The Torah's cryptic warning not to boil a kid in its mother's milk (Exodus 34:26) becomes, in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, something much more expansive — and much more alarming. The Targum widens the verse into a general prohibition: You are not allowed to boil or to eat flesh and milk mixed together, lest My displeasure be kindled against you, and the fruit of your trees, with the grapes in their branches and their leaves, be laid waste together.
This is the foundation of the entire Jewish law of basar b'chalav — the separation of meat and milk that still shapes kosher kitchens today. The Targum does not argue the reason; it states the stakes. A household that mixes meat and milk will see its vineyard wither. The punishment is agricultural, specific, and frightening: grapes shriveling on the branch, leaves laid waste together — the same word the prohibition uses for the forbidden mixture itself.
The Targum also begins the verse with the command to bring the best firstfruits to the sanctuary. The two halves of the verse mirror each other. What you bring to God (firstfruits) and what you refuse to mix (meat and milk) together form a single ethic: the table and the altar share one holiness, and both require discrimination.
The rabbis of the Talmud (Chullin 115b) later built three separate prohibitions out of this single verse: not to cook, not to eat, not to benefit from the mixture. The Targum's anxiety about the grapevine is the seed of all three.
The takeaway: Judaism treats the kitchen as a theology. What crosses a Jew's plate is not trivial — it reaches up through the leaves of the vineyard and into the courts of the Temple itself.