JTA — The oldest continually active Jewish congregation in the Americas? Hint: Check your margarita glass. Congregation Mikve Israel Emmanuel in Curacao, home of the liqueur of the same name, holds the honor, having served the island’s Jewish community since roughly 1654. The wheels of the community were put in motion by Jaoa d’Yllan, a…
This is an elegy for chopped liver, a common appetizer with a distinguished pedigree. Its origins have been traced to 11th-century Alsace-Lorraine, where it was foie gras, made from the livers and fat of force-fed geese, plus a dash of Armagnac or Madeira, to add moisture as well as flavor, and salt. In France to…
The Evaluations Here are the results of , based on a survey of five retail sources in New York. Samples were purchased, listed ingredients noted, and each rendition tasted, chewed, and graded, measured, using a reconstruction of the precious Ashkenazi prototype. For control purposes, an upscale vendor on the city’s Upper East Side was included…
This is the third in a series of pseudonymous essays by The Treyfster. The pieces explore forbidden foods from the point of view of a person who used to keep traditionally kosher. Illustration by Kurt Hoffman If you’re talking treyf, it doesn’t get much trey-fer than bacon. That’s not true, of course. The idea that…
Schlissell challah made by Melinda Strauss, whose site, Kitchen Tested, offers a recipe and how-to. Photograph by Melinda Strauss Bread has been on my mind lately… It seems there’s nothing like a week of absence to make my love of complex carbohydrates grow stronger. As we begin counting until Shavuot, many will think of dairy…
Purist pastry chef Jeffrey Finkelstein of Hof Kelsten with his glorious challah. When Jeffrey Finkelstein was a kid in Montreal, he’d savor the soft, caraway-spiked rye bread at Moishe’s, the legendary downtown steakhouse where he’d ask to celebrate his birthdays. Today, his burgeoning wholesale bakery, Hof Kelsten, is making Moishe’s bread — “our signature loaf,…
Thinkstock When we hear the word Passover, we think about matzo, matzo brei, and matzo balls, but before the destruction of the Second Temple Jews associated Passover both with matzo and with barley. Barley was a critical foundation of our ancestors’ diets due to its resilience in the searing desert heat, and since it was…
Photograph by Tami Ganeles-Weiser/The Weiser Kitchen Move over, quinoa? Amaranth, its kissing cousin, is technically kosher for Passover… maybe. Or maybe not. Amaranth is actually a category of about 60 different plant species that grow between five and eight feet tall, produce vibrantly colorful ornamental flowers, sprout copious amounts of wildly colored edible leaves and…
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