When It Comes to Food, Southerners & Israelis Have a Lot in Common

By Michelle Ferguson-Cohen for Raising Kvell

I am a southerner. My husband is an Isreali. On the outset, many people think it is a strange pairing, but in fact, our backgrounds share much in common. We are both from communities made up of tenacious people of faith whose circumstances inspire ingenuity and who are intensely tied to the land.

I was not raised Jewish, but my spiritual journey to Judaism began long before I met my husband. I converted on my own terms, yet my decision to go kosher was one that was venturing into a new and frightening territory. It was encroaching on the little piece of home that I had left, my kitchen.

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Gluten-Free Butternut Squash Mac and Cheese

By Rella Kaplowitz for The Nosher

I try to eat a pretty healthy and most unprocessed gluten-free diet, but I do love mac & cheese. This is my new favorite way to make it—a healthier cheese sauce that uses pureed butternut squash and milk as the base with just a bit of shredded cheese, topped off with cheese and buttered breadcrumbs, and baked in the oven until it’s bubbly inside and toasty on top. This is also a great way to get picky kids to eat vegetables—the sauce tastes cheesy, not squashy! For an extra bit of richness, use whole milk instead of 2%.

Gluten-Free Butternut Squash Mac and Cheese
Ingredients

2 Tbsp olive oil
1 large onion, diced
3 garlic cloves, minced
2 cups cooked butternut squash
1 ¼ cup 2 % milk
½ tsp sea salt + more to taste
1/8 tsp black pepper
1 lb gluten-free pasta (macaroni, penne, ziti, or rigatoni are best)
1½ cups shredded mozzarella, divided
1/3 cup gluten-free breadcrumbs
2 Tbsp melted butter
Finely minced herbs for garnish

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Red, Delicious: How Paprika Became Jews’ Favorite Hungarian Spice

Sweet or hot, stewed in goulash or rubbed on chicken, this versatile spice is a staple of the Jewish-American kitchen

By Leah Koenig for Tablet Magazine

“I’ll have what she’s having.” Those five words, uttered during the infamous orgasm-at-Katz’s-Deli scene in When Harry Met Sally, are arguably among the most legendary to emerge from 1980s cinema. But my favorite line in the movie comes from a different scene, when Harry (Billy Crystal), on a stroll through the Metropolitan Museum of Art, coaxes Sally (Meg Ryan) to repeat after him in a goofy, zayde-inflected accent: “Waiter, there is too much pepper on my paprikash.” The line itself means very little, spoken mostly as a means to a flirtatious end. But there is something so utterly charming about Crystal’s impish delivery—something so irresistibly New York, and undeniably Jewish—that I fall for Harry’s shtick every time.

I was a child of the 1980s, and that scene also first introduced me to chicken paprikash, or paprikas csirke in Hungarian. Since there’s no Hungarian ancestry in my own family, the country’s famous stewed chicken dish, which turns rosy under the heavy influence of sweet paprika, never appeared on our table. Over the ensuing decades, I have probably eaten the dish only half a dozen times. Still, I feel an unspoken connection to chicken paprikash as a food of my people. Like Harry, the dish—and a liberal hand with the paprika shaker more broadly—has always seemed implicitly Jewish.

In Nobody Knows the Truffles I’ve Seen, the memoir of the late New York restaurateur George Lang, he recounts leaving his parents’ home at 19 to report to a Nazi labor camp. Lang, who would eventually go on to direct the Four Seasons and resurrect the famous Café des Artistes on New York’s Upper West Side, maintained a deep connection to Hungarian food throughout his life. Tellingly, he writes about the supplies he took with him as he bid his childhood home goodbye: “Almost as important a part of the backpack inventory as my books, was a well-wrapped slab of paprika-coated ‘bacon,’ my mother’s rendition of the real thing … made out of the sides of a well-fed goose.”

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Sour Cherry Soup

A Hungarian favorite. Not JUST for Shavuot.

By Adeena Sussman for MyJewishLearning

The tradition of eating dairy products on Shavuot has ushered in an entire menu of delicious dishes. For Hungarian Jews, Shavuot often coincided with the country's prolific sour cherry harvest.

Ask someone with Hungarian ancestry about their favorite foods, and invariably sour cherry soup is among them. "We would eat it during the summer months," said Miri Abraham, a friend of mine who used to visit her Hungarian grandmother, Emma, in Israel during summer vacations. "It was always part of a dairy meal."

Most recipes use a thickened mixture of sour cream and flour to lend the soup its signature pinkish-purple color. Sour cherries are at their peak towards the end of spring, and have a shorter season than sweet cherries. Luckily, jarred varieties (which are better than canned) are available all year, and are relatively easy to find.

Serve this soup as a sweet first course, or as a refreshing alternative to heavier desserts.

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