Eat, Drink & Think is your daily destination for recipes, restaurant news, holiday menus and great food journalism — all through a Jewish lens. From the traditional to the cutting edge, we explore the worldwide Jewish culinary landscape and bring…
Food
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Fit to Eat? Shifting Paradigms of Kashrut
According to “lexical supermaven” Sol Steinmetz, who passed away this fall, “kosher” ranks first among the ten most frequently used words Jews have given to American English.* An adjective originally meaning “fit to eat” according to the Jewish dietary laws, its slang uses have come to describe almost anything – from a person to an…
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Beyond Canned Food Drives – Innovative Food Justice
As the national discussion about food widens to include terms like food desert, food insecurity and food justice, Jewish food activists are broadening their responses to hunger in new and creative ways. At the Hazon Food Conference West, I sat in on a panel discussion that highlighted examples of individuals and communities that are helping…
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The Vegetarian Bentsher From the South
If you’ve ever been to an observant Jewish wedding it’s likely that you’ve come home with a bentsher, a small prayer book used to say blessings after a meal. Your party favor might have even had a cheesy logo on the front – maybe it was the couple’s Hebrew initials intertwined to form a rose….
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Q&A: ‘The Complete Asian Kosher Cookbook’
This article is cross-posted from the Joy of Kosher. Shifrah Devorah Witt and Zipporah Malka Heller are the mother-daughter team that co-authored “The Complete Asian Kosher Cookbook.” As they grew in religious observance and began following the laws of kashrut, they were not willing to give up the Chinese food and Asian dishes they love….
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Recipe: Vegetable Fried Rice
‘Twas the night before Christmas (well almost) and Jews around the country were pondering their Chinese dinners. There is a funny history of Jews frequenting Chinese restaurants on Christmas Eve Check out our related video here. For some Jews, Chinese restaurants were the one place where they would order treyf – perhaps because they couldn’t…
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Jews and Chinese Food: A Christmas Story
Chinese food is the most prolific cuisine on the planet, and, aside from the Chinese themselves, no one loves it more than American Jews, according to Andrew Coe, author of “Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States.” On Christmas, noodle, rice and savory dish consumption quite possibly peaks among Jews,…
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I Can’t Believe There’s No Butter
Around October people in Israel started to notice that the usual 227-gram blocks of butter were becoming more difficult to come by. By November, even the smaller, marked up 100-gram packs were scarce. And before the start of December, supermarket shelves were wiped clean of butter, meagerly offering margarine and other whipped oil products as…
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The Sweet Side of Tahini
Once upon a time, before Mediterranean food got a facelift and a silent endorsement from the healthfood industry, tahini was a one-trick pony: you made hummus, and then you mixed in some tahini to give the finished dish that je ne sais quoi. Yes? Yes. These days, tahini is something of a trend. Tahini is…
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Mixing Bowl: Fortune Cookies, The First Shabbat Dinners in NYC, Tofutti Recall
The first Jews to arrive in New Amsterdam in 1654 came fleeing persecution in Brazil. What did they eat for Shabbos when they arrived? Brazilian rice casserole. [JPost] No plans for Christmas? Make your own fortune cookies at home. A California inmate, who claimed to be celebrating the “Seinfeld” holiday Festivut, “used his devotion to…
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From Lox to Gravlax
There are few Jewish foods in America as iconic as the bagel and lox. We eat it at Sunday brunch, after funerals, for Yom Kippur break fast and at brises. It is a staple food of Jewish lifecycles and traditions. Rarely, though, is your bagel with shmear actually accompanied by lox. What, you say? Then…
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Ready, Set, Cook Kosher
There is more to cooking than food, three home cooks and passionate foodies discovered on Sunday. The Next Great Kosher Chef competition, the first of its kind, was hosted by The Center for Kosher Culinary Arts. With gruelling written and physical parts of a eight-hour competition the heat was definitely on. The prize: A scholarship…
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