and place where keeping a rooster in a residential neighborhood was technically illegal but widely practiced. Schmaltz had a notably aggressive temperament and once chased a postal worker three blocks. The postal worker filed a formal complaint. My great-grandmother had to go to some kind of hearing and explain, with a straight face, that Schmaltz was a treasured family pet. The rooster was allowed to stay but had to be “supervised during postal delivery hours.”

Herman’s brother, my great-uncle Saul, had a parrot named Kishke. Kishke knew seventeen words in Yiddish and three in English. The English words were “hello,” “cracker,” and, inexplicably, “automobile.” Saul swore he never taught the bird that last one. Kishke would sit in the window and yell “AUTOMOBILE” at passing cars. The neighbors found this delightful. When Kishke died in 1953, there was a genuine period of neighborhood mourning.

Going back another generation, we hit my great-great-grandfather’s household in the Lower East Side. This is the 1910s. Records from this period are spottier, but family letters reference a series of pigeons (messenger pigeons, apparently, though who they were sending messages to is unclear). The pigeons had names like Latke, Blintze, and Knish. One letter from 1916, written by my great-great-aunt Rifka, mentions that “Latke returned from Weehawken with extraordinary news about Uncle Moishe’s fabric venture.” What news? How did the pigeon convey this? The historical record is silent.

We have actual photographic evidence for this part: my great-great-great-grandfather Yitzhak, still in the old country, kept a goat named Borscht.

This was in the shtetl of Wysokie Mazowieckie in Poland, sometime in the 1880s. We have a photograph, one of those formal, sepia-toned portraits where everyone looks vaguely startled. Yitzhak is seated. Standing next to him is Borscht the goat, wearing what appears to be a small ceremonial vest. On the back of the photograph, someone has written in Yiddish: “Yitzhak and Borscht, 1884.”

According to family stories passed down with dubious accuracy, Borscht was tremendously intelligent. She could open gates, recognize her name in three languages, and had strong opinions about which children she’d allow to milk her. (She liked my great-great-grandmother Chaya. Did not care for Chaya’s brother Avram. Would turn bodily away from him. Avram apparently never recovered from this rejection and moved to Minsk.)

But before Borscht, there was allegedly a sheep named Tsimmes.

I say “allegedly” because we’re now in the realm of oral history, no photographic evidence. Tsimmes belonged to Yitzhak’s father, Zalman. The sheep was apparently a champion wool producer and had a peculiar talent: she could predict rain. Not through normal animal behavior, but (according to the story) by bleating in a specific pattern. Two short bleats and a long one meant rain within three hours. One long bleat meant a storm. Three short bleats meant false alarm, she was just excited about feed.

Did this actually work? My grandfather swore his father told him it did. “Tsimmes was never wrong about weather,” he’d say, as if this were a completely reasonable thing to assert about a sheep that died in approximately 1875.

And then we get to the genuine stuff of legend: Zalman’s father, my great-great-great-great-grandfather Avram, reportedly kept a bear.

A bear named Cholent.

Now, I want to be clear: I cannot verify this. We’re talking about the 1840s or 1850s, in a small shtetl in what was then the Russian Empire. Record-keeping was not robust. But the story has been passed down with such specific details that I’m inclined to believe some version of it happened.

According to family lore, Cholent was not a full-sized bear. It was a medium bear. My great-grandfather’s exact phrasing when he told this story. Cholent was allegedly found as a cub, orphaned, and Avram nursed it back to health with goat’s milk. The bear became domesticated (or as domesticated as a bear gets) and lived in an enclosure behind the house. Children from the village would come to see Cholent. Avram would charge a penny or the equivalent in eggs.

The story goes that Cholent was gentle except for one incident where a traveling tax collector tried to overcharge Avram on some grain assessment. Cholent sensed the tension and stood up on his hind legs. Just stood there. Didn’t growl, didn’t charge. Just stood up, which, if you’re a bear, is all you really need to do. The tax collector apparently recalculated the assessment on the spot and never returned to that part of the district.

Did we really have a bear named Cholent? I choose to believe we did. It makes the rooster named Schmaltz seem downright conventional by comparison.

The tradition died out briefly in the mid-20th century. Assimilation pressures, probably. My uncle David had a dog named “Rex” in the 1960s. Rex! Like we were trying to blend in with some imaginary gentile standard of normal pet names. The family still talks about this as a regrettable period. “The Rex years,” my father calls it, shaking his head.

But traditions have a way of resurging. When we got Kugel in 2008, it felt like a return to form. Something essential had been restored. And now we have Soup, who is currently asleep on the couch, unaware that he’s part of a multi-generational legacy that may or may not include a medium-sized bear.

And after Soup, we’ll get another pet. We haven’t decided what yet. But the name is already chosen: Rugelach. It’s a family decision, arrived at by consensus. My mother suggested Gefilte, but we all agreed that felt mean to the animal.

This is who we are. We are people who name pets after Jewish foods. We have been doing this since at least the 1840s, possibly longer. The tradition will continue. Somewhere, I imagine, the spirit of Cholent the medium bear approves.