Jane Ziegelman, a James Beard Award winning food historian, is the author of “97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement” and “A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression,” which she wrote together with her husband, Andrew Coe. She lives in Brooklyn.
What can a Jewish cookbook from 1946 tell us about the 21st-century Jewish-American experience? Liza Schoenfein, the Forward’s senior food writer, and Jane Ziegelman, a culinary historian, took our signature collection of Yiddish recipes off the shelf and found a direct line from the balaboostas of yore to the kitchens of today. A Latke Origin…
In 1916, the New York Board of Health issued a concise 36 page recipe book aimed at Jewish American homemakers. Published bilingually in both Yiddish and English, “How to Cook for the Family” contained recipes for such “plain, substantial and wholesome” dishes as tomato soup, beef stew and cornstarch pudding. So far as we can…
Unlike Rachel Ray (whom I happen to enjoy watching), I am perversely attracted to drawn out, labor-intensive kitchen projects. Case in point: I will happily put aside a few hours to stretch my own strudel dough. I also bake bagels, a process that involves simmering the raw bagels in a water bath laced with malt…
Esther Kessler, my paternal grandmother, cooked with the precision of a diamond cutter, methodical, deliberate, and composed. Her hair professionally coiffed, a silk-scarf jauntily tied at the neck, she brought those same qualities to her personal style. Esther immigrated to the U.S. from Poland in 1938 and settled in the Bronx. A single mother of…
A gastronomic fixture of the Lower East Side for seventy-one years, the Essex Street Market faces a precarious future. Recently approved guidelines for the nearby Seward Park Urban Renewal Area development project include the possibility of demolishing the current market in favor of a larger, more modernized facility at a new, still undetermined, location. In…
One sure sign of spring in my Brooklyn neighborhood is the first sighting of the Mr. Softee truck. A hundred years ago, Jewish residents of the Lower East Side knew it was spring by the appearance of sorrel, or schav in Yiddish, on the neighborhood pushcarts. While the pushcarts are gone, nowadays you can find…
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