Meals about nothing: 25 memorable foods featured in “Seinfeld”

In the Season 5 episode “The Dinner Party,” Elaine insists the gang bring wine and food to a gathering they attend and stop into a bakery for a chocolate babka. However, Jerry & Elaine forget to take a number, and the last chocolate babka is purchased just before their turn, forcing them to settle for a cinnamon babka, which Elaine calls a “lesser babka.” Making matters worse, they discover a hair on the cinnamon babka and must wait even longer to exchange it.

Although many people remember the Festivus episode of “Seinfeld” as being all about the pseudo-holiday, there are also a couple of subplots, including one about Kramer returning to work at H&H Bagel following the settling of a labor dispute. (The Season 9 episode is even entitled “The Strike” because of this.) However, Kramer’s employment is short-lived as he learns about Festivus from George’s dad, requests time off to celebrate it, has his request denied by his employer, and goes back on strike. When picketing the shop, Kramer chants “No bagel no bagel no bagel no bagel!” while holding a sign that reads: “FESTIVUS YES! BAGELS NO!”

In the Season 7 episode “The Rye,” Kramer mentions not having enough room to store all the Beef-A-Reeno he recently bought at the price club, and ends up feeding it to his hansom cab’s horse, Rusty. The script originally referred to the product by its actual name, Beefaroni, but Chef Boyardee rejected the request to use the name of their canned pasta.

In the same scene we discussed in the aforementioned episode “The Dinner Party,” while waiting in line to return the hair-adorned cinnamon babka, Jerry decides to buy and eat a black & white cookie, extolling the treat as being a metaphor for racial harmony. (“Look to the cookie Elaine. Look to the cookie.”) Unfortunately, the frosting combination didn’t sit well with Jerry’s stomach, and he headed for the bathroom to toss his cookies (or cookie), ending his 14-year vomitless streak.

George Costanza gets New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner hooked on calzones in Season 7’s “The Calzone,” with the latter requesting the former bring him one daily for lunch. However, after tipping two days in a row and the employee not seeing it either time, George reaches into the tip jar to retrieve his money and try again, gets caught in the act, and is banned from the pizzeria. George enlists Kramer to pick up the calzones, with expectedly hilarious results.

Some people don’t like the skin that forms on top of homemade pudding, but George loves it and even comes up with the idea of packaging and selling “pudding skin singles.” Later in the episode, the Exacto knife George was using accidentally cuts Jerry, who then requires a blood transfusion from Kramer, who has coincidentally been storing his blood at home to avoid paying the blood bank’s fees — hence the name of this ninth-season episode: “The Blood.”

George embarrasses himself in front of his girlfriend’s mother thrice in the Season 6 episode “The Gymnast.” First, he is caught taking a bite out of a partially eaten éclair that was in the garbage. Then he spills coffee on a driver’s windshield and attempts to wipe it off with a newspaper, appearing as if he is washing the windshield for spare change. And finally, he takes his shirt off in her bathroom, gets distracted by a 3-D picture, and forgets to put the shirt back on before exiting in front of everyone. Our favorite is the éclair, which leads to Jerry’s quote: “So let me get this straight. You find yourself in the kitchen. You see an éclair in the receptacle...and you think to yourself: ‘What the hell, I'll just eat some trash.’”

Numerous plots in the Season 5 episode “The Non-Fat Yogurt” center on the gang’s suspicion that a supposedly non-fat variety of frozen yogurt actually contains fat. One of those storylines also involved Elaine telling her boyfriend, Lloyd Braun, that all New Yorkers should wear name tags — a suggestion he takes to Mayor David Dinkins, who is running for re-election. Dinkins is publicly mocked for the suggestion, Braun is fired and suffers a nervous breakdown, and Rudy Giuliani wins the race after promising to investigate the so-called non-fat yogurt.

Kramer makes a miniature version of Jerry out of fusilli pasta in the Season 6 episode “The Fusilli Jerry,” and during a tussle, Frank Costanza falls on it and needs to see a proctologist. This leads the gang to discover the true owner of the vanity license plate Jerry mistakenly received earlier in the episode — a plate that read: “ASSMAN.”

Whenever we get squirted with grapefruit juice, we think of the Season 7 episode of “Seinfeld,” “The Wink,” in which George unknowingly winks at various people after getting sprayed in the eye by the citrus fruit. This results in him getting into all sorts of unintended predicaments, including almost getting fired and then getting a promotion he didn’t want.

We realize gum isn’t really food, but we really wanted to include one of our favorite “Seinfeld” episodes, Season 7’s “The Gum.” Kramer spends much of the episode making sure Lloyd Braun feels back to normal after his aforementioned nervous breakdown in “The Non-Fat Yogurt.” After Lloyd mistakenly believes Jerry wears glasses, the latter keeps up the ruse at Kramer’s insistence, even though glasses cause his vision to be extremely blurry. As a result, when Jerry buys some Chinese gum (in another attempt to appease Braun), he accidentally hands over a $100 bill and ends up with $100 worth of gum. Jerry’s reaction, “It’s a lot of gum!” is now a famous line.

When Kramer meets Bette Midler at a charity softball game in the Season 6 episode “The Understudy,” she asks him to bring her a pineapple Italian ice. Kramer returns with the frozen treat, but not before George runs down Bette (who was playing catcher) while trying to score. Fun fact: Although George was declared safe in the collision, he never actually touched home plate.

In the aptly named Season 4 episode “The Junior Mint,” Kramer offers Jerry a Junior Mint while the pair observe a splenectomy from the viewing gallery of a hospital operating room. Jerry refuses and pushes Kramer’s hand away, causing the mint to fly across the room and into the patient on the operating table. To this day, we can’t see a Junior Mint without thinking of this episode.

Lobster has a few cameos on “Seinfeld.” It is part of Season 5’s “The Hamptons,” in which Kramer poached some lobster from a commercial trap and George later serves them to Jerry’s kosher girlfriend. It appears later that season in “The Conversion,” when George urges his date to order the lobster, she says they need to break up due to her parents’ disapproval, and then orders the lobster anyway. And in Season 7’s “The Bizarro Jerry,” Jerry’s date uses her “man hands” to tear apart a lobster dinner. (Bonus: Kramer often wears a lobster-patterned shirt!)

George’s parents, Frank & Estelle, bring a marble rye loaf to dinner the first time they meet the parents of George’s fiancée Susan, but the loaf isn’t served, so Frank covertly takes it back. Hoping to avoid a family feud, George schemes to replace the missing loaf with an identical one before anyone notices and enlists Kramer to help distract them for a bit with his hansom cab. Yes, the same cab we mentioned in our entry for Beef-A-Reeno, because this is all from the same episode: Season 7’s “The Rye.”

Grapefruits make us think of “The Wink,” and so does mutton. As you may recall, another storyline in this episode involves Jerry disappointing his girlfriend by ordering a salad at a steakhouse. He tries to make up for it while at her house for dinner, but doesn’t like the mutton she is serving, and secretly stuffs it all in the pockets of his jacket. Elaine later borrows the jacket and attracts the unwanted attention of some local mutton-loving mutts.

Earlier we discussed “The Blood” and the pudding skin singles but didn’t mention George’s other plotline: his desire to incorporate food and TV into the love-making sessions with his girlfriend Tara. She is understandably repulsed by the idea, especially since George’s food of choice is a pastrami sandwich.

In “The Pez Dispenser,” from Season 3, Jerry makes Elaine laugh by placing a Pez dispenser—specifically a Tweety Bird Pez dispenser—on her leg at George’s girlfriend Noel’s piano recital. The laughter distracts the pianist and causes her to lose her confidence, and George insists Elaine not apologize and reveal it was her that laughed. Of course, Noel later recognizes Elaine’s laugh after hearing it at an intervention…an intervention that results in the addict seeking treatment but subsequently developing a Pez addiction.

There are two types of pie in Season 5’s “The Pie.” In the beginning at Monk’s, Jerry’s girlfriend Audrey refuses a bite of his apple pie by shaking her head. Jerry does the same thing when Audrey offers him a slice of pizza at her father’s restaurant. Audrey thought it was out of revenge, but it was actually because Jerry saw her father, the chef, leave the restroom without washing his hands.

Serve us a big bowl of pretzels, and we can’t help but comment, “These pretzels are making me thirsty.” That’s because this was the line Kramer was supposed to have in a Woody Allen movie in the Season 3 episode “The Alternate Side.” Jerry, George, and Elaine suggest different ways for Kramer to deliver the line — and they later work it into casual conversations in various contexts — but when the moment finally comes, Kramer says the line, shatters a beer glass, accidentally cuts Allen, and is promptly fired.

Have you ever been in a situation where someone else received credit for your good deed? That’s the topic of the Season 6 episode “The Big Salad.” Before George going to Monk’s for lunch with his girlfriend, Julie, Elaine asks him to pick her up a big salad. George pays for the salad, but Julie is the one who hands it to Elaine and is thus the recipient of her thank you. Because George is George, he is, of course, incensed that he did not receive the credit for the big salad and tells Elaine that it was he who actually bought it. When Julie discovers that George cares so much about such a trivial matter, she dumps him.

Elaine is shocked to witness her boss, Mr. Pitt (Ian Abercrombie) eating a Snickers bar with a knife and fork in the Season 6 episode “The Pledge Drive.” George, on the other hand, is impressed by this action, seeing it as a classy move that he later imitates — and it catches on around the city. The episode was such a big hit that the day after it aired, Abercrombie was out to lunch and the server jokingly brought him a Snickers bar on a plate.

“No soup for you!” is one of the most famous lines in “Seinfeld” history, and it of course originates from the classic Season 7 episode “The Soup Nazi.” The Soup Nazi character, played by Larry Thomas, was based on an actual New York City soup vendor named Ali "Al" Yeganeh. Yaganeth was infuriated by his portrayal on “Seinfeld” (he even ejected Jerry and the episode’s writer, Spike Feresten, from his restaurant on one occasion), but the resulting fame allowed him to launch a national chain of soup restaurants under the name “The Original Soup Man.”

While Jerry is busy buying a car in Season 9’s “The Dealership,” George deals with more trivial matters — he is convinced a mechanic “stole” his Twix bar that got stuck in the vending machine when he attempted to buy it. George launches several attempts to get the mechanic to confess, but the latter insists he was actually eating a 5th Avenue bar, even though he has cookie crumbs on his face. “Twix is the ONLY candy with the cookie crunch!” George exclaims in vain.

In the Season 9 episode “The Butter Shave,” vegetable lasagna isn’t just a food…it’s a character! After Elaine and Puddy (Patrick Warburton) break up during a flight, they start chatting up the passengers seated near them. To Elaine’s left is a Dutch passenger that she and Puddy repeatedly refer to as “Vegetable Lasagna” because of the in-flight meal he orders, even though he tells them at one point that his name is Magnus. Veg—er, Magnus—grows increasingly uncomfortable with the on-the-rocks couple’s boisterous arguments and tries to disassociate himself from their quarrel…but eventually inadvertently shares a cab with them at the episode’s conclusion.