Perhaps this is another old saw, like the one about Jews not drinking alcohol. But when Forward archivist Chana Pollack sent me the article below, which appeared in an English supplement to the Jewish Daily Forward in 1924, I was intrigued. I believe 1924 was the year my grandmother and her family arrived in New…
I never really gave much thought to beer in Israel. Recently, however, I did some reading, and here’s what I discovered. According to the Biblical Archaeology Society: “Ancient Israelites proudly drank beer…and lots of it. Men, women and even children of all social classes drank it…Even Yahweh, according to the Hebrew Bible, consumed at least…
I make the treyf groceries first. (In New Orleans, you “make” groceries; you don’t buy them.) Traffic inches along North Broad Street, everyone eager to start the weekend. The sun is a ripe satsuma hanging above the Mississippi, and the Superdome reflects the purple sky. I have several stops to make before I even start…
In the beginning, there was mun. And it was good. Mun, sometimes spelled mohn, is the Yiddish word for sweet poppy-seed jam. It was a key ingredient in many Eastern European baked goods, from mohnbrötchen (poppy-seed bread) to munstrudel (a sweet, swirled bread). So it’s no surprise that Ashkenazic Jews used mun to fill their…
It’s no accident that Shiso Soy bottles look like high-end spirits. Soy sauce is “a very complicated, sophisticated brewed product,” according to Jonathan Blum, a lawyer and cooking enthusiast, who became obsessed with the ubiquitous Japanese condiment. “All people know here is Kikkoman, which is like [the ultra-low-end wine] Two Buck Chuck. And they put…
On Wednesday, The New York Times ran a story in its food section about a new cookbook by New York Times writers Frank Bruni and Jennifer Steinhauer called “A Meatloaf in Every Oven: Two Chatty Cooks, One Iconic Dish and Dozens of Recipes — From Mom’s to Mario Batali’s” (Grand Central Life & Style). In…
Challah has never been just bread to me. I grew up watching my father proof his yeast every Friday at dawn before he’d race off to do rounds at the hospital, returning at midday to punch down and knead the aromatic dough before braiding and baking it. My dad also ventured into rolling out savory…
Little did I know, when my Indian-Israeli aunt insisted on visiting a certain spice shop during my visit to Mumbai, that it would be in the Lalbaug spice bazaar. I had marked the bazaar as a must visit on the Google map I “drew” while planning my trip to India. Like my aunt, many Indian…
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