Many of you know about the Forverts cooking show “Est Gezunterheyt”, which I’ve been co-hosting with Yiddish gourmet chef Eve Jochnowitz for almost 12 years. But we also produced another series, Timeless Delicacies, in which we asked people with Jewish roots in Eastern Europe to share their favorite recipes growing up and then we went…
Rukhl Schaechter and Eve Jochnowitz demonstrate how to make this tasty dish the way East European Jews did it for centuries and explain why it’s a Purim specialty.
This recipe is reprinted with permission from Hélène Jawhara Piñer “Sephardi: Cooking the History.” In an Inquisition trial record from July 13, 1590, we learn that Catalina Albarez, a conversa, prepared a dish with meat (from which she had carefully removed the fat), Swiss chard, and chickpeas. The recipe below, acelgas con garbanzos in Spanish,…
I love pumpkin. I love it in a sweet dessert, I love it in a savory stew, and — I’m not afraid to say it — I love it in my morning latte. But I’ve never imagined my ancestors who lived in a Belarussian shtetl would have felt the same. Jews, it turns out, were…
The U.S.’s largest annual Yiddish culture festival, Yiddish New York, is once again going to be conducted online, enabling people all over the globe to participate in its wide variety of workshops and lectures. The festival will take place from December 25 to December 30, 2021. Among the many sessions participants can choose to attend…
I should have trusted my bullshit detector; Anthony Bourdain would be ashamed of me. (At least I think he would.) There were moments in Morgan Neville’s “Roadrunner” that seemed a bit too perfect. The perfection didn’t stem from cinematography or editing or the arbitrary intercuts of Kurosawa films. It didn’t come from the insights of…
I grew up with no macaroons. My mother was raised on almond macaroons that her grandmother made, but the experience was hard to replicate by the time I came around. “Every time I saw an almond macaroon, I bought it, but in bakeries you mostly only see coconut,” she told me. “It’s a travesty.” This…
Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in June, 2020. For chef and culinary historian Michael W. Twitty, studying the food of the past doesn’t just uncover what people used to eat; it reveals the stories they wanted to tell. “When you talk about people surviving to the next day or the next decade, what you’re…
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