Leah Koenig

Image by Zivar Amrami
The best food writing isn’t only about food. It’s about considering the world — a community, a region, a country — at a moment in time, through its flavors, textures, ingredients, cooking methods and dining traditions.
That’s exactly what Leah Koenig, 33, achieved this year with the publication of her second cookbook, “Modern Jewish Cooking: Recipes & Customs for Today’s Kitchen” (Chronicle Books). Her first was published in 2011.
“I wanted this book to really be a snapshot of who the Jewish community is today,” Koenig told the Forward earlier this year.
She achieved that goal by grasping the direction Jewish cooking is taking — a trajectory that follows what Koenig has experienced in her own kitchen. She’s a leader in a generation of Jewish chefs, farmers and food producers who “are not afraid to infuse history with a sense of innovation — to incorporate global flavors and fresh, seasonal ingredients into the mix,” she wrote in the book’s introduction.
Koenig lives in Brooklyn with her husband and baby boy and writes for publications including Saveur, The New York Times and the Forward, where she’s a columnist and contributing editor. Since “Modern Jewish Cooking” was published in March, she’s also spent a lot of time on the road, offering cooking demos of the book’s recipes, which include twists on classics. Think jalapeño-shallot matzo balls.
“I kind of put it through the test of would my grandmother recognize this, and would my 21-year-old cousin also think it was interesting,” she said.
Mission accomplished.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO