Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky

By Rukhl Schaechter April 7, 2022

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 off to my kitchen and put together a cooking segment showing how the dish is prepared.

Then an idea began to germinate: how about preparing the favorite dishes of celebrities about their own favorite Old World recipes?

You can just imagine our excitement when we managed to arrange an interview with virtuoso Itzhak Perlman, a son of Polish Jews. Meeting in a classroom at the Juilliard School of Music, Perlman shared several favorite Passover recipes of his that his mother used to make. One of them was potato latkes made with cooked potatoes instead of grated raw ones, and then fried in shmaltz (chicken fat).

Here we share a segment of that interview and then we show you how to make it yourself, just in time for Passover.

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