Author Blog: From Deli to Cookbook
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
Noah and Rae Bernamoff are the owners of Mile End deli and the authors of the cookbook “The Mile End Cookbook.” Their blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit:
We just wrote a cookbook filled with recipes, stories and ideas from our restaurants.
When we opened Mile End Delicatessen in January of 2010, we had little sense of how our style of Jewish comfort food from scratch would resonate. The decision to open a 430 square foot deli on a side street in Brooklyn was a gamble for a couple of 20-somethings with no industry experience. With all of the other operational elements outside of our comfort zone, the food was the intensely personal and familiar constant.
If we didn’t foresee how deep the love of liver ran prior to opening, we soon found out. The warm memories and harsh critiques were aplenty from our Jewish and non-Jewish customers alike. We didn’t put chicken soup on the menu for the first few months for fear of treading on Bubbie’s sacred tablespace.
With nearly three years of slinging smoked meat sandwiches behind us, we recognized that we had hundreds of recipes and countless more stories about where they come from, how we use them and why we love them. The hope is that we summarized generations of tradition and years of kitchen experience into a handy and timeless guide to cooking Jewish comfort food. Obviously that’s a tall order, and only time will tell if the recipes and techniques are adopted and utilized by our peers and progenitors.
The process of putting together a cookbook is a trying one. Of course conceiving of a format that’s friendly to casual and advanced cooks alike, while scaling down recipes usually made by the boat load, is challenging, but even more so was striking the balance between reverence for history and tradition, personal anecdote and modern relevance.
In all truth, it took us a couple strikes to finally hit the look, feel and focus that we were going for. In fact, much fell into place once we agreed that it should be called “The Mile End Cookbook.” For months we attempted to come up with an alternative name that would be descriptive to browsers unfamiliar with our brand, one that wasn’t as regional or restaurant specific. We loved the humor in “A Nice Jewish Cookbook” and felt like “Schmaltz” really represented our approach to cooking, but after literally hundreds of attempts on the title and cover design we finally concluded that we should roll with our namesake.
Check back all week for more posts from Noah and Rae Bernamoff and visit their official website here.
The Jewish Book Council is a not-for-profit organization devoted to the reading, writing and publishing of Jewish literature. For more Jewish literary blog posts, reviews of Jewish books and book club resources, and to learn about awards and conferences, please visit www.jewishbookcouncil.org.
MyJewishLearning.com is the leading transdenominational website of Jewish information and education. Visit My Jewish Learning for thousands of articles on Judaism, Jewish holidays, Jewish history and more.
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