This is an occasional column in which the writer evaluates a cookbook by making some of its recipes, sharing the dishes with friends and asking those friends what they think of the results. For Passover, the writer cooked her way through “Modern Jewish Cooking: Recipes & Customs for Today’s Kitchen,” by Forward writer and contributing…
Canned vegetables await processing at the 2014 Hazon Food Conference. Two hundred pounds of tomatoes. Some big and red and juicy, some yellow, some tiny cherry tomatoes, a pile of colorful beefsteaks and even a box of ripe green tomatoes with beautiful dark green veins. This summer, two hundred pounds of tomatoes passed through our…
Thinkstock Yes, it is meltingly tender, a hallowed tradition, the ultimate comfort food, the meat that people who don’t eat meat do eat. (Before I wrote “The Brisket Book,” I thought that was a little odd too.) And brisket — multitasker extraordinaire — is not only delicious, it is also deliciously quotable. Observations, opinions, advice,…
Thinkstock My mother had been dead not quite twenty-three months when I was told I would not be making the matzo ball soup. I can’t quite remember what I said next, but I remember the feeling clearly, viscerally: like lead in the gut, a slight dizziness; a fuzziness around the edges of my brain. It…
Photographs by Thea Glassman Gina Cecala came into Streit’s Matzos on Tuesday morning in search of black-pepper matzo — and to pay her respects. “When I read in the newspaper that you guys were moving, I almost died,” she said, loading her purchases onto the counter. “So many years you’ve been here. I feel so…
Family influences abound in the kitchen and the cookbook. At San Francisco’s Bar Tartine, the chef’s Lithuanian Jewish grandmother shows up regularly in the kitchen — or rather, her spirit does. “Family influences are our strongest inspiration,” Cortney Burns writes with co-author and co-chef Nicolaus Balla in their intro to “Bar Tartine: Techniques & Recipes.”…
The recipe notebook of Lola Blei, the author’s grandmother, who was known as Loly. Photograph by Daniela Blei. If there was ever a doubt that cooking is more than just a means of providing sustenance, the evidence lies in my grandmother’s cursive. Her recipes fill a wire-bound notebook, its brittle pages a testament to butter…
Spice Up Your Valentine’s* is a video from the* Jewish Daily Forward on Vimeo. Valentine’s Day comes with high expectations. Oh, the pressure to create romance. Add to that an expensive dinner in a restaurant overburdened by so many romance-seeking customers, and the evening often ends in disappointment. I remember one Valentine’s Day dinner, at…
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