Jewish Home Cooking
by Arthur Schwartz
Ten Speed Press, 2008
$35.00, cloth
269 pages
With this book, Arthur Schwartz has performed a mitzvah-a good deed-by capturing a bit of American slow food.
Slow food is the food of a particular place and that in many places is in danger of passing into memory, along with aunts and grandmothers who made it and the fressers who feasted on chicken fat, knishes, cholent, and mandelbrodt. This is solid food, based in Ashkenazim traditions and designed to get you through through a sabbath without cooking or a Romanian winter. In the midst of American abundance those hard traditions became luxurious indulgences. As families assimilated, kosher eventually became kosher-style and Jewish food became all-American.
These days, the thought of using chicken fat as a condiment is nothing short of shocking. Delis close and Romanian steakhouses are reincarnated as hipster bars. Pickle makers, bagels bakers, and pastrami slicers dwindle, and these flavors retreat into home kitchens. Schwartz' goal is to capture the tam, traditional tastes,while lightening the unhealthful ways it's always been cooked.
If you grew up in or near a Jewish community you'll know and love these flavors-rugelach and hamantaschen cookies, sunshiny chicken soup swimming with noodles and maybe a matzoh ball, whitefish salad and oniony scallion cream cheese from the deli counter. Part of the reason you love these foods, as Schwartz points out, is that Jews assimilate into their communities adapting and adding to the local food culture.
In America, and particularly New York, those flavors became everyone's favorites. Schwartz's sidebars give the history of familiar products like bialys that began in Old Country Polish bakeries and are now baked at Kossar's on New York City's Lower East Side. Delicate Golden Blossom Honey is made by a California gentile, but lends a distinctive taste to baking. And the "Jewish champagne," the lightly sweet Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray Soda, that began life as a healthful tonic and is a perfect foil to salty food.
New York Cheesecake deserves special attention. Schwartz begins by pointing out that it is made, ironically, with Philadelphia Cream Cheese. It evolved from traditional eastern European fresh curd cakes and probably was much drier in the old world. In America, cream cheese gives it a rich and slightly sour tang that is irresistible. Schwartz includes recipes for Junior's Brooklyn version, with with cornstarch and heavy cream or Lindy's with five eggs and two egg yolks.
The book begins with a chapter of Appetizers, including the pickles and sides that round out a Jewish meal. Soups, Side Dishes, Meat and Dairy Main Courses follow, with a chapter of Passover recipes that make use of unleavened cracker bread, matzoh. The Pareve Apple Cake for Passover, begins with beaten eggs and sugar that combine with matzo meal to create a nutty sponge cake, sweet and studded with tangy apples.
You can finish off the box with Matzoh Brei, a kind of Jewish Huevos Rancheros that tosses softened crackers with peppery scrambled eggs.
Chapter on Breads and Sweets include diagrams for breading Challah and photographic guidance for filling and shaping chocolate-filled Hamantaschen.
For dinnertime quizzes, use Schwartz's glossary of yiddish food terms. Beyond bagels and borscht, einlauf is a kind of soup noodle, chometz are the leavened bread and other foods forbidden during Passover, and knaidel are a family of dumplings that include matzoh balls.
Memory speaks with every bite of these dishes, layered with religious traditions, that nurtured families, and thanks to this book, can continue to feed future generations.
© 2008 Claudia Kousoulas
