Baboo is my grandmother. She’s one of those tiny Polish women whom you can’t picture without wrinkles, who dotes on her grandchildren with all her heart and spare cash, and who occasionally makes inappropriate jokes and then giggles at her own audacity. In short, she’s great. So it’s easy to forgive her for her occasional…
After more than 15 years of marriage to his Jewish wife, chef Todd Gray considers himself something of an authority on Jewish food. But the James Beard Award-nominated chef of Equinox Restaurant in Washington, D.C. is quick to point out that he didn’t always know the difference between kreplach and kneidlach. “I had no exposure…
With Passover looming ever closer, now might be a good time to brush up on your kitchen skills. Luckily there are classes around the country that focus on Jewish and kosher cooking, many of which are taught by well-known restaurant chefs like Michael Solomonov of Zahav and cookbook authors like Joan Nathan. Here’s a round…
In 1432 a Venetian captain, Pietro Querini, returned home after surviving a terrible shipwreck off the Northern coast of Norway, and described for the first time the stocfisi (dried salt cod) he had tasted in the remote islands where he’d been nursed back to health. His description probably went largely unnoticed at the time, given…
Although carrots often play a supporting role in the culinary world, I’ve long appreciated them in their own right. As a baby I turned a subtle hue of orange from consuming so much carrot puree, and as a child I happily mimicked my favorite cartoon character, Bugs Bunny, by chomping on carrots every chance I…
As a Jewish woman who prefers work to cooking, the Hebrew calendar determines most of the time I spend in the kitchen. Certainly I cook year round — especially for shabbos — but for me, serious cooking happens over the Jewish holidays. While most Jewish women would probably claim Pesach as the ultimate in holiday…
When I talked to cookbook author Susie Fishbein in September, she was at home in Livingston, New Jersey poised to whip up her mother’s recipe of peach cake with soy milk for Shabbat dinner. The 44-year-old mother of four (her youngest child is 10, the oldest 18) is proudly awaiting publication of her eighth cookbook…
Every year just before Rosh Hashanah, my mother and I engage in a ritual attempt to approximate my grandmother’s gefilte fish recipe. The recipe itself is an approximation. She cobbled it together from other Holocaust survivors, and perhaps gleaned a few tips from women in a displaced persons’ camp, perhaps remembering bits from what her…
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