Photograph by MollyJade via Flickr Growing up, there was nothing like waking up on Shabbat morning to the unmistakable smell of cholent cooking in my mother’s extra-large stock pot. Held down by a massive weight (which my mother used to call “the cholent maker,” leading me to believe there was an actual devise that magically…
From time to time I like to dig into my past on the Internet, as many of us do. Sometimes I go digging for details from my old yeshiva in Baltimore, which is difficult, because it doesn’t have much of what you might call a web presence. But recently I came across a Twitter feed…
I spent most of freshman year at Harvard threatening to transfer. I quickly realized college wasn’t going to be a delightful blur of Solo cups, but rather, a lot of solitary lunches. I was tired of the awkward icebreakers, and all I desired was the comfort and familiarity I had enjoyed at home. Luckily, I…
Savta Zarifa is the paradigm of a fairy tale grandmother; plump, patient and never far from her kitchen. Unlike characters from Mother Goose stories, she did not bake gingerbread cookies but simmered tangy tomato dumpling soup over a kerosene stove or rolled countless grape leaves with herbs and rice. On Friday she also prepared hamin,…
Last month on JCarrot, Renee Ghert-Zand uncovered shul cook-offs from New York to the Deep South — whether it’s BBQ, brisket, cholent or holiday foods, Jewish cooks are facing off in fierce and friendly food contests like never before. So one might expect that the mother of all of these, the Man-O-Manischewitz Cook-Off, which bills…
In my family, Shabbos dinner were always epic. Friday night meant hordes of guests, a continuous parade of delicious food and raucous singing way into the night. These meals were the stuff of legends among our friends. People would finish up their dinners and stroll over to ours, ready to pull up a chair and…
Tongues have been clicking in the Orthodox world about the U.S. debut of Eve Annenberg’s feature film “Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish” (which I previously wrote about for the Forward here), but the New York Jewish Film Festival screening on January 16 at Lincoln Center sold out quickly and the Hasidic dropouts-turned actors who star…
Nowhere do form and function meet so well as in a warm bowl of cholent. The hearty Sabbath stew known by an endless array of names and flavors in Jewish communities around the world is essentially an outgrowth of two seemingly opposing forces: The Jewish laws prohibiting cooking on the Sabbath and the encouragement offered…
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