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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2 Tbsp olive oil
“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.
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.
When
Jewish families in Baghdad had big parties like weddings, which usually
took place in the gardens of houses, they hired specialists to come and
prepare masgouf. The specialists were the boatmen (ballamchi) on the
river Tigris who brought in the fish every evening and cooked it on the
riverbank in Baghdad. When the boats came in at around 9:30 in the
evening, the boatmen went up to people sitting in the riverside cafes to
take orders and proceeded to clean and cook the fish on the bank. By
the time they were ready, the men in the cafes were drunk on arak and
beer. In the summer, the riverside was dotted with the flames of
brushwood fires against which were silhouetted the fish roasted upright.
I
grew up eating lots of very traditional Italian-American lasagna, baked
ziti and anything else you could cover in homemade tomato sauce and
cheese. And I loved it – I mean who doesn’t!? Garfield the cat was even
one of my heroes growing up. I always appreciated his feisty-ness
towards his sibling (Odie), his appreciation of napping and of course
his love of lasagna.
These
aren’t punch lines to a fresh crop of Jewish jokes. They are real foods
that recently arrived on New York City’s food scene. And they are proof
of a sudden and strong movement among young cooks, mostly
Jewish-Americans, to embrace and redeem the foods of their forebears.
That’s why, at this moment in 21st-century New York, the cutting edge of
cuisine is the beet-heavy, cabbage-friendly, herring-loving diet of
19th-century Jews in Eastern Europe.
The
chefs and artisans behind these new enterprises are embracing the
quickly disappearing foods of their grandparents — blintzes and babka,
kasha and knishes — and jolting them back to strength with an infusion
of modern culinary ideas. Those foods became punch lines in the 1970s,
when the health consequences of a steady diet of meat, salt, bread and
cream became apparent, and when strong, smelly foods like garlic dill
pickles and herring with raw onion seemed dated, even embarrassing.
“Food rejection was part of the assimilation process,” said Devra Ferst,
editor of the food blog