The Roman emperor Antoninus was a friend of Rabbi Judah the Prince — the compiler of the Mishnah, known to tradition as Rabbi. The two men ate together often, and the emperor noticed something he could not explain.
When he dined at Rabbi's table on an ordinary weekday, the food was hot, seasoned, freshly cooked, splendid. When he dined there on Shabbat, the food was cold — because no fire had been lit since sunset Friday — and yet somehow it tasted better.
"How is this?" Antoninus asked. "Your Shabbat stew has been sitting for a day. My weekday meal came straight from the hearth. And yet I would sooner eat your cold Sabbath food than my hot feast."
Rabbi smiled. "There is one spice missing from your weekday meal. It is the blessing that God lets rest on the seventh day. Shabbat itself seasons the food. No cook can add that flavor, and no furnace can copy it."
The Exempla keeps the story because it teaches that Shabbat is not a day of deprivation, even when it looks that way from outside. A Jew who guards the Sabbath receives a taste — literal or spiritual — that cannot be bought or reheated.
(From The Exempla of the Rabbis, Moses Gaster, 1924, no. 120, based on Shabbat 119a.)