I make the treyf groceries first. (In New Orleans, you “make” groceries; you don’t buy them.) Traffic inches along North Broad Street, everyone eager to start the weekend. The sun is a ripe satsuma hanging above the Mississippi, and the Superdome reflects the purple sky. I have several stops to make before I even start…
In the beginning, there was mun. And it was good. Mun, sometimes spelled mohn, is the Yiddish word for sweet poppy-seed jam. It was a key ingredient in many Eastern European baked goods, from mohnbrötchen (poppy-seed bread) to munstrudel (a sweet, swirled bread). So it’s no surprise that Ashkenazic Jews used mun to fill their…
It’s no accident that Shiso Soy bottles look like high-end spirits. Soy sauce is “a very complicated, sophisticated brewed product,” according to Jonathan Blum, a lawyer and cooking enthusiast, who became obsessed with the ubiquitous Japanese condiment. “All people know here is Kikkoman, which is like [the ultra-low-end wine] Two Buck Chuck. And they put…
On Wednesday, The New York Times ran a story in its food section about a new cookbook by New York Times writers Frank Bruni and Jennifer Steinhauer called “A Meatloaf in Every Oven: Two Chatty Cooks, One Iconic Dish and Dozens of Recipes — From Mom’s to Mario Batali’s” (Grand Central Life & Style). In…
Challah has never been just bread to me. I grew up watching my father proof his yeast every Friday at dawn before he’d race off to do rounds at the hospital, returning at midday to punch down and knead the aromatic dough before braiding and baking it. My dad also ventured into rolling out savory…
Little did I know, when my Indian-Israeli aunt insisted on visiting a certain spice shop during my visit to Mumbai, that it would be in the Lalbaug spice bazaar. I had marked the bazaar as a must visit on the Google map I “drew” while planning my trip to India. Like my aunt, many Indian…
If you keep kosher and have a diverse group of friends and dining partners, it seems inevitable that you will at some point have to explain yourself. Kosher can be complicated, and of course a 3,000-year-old practice will never be as fashionable as the diet du jour. Then again, Paleo came back from the Stone…
SHORT, SERIOUS ANSWER: “No, because it’s pork, and because we don’t eat meat with milk, so we don’t eat meat with cheese.” MORE EFFECTIVE RETORT: “No milk with meat is TRADITION!” Crucial here, according to Nemko, is to say it like Tevye from Fiddler. CONCISE COMEBACK: “The Lord wouldn’t strike me dead… but why take…
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