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Tag : food
December 15, 2020 by Polina Kroik
The Sufgania That Made Me Feel At Home In a Place That Rarely Felt Like One
In pre-pandemic years, when Hanukkah drew close, I’d find myself wandering the streets of New York in search of the perfect sufgania. I’d walk down to Breads Bakery in Union Square and order one of each kind, jelly-filled, plain, chocolate covered, then furtively bite into them on the way to the subway. The next day I’d travel all the way to the Lower East Side and get half a dozen, neatly arranged in a white cardboard box. This time I’d patiently wait until I got home, and slowly consume one in my overheated kitchen, hoping perhaps that the familiar setting would also infuse the fried pastry with a taste of the past.
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October 23, 2020 by admin
A Beginner’s Guide to Mizrahi Music
“If I had to compare Mizrahi music with food—which I do, because food is the other super important cornerstone of Mizrahi culture—I’d say it can best be described as a blend of lemon, ginger, and cinnamon: warm and fresh, with just the right amount of kick to open up your throat and heart and get your feet moving.”
TALI AHARONI, “A Beginner’s Guide to Mizrahi Music,” Hey Alma, June 24, 2020.
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October 23, 2020 by admin
Making a Feast of Mezze
AS A WRITER, cook, filmmaker and travel enthusiast, I’ve loved eating my way through cuisines. Many of my favorite dishes have been part of mezze, an abun- dance of cold and hot plates full of flavor and a wide variety of ingredients.
The mezze of the Mediterranean and Middle East, called salatim in Israel and tapas in Spain, are traditionally a prelude to stimulate the appetite for the main meal to follow. But for me, mezze is a wonderfully social, leisurely way to eat the meal itself. Whether dishes are brought out one by one–cold first and then hot, as is traditional–or served all at once, Mezze encourages tasting, talking and slowing down.
Mezze has a long history as part ofJewish cuisine. The exact origins of mezze are not clear, but by the Middle Ages, there are records of a variety of small plates served to guests before a bigger meal throughout the Middle East, Mediterranean and among the Sephardim and Muslims of Iberia.
As with so much of the food of the original Sephardim, we know about mezze because of Inquisition testimony, including one woman whose maid reported to the authorities that her mistress served small dishes of cold foods to her women friends who came to visit on Saturday afternoons. This was damning proof that the hostess was keeping Shabbat.
Tapas grew out of the small-plate tradition of the Jews and Muslims in Spain. They were named for the lids that would cover the dishes as they were carried from the kitchen. Tapas were originally presented at pubs, especially to men gathered on Sunday afternoons after church while the women were home taking care of the children. The tradition that many tapas include pork developed as a way to ensure everyone’s Christian faith.
Turkish Tomato and Walnut Salad
Although tomatoes weren’t part of Ottoman cuisine until the mid-1800s, the fruit quickly made its way into dishes like this. It might sound like a bit of an unusual combination, but this salad brings together the gentle sweetness of ripe tomatoes with the slightly smoky, crunch of toasted walnuts and the tart, unique flavor of pomegranate molasses. If you don’t have pomegranate molasses, try using a balsamic vinegar reduction. It won’t taste the same, but it will still be good.
1/2 cup walnut pieces or halves, roughly chopped 2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons pomegranate molasses
1 teaspoon sumac
1/2 teaspoon sea salt, or to taste
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper, or to taste
2 cups chopped tomatoes (about 4 medium tomatoes), seeded and drained
1/4 cup chopped parsley, preferably flat leaf
Toast the walnuts in a dry sauté pan for 10-12 minutes, shaking the pan often, until fragrant and just starting to darken slightly. Put into a bowl or dish to cool and set aside. In a small mixing bowl, whisk together the oil, pomegranate molasses, sumac, salt and pepper. Put the walnuts, tomatoes and parsley into a mixing bowl. Pour on the dressing and toss together well. Serve immediately for the crispest nuts, although this salad is still good the next day.
Squash Ribbon Salad
This dish shines with the flavors of fresh vegetables, good olive oil, fragrant lemon and basil. I first ate it years ago in the Jewish quarter of Rome, and it wasn’t just the setting that made it taste so good. I’ve been serving it ever since for brunch, lunch, dinner, parties…and chopping up the rare leftovers into omelets and frit- tatas. There are no measurements here. This dish is best when made by instinct, taste and what you have available. Add the ingredients to your liking, which is the best way to cook anyway.
Zucchini
Yellow summer squash
Good quality extra virgin olive oil
Fresh lemon juice
Lemon zest
Basil leaves, cut into thin strips (chiffonade) Salt and pepper
Shaved parmesan
Using even pressure, run a vegetable peeler down the length of each squash, creating long ribbons. Continue all around the sides of the squash, stopping at the center seeds. (Save that for making soup stock.)
Pile the squash on a pretty serving plate, mixing colors and, if desired, curling a few ribbons more tightly for presentation. Drizzle with olive oil and some fresh lemon juice. Sprinkle with lemon zest, basil pieces, salt and pepper. Top with few pieces of shaved parmesan. Serve soon after making either cold or at room temperature.
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July 27, 2020 by admin
Get Your Chill On
The first cold soup I ever tasted I hated. For years.
How unfortunate that it was introduced to me (dare I say pushed on me?) by the two women I admired most, my mother and my small-but-mighty Russian grandmother. Imagine walking seven long blocks home from elementary school for a tasty lunch, only to be met by a bowl of beet borscht from a jar. Yes, jarred! Two women who made from scratch the hit parade of Ashkenazic food– chicken soup, brisket, tongue, sweetbreads, both potato and noodle kugels, even gefilte fish– loved their industrial borscht, adding sour cream to complete the dish. I gagged trying to get it down, rarely succeeding.
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July 27, 2020 by admin
Making Flatbread to Nourish Your Body and Spirit
Since humans first tamed fire and turned grain into flour, we have been making bread. In the earliest form, breads were simple. Mix one or more flours with water. Pat out into a flat cake. Cook on a hot rock or a stone hearth around an open fire. That’s it. So simple, so basic to survival. And something shared by all peoples on Earth throughout history.
As we’ve seen during this pandemic, baking bread is about more than just survival. There’s something about the bread-making process that is compelling. It’s elemental, grounding, nourishing in the most essential ways. We are now also in a time of social and political upheaval and change, which makes the qualities of bread’s emotional sustenance even more important, especially when understood together with the centrality of bread in nearly every culture, historically and in our world today. Bread, in various forms, is something all peoples share.
This awareness led me to conceive a Lilith online class focused on basic flatbreads. Participants gathered over Zoom one recent Friday afternoon before Shabbat. As I talked and mixed, kneaded and rolled out each flatbread, I felt myself becoming calmer, more centered in the moment and even more content. I ate my Shabbat dinner that night outside on my rowhouse deck in a D.C. city neighborhood—just a salad and two flatbreads from the class, one with cumin, mint and garlic in the dough topped with labne and black sesame seeds, and the other brushed with olive oil, a generous sprinkling of my homemade za’atar and pieces of beautiful, edible red nasturtium from my deck garden.
We know that bread—lechem, in Hebrew—is central to Jewish life, as demonstrated by the blessings we say before and after eating it, as well as rituals around bread such as Shabbat and holiday challot. During the tashlich ritual at Rosh Hashanah, we use bread crumbs thrown on flowing water to carry away our sins of the old year so we enter the new year ready to do better.
Bread is mentioned hundreds of times in the Torah, the first when Adam ate from the forbidden tree. God then tells Adam that now in order to have bread–food–he will have to earn it “by the sweat of your brow.” It is the moment when humans, leaving the Garden of Eden, become responsible for feeding themselves.
Torah aside, what I realized that Shabbat evening under the slowly darkening sky was how complete I felt eating the flatbread that I had made with just flour and water, as women have made it for millennia. With that simple meal, I felt deeply, indescribably connected to Shabbat and to the long history of food entwined with my ancestral Judaism.
SUSAN BAROCAS, The Lilith Blog
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April 25, 2020 by Yona Zeldis McDonough
Beyond the Ghetto Gates: The Liberation of Jews in Italy
In the late 18 century, French troops invaded the Italian port city of Ancona, liberating the Jews from the ghetto where they’d been forced to live. This new freedom had consequences both cultural and personal. Novelist Michelle Cameron’s Beyond the Ghetto Gates (She Writes Press, $16.95) is set in this bracing moment and she talks to Fiction Editor Yona Zeldis McDonough about why she chose this particular time and what she hopes her readers will learn from it.
Yona Zeldis McDonough: You selected an atypical chapter in Jewish history on which to focus; what drew you to it?
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April 15, 2020 by Yona Zeldis McDonough
An Imaginary Quarter of a Food-Obsessed City
Consider the Feast (Open Books, $19.95) offers a wild ride through an imaginary quarter of a food-obsessed city. Debut novelist Carmit Delman talks to Fiction Editor Yona Zeldis McDonough about how food becomes both marker and symbol for the haves and the have nots.
Yona Zeldis McDonough: Like your protagonist,Talia, you have a background that’s both Indian and Israeli. Can you describe growing up within those two cultures?
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April 6, 2020 by admin
Turning Days of Distancing into Days of Reflection
Progress is an American value. We are acculturated to propel—socially, professionally, economically—which makes sheltering in place excruciating. For me, not moving forward is as good as moving backwards.
So, how can we navigate this temporary suspension of life as we know it? Some folks are turning this time into an opportunity to begin exercising, bond with family and pets, clean closets, or garden. Others are re-hanging holiday lights. I am reliving the Days of Awe.
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April 6, 2020 by Nechama Liss-Levinson
Food for Thought on Passover
In some ways, I have always been a gastronomic Jew, that is, my Jewish identity intertwined with eating and enjoying traditional Jewish foods, like chicken soup with knaidels, noodle kugel and mandelbread. I knew in my heart that for some of us, these foods were our “madeleines,” the tastes, smells and memories that connect us with our past.
Years ago, after my mother died, I would wander down the aisles of the supermarket at Passover, looking at the lovely stalks of fresh asparagus, the bags of tiny marshmallows, the chocolate covered orange peels and the matzah redolent of matzah brei and I would silently weep, missing her presence.
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July 9, 2019 by admin
The Foremothers of Food Memoirs
Food memoirs have been springing up like chanterelles after a rain. For 20 years or so, we’ve been treated to a harvest of life stories with recipes included; an Amazon search for “food memoir” turns up more than 2,000 entries.
Reading food memoirs may feel like eating dumplings (or maybe kreplach): they’re comforting, produced by people hailing from all over the world, and easy to love. Look at a few titles, and you’ll see the scope: Poor Man’s Feast; Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw (Elissa Altman); Lunch in Paris (Elizabeth Bard) and Talking With My Mouth Full (Bonny Wolf).
When, in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, Mimi Sheraton and Laurie Colwin, and later Ruth Reichl, were writing about the conjunction of food and family life, they were looking back in ways that anticipated and influenced the contemporary food memoirs.
“Food is like no other trigger, physiologically,” says Traci M. Nathans-Kelly about her 1997 study Burned Sugar Pie: Women’s Cultures in the Literature of Food. “It has a physical presence that something like a song doesn’t. It is one of the few things that are hard for people to forget. So, when you combine it with memory—people, places, things—it’s really powerful.”
Mimi Sheraton, author and New York Times restaurant critic from 1975 to 1983, can attest to that: “Food was so much a part of my life, so if I cooked, or longed for, a food that my mother made, it evoked a whole scene. …The tone of my family life informed the cooking, or the other way around. I always wanted to tell the story of my family as a surrounding for the recipes,” she told Lilith in a recent interview.
Sheraton’s book From My Mother’s Kitchen: Recipes and Reminiscences was first published in 1979. It alternates chapters featuring recipes from Sheraton’s mother with fond essays about growing up in a food-obsessed Jewish family in Flatbush, Brooklyn, in the 1930s and 1940s. “I just always conceived the book that way,” Sheraton said of its unusual format. It was practical, too: “We didn’t want to do memoirs first, then recipes,” or vice versa, Sheraton explained. “No one would read all of it!”
Sheraton’s mother was an experienced and skilled home cook, and while the book contains many classic Eastern European Ashkenazi Jewish dishes, like brisket, chicken soup, and farfel (egg barley), her repertoire also included non-kosher American favorites like shrimp Creole and chicken pie.
While responses to the memoir sections were “very, very positive,” From My Mother’s Kitchen “got an adverse reaction from Jewish organizations because it wasn’t kosher,” Sheraton recalled. Although she provided kosher substitutions, “B’nai B’rith started a letter-writing campaign” to the author in protest.
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