Toward the end of the meal, the buffet cart was rolled out with tarte au citron, tarte au chocolat, œufs à la neige, and other delectable classic French desserts. And then I saw what looked like a creamy American cheesecake with a graham cracker crust beneath. I asked Elisabeth what it was. “Oh,” she said, “that is a new dessert that our guests really like. It is made with Philadelphia. We learned it from a Japanese intern.”

After Allan and I finished chuckling, we confirmed that this was indeed an example of the classic American cheesecake born when Joseph Kraft, who owned the Philadelphia cream cheese company, bought a graham cracker company. When I asked Elisabeth how the Japanese intern found the recipe, she said that she got it off the Internet and made it for the staff. Today the dessert, less sweet and more lemony than its American counterpart, is a regular on her menu.

I thought about this cake while wandering around Provence during my visit. As I strolled through the 1,000-year-old market, in the shadow of the Roman theater and forum in Arles, I couldn’t help but think about how rich Jewish life must have been in 1306 when, of the 52 butchers in the town, 14 of them were kosher, according to sources researched for my most recent book, Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Food in France. Given the 2,000-year history of Jews living there, Jewishness and Jewish food—like that classic American cheesecake—still pop up in places no one would expect

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In the Middle Ages, Jews lived in quarters separated from Christians in every town in southern France and had a protected status in most towns. According to Kalonymos ben Kalonymos, who described the everyday life of the Jews of Arles in the early 14th century, holiday dishes included a round fried cake similar to a doughnut made out of flour, served covered with jam, for Hanukkah. (Sound familiar?) Kalonymos also wrote charmingly about the grape harvest. “Everybody goes to the vineyard and transports grapes either by boat or by horses,” he wrote. “The weather is very hot. Mosquitoes are numerous. They fall in the wine that we are drinking despite everything …”

But for the most part, the 13th and 14th centuries were dark times for Jews throughout France. All, for example, had to wear a round fabric badge declaring their religion and a pointed yellow hat on their head. In 1242, King Louis XI had the Talmud and 20,000 other books burned in Paris, and in 1288, a group of Jews was burned alive in Troyes. In 1394, Jews were expelled until after the revolution, and “officially” no Jews lived in France. A thousand or so Jews, known as the Juifs du pape, were able to live in four towns in Provence: Avignon, Carpentras, Cavaillon, and Isle de la Sorgue, protected by the Italian popes who broke with Rome in the 14th century.

For me, the most poignant visit in this area was the charming village of L’Isle sur la Sorgue on the Sorgue River, in part because very few people who visit this antique center know its history. Allan and I headed straight for the old city and La Place de la Juiverie. Across the street from a new chic chocolate store is a sign that reads “l’Ancienne rue Hébraïque.” Further down the road, the center of the Jewish community, once a square, is now a parking lot. The only remnant of the carrière, which housed about 250 people, is the façade of a four-story stone apartment building, attesting to the extensive community that lived here, protected by the cathedral nearby.

As I looked up at the façade, I remembered what I had learned about the Juifs du Pape. Beginning in 1650 until just after the revolution, when Jews were given back their civil rights, they were locked in the carrière from dusk until the morning. By the 18th and 19th centuries, the Jewish community, despite these confinements, were the leading silk merchants of the town. After the revolution, the ghetto-like existence ended, and the Jews left L’Isle sur la Sorgue and the three other towns for larger cities in France.

But what remains in the south and all over France is a fondness for certain old, distinctly Jewish dishes like eggplant papeton (an eggplant mousse) and matzoh, which the French call pain azyme. It was baked in the matzoh oven, which was in the basement of the synagogues. The matzoh was so popular in the Christian community that at Passover the Jews made extra to be distributed to them in bakeries in the main part of each town.

With all this history under our belt, Allan and I left L’Isle sur la Sorgue, driving back to modern-day Provence and Elisabeth’s home, a stone house nestled in a vineyard. When we woke the next morning, she had a warm brioche ready for us in her sunny kitchen with salvaged wooden tables.

As we enjoyed our breakfast, Elisabeth took another piece of brioche, a member of the babka family, and began wrapping it around a fish first spread with mousseline, then dotted with chopped spinach as the first course in a meal she was preparing for a party in our honor that night. A very complicated dish, it reminded me of a friend’s very simple fish en croûte with puff pastry. Although the fish was delicious, I could not imagine many home cooks making it, so I am sharing my much easier substitute, which, together with Elisabeth’s French-Japanese-Jewish cheesecake will make you smile, even in the deepest winter.

Today, when there are so many cookbooks published each year, it’s difficult to know which one will make a long-term impact, especially when, as Child told me, none of them is perfect. Even her iconic Mastering the Art of French Cooking had corrections well into the fifth printing.

What about Jewish cookbooks? I’ll narrow my task, by concentrating on Hanukkah baking recipes in the cookbooks I think made a difference in the past year or so.

I adored Inside the Jewish Bakery: Recipes and Memories From the Golden Age of Jewish Baking, by Stanley Ginsberg and Norman Berg. An obvious labor of love, it is the brainchild of Ginsburg, a retired writer and businessman with a longtime fondness for New York’s Jewish bakeries and the memory of his grandmother’s breads and cookies. In beautiful prose, he tells of the history of Eastern European baked goods and how they crossed the ocean to America. Each chapter teaches so much. Who knew, for instance, that in Lithuania Jews ate almond bagels for Purim, or that a bagel-making machine came into existence in 1962?

Through the website thefreshloaf.com, Ginsburg found Berg, a commercial baker who worked at several bakeries in the Bronx. He provides recipes—though they refer to them in the book as “formulas.” That locution is not the only challenge here. Ginsburg and Berg instruct bakers to use the same doughs for many recipes (babka dough is used for cinnamon rings, Russian coffee cake, and, of course, babka) but the recipe is offered only on one page, which means you are flipping back and forth constantly. Though the recipes are scaled down from huge commercial amounts to something usable for a home cook, instructions use terms that are perhaps unfamiliar. For instance, they tell you to “degas” rather than “punch down” a dough. There are other incongruities. The recipe for onion rolls, for example, suggests three onion toppings to choose from, including dried onions, an ingredient most good home cooks would not use today, when fresh ones are available and taste better.

Despite these reservations, this is a real treat of a cookbook, one that will stay on my shelf and in my kitchen. That said, I recommend you read the whole recipe through a few times before you start cooking to ensure you don’t miss a step.

Another baking book that came out recently is Sarabeth Levine’s Sarabeth’s Bakery: From My Hands to Yours. Best-known for her line of jams and her eponymous restaurants in and around Manhattan, Levine is, at heart, a baker. You can see it in her hands and in her work ethic. At public events, she preps her own dough, unlike many of her professional peers, rather than having an assistant do it. When we both appeared at a recent event, Levine arrived four hours early to guarantee that her dough was perfect—even though nobody was going to taste it after her rolls came out of the oven.

Her book is beautiful, and its wonderful recipes highlight her exacting standards. I tried Mrs. Stein’s Chocolate Cake, and I’ve made the marvelous chocolate babka—a recipe inspired by Michael London of Mrs. London’s Bakery and Café in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., who learned to make his Jewish baked goods from the best old-time bakers of New York. I am eager to try making Levine’s rugelach, Viennese kugelhopf, and apple cinnamon loaf, all musts for my holiday table at Hanukkah.

Kosher Revolution: New Techniques and Great Recipes for Unlimited Kosher Cooking, by Geila Hocherman and Arthur Boehm, struck me at first as gimmicky, but it proved fascinating. Hocherman and Boehm, both professional chefs, integrate cutting-edge ingredients—balsamic vinegar glaze, coconut milk, crème fraiche, and Parmigiano-Reggiano and Roquefort cheeses, for example, into kosher cooking. I started my tour of this cookbook making the Peshwari challah, a basic dough with cumin, cardamom, and other spices mixed in, rolled out with a filling of pistachio, golden raisin, coconut, coriander, and assorted Indian spices. What would the Cochin Jews of India, who basically use a flat bread for challah, say about this one, made with a sweet Ashkenazic dough?

With careful guidance through step-by-step instructions and intelligent reasoning for the ingredients used, these recipes help home cooks indulge their fancies, traveling gastronomically around the world. This book will help a new generation of kosher cooks reinvent their cooking.

Finally, there is Recipes Remembered: A Celebration of Survival, by June Feiss Hersh, a book that tells the stories of Holocaust survivors and shares their recipes. It brought me back to the early years of my marriage, when my mother-in-law, Peshka Gerson, who is cited in the book for her gefilte fish, which I prepare every year, would talk about life in Zamość, Poland, as well as in Siberia, where she and my father-in-law lived during World War II. As I read the stories of Holocaust survivors and their families, I applauded Hersh, who so artfully and lovingly assembled this book as a fund-raising venture for the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. And yet no book is perfect. Hersh could have done without the contributions of professionals, including myself. Her own text, with the poignant stories of the many people she interviewed, is enough.

We all agreed that most kosher turkeys are not as salty as they used to be, so you can brine them. In brining this turkey, I used salt with equal amounts of brown sugar, as well as thyme and apple cider. Other people add aromatics like juniper berries and bay leaves, and many people advocate using less salt for a kosher bird. If you decide to brine your kosher turkey, make sure you rinse the bird well and pat it dry before roasting. You also must use a cold, not hot, brine; hot brine cooks the turkey a bit and risks salmonella.

Some of my otherwise non-kosher Thanksgiving turkey-eating guests were put off by the feathers often left on kosher turkeys. When I asked an Empire spokesperson about this, he explained that since only cold water is allowed in a kosher slaughter, it is harder to get rid of the feathers. The reason that warm water, which would loosen the feathers and allow for easier extraction, is not allowed is that warm water would begin the cooking process forbidden during slaughtering. I also imagine that with the influx of buyers at Thanksgiving time, it is more difficult for the workers to keep up with the feathers. You can pluck them yourselves or forget about them.

When it is time to roast the turkey, try not to set the roasting pan on the very bottom rack of your oven, but rather the second from the bottom, as things burn too easily on the bottom.

How the turkey is carved is almost as important as how it is cooked. One school of thought—that of our turkey carver for the evening—is that you should first rest the turkey outside the oven for at least 20 minutes, then scoop out the stuffing if using it. Next, remove the legs and the wings by fishing around with the edge of the knife to find the right joint, take the skin off (but don’t discard it–it’s the best part), and with the turkey facing breast up, make a lateral cut at the base of the breast as deep and far back as you can. Then, start diagonally slicing white meat from the top down to the bottom. Lastly, cut the dark meat off the carcass. The backseat-driver school of thought proffered that after resting the bird, cut it down the center, because it is easier to carve that way.

Carving customs aside, this is a day about family coming together to celebrate that for which they offer Thanksgiving. We shouldn’t make light of these family traditions, as we saw in Avalon, the movie about a large Jewish family in Baltimore. In one memorable scene, the family is waiting for their uncle, played by Lou Jacobi, to arrive before they start the ceremonial carving of the turkey. While the younger family members want to feed their impatient children, the elders want to maintain the time-honored tradition and insist, “Don’t cut the turkey,” but to no avail. When Uncle Gabriel arrives, anticipating the coveted moment of the first slice, he sees the bird has already been cut. “What! You cut the turkey without me,” he shouts, leaving the house and never coming back. So please, don’t let my tips interfere with your family’s rituals.

It makes sense that we’d have this dish on both occasions. Thanksgiving is in part patterned after the Harvest Home, an English celebration after the fall harvest. And Harvest Home was, in turn, modeled on Sukkot, a holiday that typically falls in late September or early October.

The inspiration for including the recipe was simple: my mother. She is a first-generation American who grew up eating this sweet potato dish at every holiday—Jewish and secular. Her inclusion of this tsimmes at non-religious festivals is similar to what I’ve see happening around the country for ages—new immigrants and people who have been here for generations integrating ethnic and regional character into their Thanksgiving meals. What anchors all of these meals is, of course, the iconic turkey. But what surrounds that centerpiece differs from community to community and includes everything from Armenian stuffed grape leaves to Vietnamese spring rolls to matzoh ball soup, or even a traditional tsimmes of sweet potatoes and carrots. These dishes tell you who you are.

Though the turkey is the holiday’s commonality, its provenance tells different stories. Turkeys today can be heritage breed, kosher, organic, fresh, pasture raised, wild, or frozen Butterballs, the favorite of the late Julia Child. That range of choices is a relatively recent development; until the early 1990s almost everybody bought a factory-processed turkey.

Last month I spent a day on the tractor with Joel Salatin, immortalized by Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, at his family’s farm, Polyface, in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Salatin, a fundamentalist Christian, raises two kinds of free-range turkeys in his pasture and slaughters them humanely with a quick cut across the neck, “in the biblical way,” he explains—that is, according to Jewish dietary laws.

Across the country, many people are turning to farmers like Salatin, who thinks hard about the life and the death of his animals. Kosher producers like Wise Organic Pastures, Kosher Valley, and the two-year-old Grow and Behold Foods are following Salatin’s lead. “I feel like a turkey hunter before Thanksgiving,” said Naftali Hanau, Grow and Behold’s CEO and founder, who has been running around the country trying to find pasture-raised turkey, fed on non-GMO (genetically modified organism) feed. “Our customers have found that our turkeys have flavor and don’t dry out like conventional ones,” he says. Thanksgiving is a time when people who don’t generally eat meat indulge, Hanau says, and when they do, they want birds that are sustainably produced and slaughtered humanely.

If every family has its traditional sides, each also adds personal flourishes to turkey preparation. Linda Schiffer, a cooking teacher who offers a course called “In Bubbie’s Kitchen” at Middlebury College in Vermont, and her husband, Ira, the Hillel rabbi there, are turkey aficionados and prepare their bird with an apple-cider brine. Before they even get to that stage, they take great care picking out their bird. “I look at Vermont turkeys from farms that are growing free-range turkeys sustainably, turkeys that don’t get overheated by being cooped up and are naturally nice and plump,” Linda told me a day after she went fishing for local salmon and trout on Lake Champlain.

In addition to using local apples and cider to make her turkey, Linda, also prepares a terrine of turkey, goose, and duck as a first course. When she has guests who observe kashrut, as she will next week, she buys a kosher bird at a supermarket in Burlington, 50 miles away. Otherwise, she buys local turkeys from Misty Knolls Farm just down the road from her house. “I used to have a kosher kitchen, but a few years ago when I read an article about Aaron’s chicken and how they were slaughtered, I went local,” she says, referring to the Agriprocessors’ owner, Aaron Rubashkin. Now, “I can see how they are raised, how they live their life and how they are slaughtered,” she says. “This is an extension of our commitment to local and sustainable.” Brining, even if she has a kosher turkey—which is salted in the kashering process—has become her custom as well. Linda brines “because kosher is just the salt,” she says, “and I am adding flavors like brown sugar, thyme, and cider.” She brines for only 24 hours. “Otherwise the meat gets mushy,” she advises. “Longer is not necessarily better.”

As I prepare for Thanksgiving this year, I am finally adopting the Schiffers’ brining tradition. It has always tempted me, as the reduced cider makes the skin aromatic and golden. And, as everyone in my family knows, the skin is the best part of the bird. But despite the appeal of every new sweet-potato dish in magazines this fall, we’ll still rely on our favorite tsimmes recipe, topped with the marshmallows and laced with pineapples, served in our traditional turquoise, oven-safe casserole dish.

Sercarz, an Israeli transplant now based in New York, is one of the city’s experts on and distributors of spices and spice blends. As William Montagne, a sous chef, welcomes him, he jokes in French that Sercarz should have his own security passcard, because this is his sixth day at the restaurant in a week. White-coated chefs gather as the wizard pulls out jars of black garlic, mango chutney, kaffir limes, and some of his unique mixtures—he is famous for mixing his spices into potent, powdery blends, simply wrapped in recycled plastic bags. One of them asks for whole mace, a delicate part of nutmeg. Sercarz responds that he will grind it for the chef, knowing that he can save time by grinding the spice quicker and better. “I grind it to order in small batches so that I always have fresh high-quality products,” he tells me later. Another wants French lentils. They don’t discuss price. Ripert’s crew know that Sercarz’s goods are top quality and cost accordingly.

Born in Israel, Sercarz spent part of his childhood in Italy and Belgium, where his father worked as a jeweler, and the balance in his home country, on Kibbutz Dan, in northern Israel, and later near Tel Aviv. After serving in the IDF, Sercarz worked at an Israeli catering company for a few years before heading to France for a two-year culinary program at the Paul Bocuse Institute in Lyons. After that, he apprenticed with Olivier Roellinger (a three-star chef known for his use of spices) at his restaurant in Brittany, Les Maisons de Bricourts, and now at his spice shop in Paris. Then he came to New York to work as a chef at Feast and Fêtes, Daniel Boulud’s catering company. While working there, where he also helped put together cookbooks, Sercarz realized that running a restaurant was not for him. “I wanted to be part of the restaurant industry but not in one restaurant,” he says. “I felt the need to tell my own story and the best way to do it was with the spices.”

When he opened his business, called La Boîte, in 2006, Sercarz offered three blends and had one customer, Laurent Tourondel, then building his BLT restaurant chain. Now he has 41 official blends and 15 more that he makes special order for his roster of 35 clients, which includes such luminaries as Marc Forgione, Michael Solomonov of Philadelphia’s Zahav, and his old boss Daniel Boulud.

Sercarz is following in the footsteps of ancient Jewish spice traders. Jews were in Ceylon, modern-day Sri Lanka, in the second century and likely brought back spices with them to the Middle East and Europe. There are also biblical references to spices. “Spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with all the frankincense trees, myrrh and aloes, with all the finest spices,” says a verse from the Song of Songs, in which the writer compares the spices to his love’s beauty. Sercarz invokes this history in describing his merchandise. “From day one the Bible mentioned scents in cosmetics and food, the clove and the nutmeg,” he says. “But they were reserved for the higher class, the average person didn’t have access to them.”

Sercarz combs the world for the best ingredients, revealing to nobody where his 120 different spices come from. He forbids anyone else from being present when he grinds them into his celebrated blends, like his popular Isfahan, which includes limon omani and cardamom and is good for chicken broths and rice dishes. Another, Amber, includes ancho chilies, annatto, and mace, and works well in a meat rub. At La Boîte, just a block from the Hudson River in midtown, he employs a single assistant, weighing spices before they are jarred, and boxing the spice cookies he bakes in the mornings and evenings.

Like one of his mentors, Olivier Roellinger, Sercarz travels to India, China, Indonesia, and elsewhere to procure his goods. He toasts his spices in the oven and then grinds different combinations of blends, each one offering a unique story. Take the blend he calls Pierre Poivre. It includes a mix of eight different peppers from around the world and is named for an 18th-century French horticulturist and missionary who traveled with the French East India Company to Cochin India, China, Guangzhou, and Macau. “Knowingly or unknowingly he broke the monopoly of the Dutch, British, and Portuguese in the 18th century,” Sercarz says.

Sercarz was born into a culinary culture where spices are central. “My Transylvanian grandmother married a Tunisian,” he says of his mother’s side. His father’s parents were from Germany and Belgium. Paprikash and poppy seeds met peppers and preserved lemons in his childhood kitchen. Years ago, I attended a cooking class sponsored by YIVO at which Sercarz prepared a delicious orange soup that combines flavors including cumin, figs, mint, and fresh oranges from the many cultures that shaped his tastes, North African to French.

La Boîte feels more like a gallery than a retail shop, with little more than a 3-foot Hobart scale standing on the floor. The only visible products for sale are a display of his spice combinations on one pedestal, delicate butter cookies infused with anise and coarse French sea salt on another, and, on a third, butter cookies shaped like dog bones and spiked with Sercarz’s mix of pink and Sichuan peppercorns, nutmeg, and mace, which Sercarz has flown in from Poilâne, the French bakery. There is no spice grinder in sight; three electric grinders are stored downstairs.

“There are no tricks,” he says about his spices. “I just create blends using the best possible products. I use my experience as a chef and my knowledge of baking to create spices that could be used in as many possible ways.” For Sercarz “the best” means learning to distinguish a bad product from a good one by testing the freshness, pungency, and aroma.

He opens a blend known as Sri Lanka. We take a whiff. “You haven’t tasted cinnamon until you have tasted Sri Lankan cinnamon,” he says. As we sniff, I imagine Sercarz in the 14th century, bringing Taillevent, the famous French chef, his spices—galangal, ginger, mace, great cinnamon, and more. Sercarz would not have been a chef in those days, just a Jewish peddler who brought spices back from China or India or Ceylon or just as likely bought them from another peddler who had made the journey. Back then, Sercarz would have courted the great chef and kept a few spices for his wife to cook at home for the Sabbath.

Today, Sercarz is more like Nostradamus, the 16th-century Jewish-born but converted doctor, seer, and pastry baker who, like Sercarz, knew that the best spices enhance our health and our lives.

But when Persian-American Jews sit down to celebrate, their tables will be laden with an abundance of symbolic foods. In fact, they call the Rosh Hashanah meal a Seder, and the Aramaic blessings they recite follow a particular order. Cookbook author Reyna Simnegar, whose beautiful book Persian Food From the Non-Persian Bride and Other Kosher Sephardic Recipes You Will Love came out earlier this year, says these customs originated more than 2,500 years ago.

“We first dip an apple in honey, then we tear a piece of leek—meaning to rip the enemy apart—and then throw the leek over our shoulder,” she said. Included on the table is fried zucchini, black-eyed peas, lamb’s head, tongue or a fish head, roasted beets, and dates. “In Iran the cooked lungs of a cow or lamb were used,” she told me. “But here, we put something fluffy like popcorn on the table.”

Even before the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E., Jews were living in Babylon, which would later become the Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great. The Persian world offered a enormous variety of food. “When you ask for oranges, pistachios, spinach, or saffron, you are using words derived from the Persian,” said Najmieh Batmanglij, author of cookbooks like Food of Life and doyenne of Persian cooking in America, who noted that Persia was a great trading post in the ancient and medieval worlds. “The land was the first home of many common herbs, from basil to cilantro, and to scores of familiar preparations, including sweet and sour sauces and kebabs.”

As Persian Jews traveled, so did their food—a taste for meat with sweet and sour sauce, egg frittatas with greens called koukous, and especially rice. Jewish traders from Persia brought rice to ancient Israel at the time of the Second Temple. By the eighth century C.E., a network of Jewish traders called the Radhanites emerged and maintained international trade routes between the Christian and Islamic worlds. They combed the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean for new foods, furs, and spices. First described by the postmaster of the caliph of Baghdad in the ninth century, the Radhanites brought a revolutionary international trade network to the area, trading products like papyrus, textiles, wine, spices, and olive oil. Their four major trading routes began in Iberia or France and, each passing through various Jewish communities, ended in the silk route of China or India, 500 years before Marco Polo traveled east.

One Persian Jewish dish often served at Rosh Hashanah and Shabbat is gundi. Simnegar calls it the Persian matzoh ball. This large chickpea dumpling, made with either ground chicken, turkey, or beef, and flavored with turmeric, cardamom, and sometimes cumin, is cooked in chicken soup. For Persian Jews, the holidays would not be complete without it.

A series of chorosht—sweet and sour stews with meat, vegetables, and fruit—are also on the menu of festive Persian Jewish meals, along with a salad of fresh dill, cilantro, scallions, and radishes. But the centerpiece is usually a variation of perfectly cooked rice, served with a crispy tadiq, or crust. Like pasta for Italians, rice sets the standard for a Persian cook.

The story of how Simnegar came to write about Persian cuisine is a fascinating one. Born in Venezuela, she spent her early years as a Catholic and discovered her family’s converso past as an adolescent. She moved to Los Angeles to study at UCLA, and while there she met her husband, Sammy, a Persian Jew. Simnegar’s mother-in-law was the one who taught her the lexicon of Persian Jewish cooking, which she serves today to her five small children. I promise you that her quince stew with veal, served with Persian rice and decorated with carrots and oranges, will enhance your Rosh Hashanah table. These dishes serve as a wonderful reminder of how Jewish traders centuries ago made the culinary world smaller. As they moved so did their recipes and traditions, enhancing Jewish tables for generations to come.

I barely thought about cooking then—I simply enjoyed eating—but on that trip I fell in love with Italian cuisine. Years later, I came to learn about the proud culinary heritage of Jewish Italian cooking, which spans 2,000 years. Adapting regional dishes to the Jewish dietary laws, the tradition includes dishes like gnocchi with spinach and cream sauce, twice-cooked pasta dishes with meat, and local greens topped with fresh anchovies. Sephardic immigrants to Italy contributed recipes like spinach and eggplant dishes, while mafroum, a delicious meat and potato dish baked with a tomato sauce, was introduced to Italian Jewish cuisine by Libyan immigrants.

I was recently asked to share my knowledge of Jewish Italian food with Alice Waters. This year her restaurant in Berkeley, Calif., Chez Panisse, is celebrating its 40th anniversary, and to mark the occasion, she is hosting 14 fundraising dinners, from Sicilian feasts to Chinese banquets, in private homes in the San Francisco Bay Area. The menus are being curated by various chefs and cookbook authors like Nancy Silverton, owner of L.A.’s Mozza restaurant; Jessica Theroux, author of Cooking With Italian Grandmothers; and me. I helped to create a Roman Jewish dinner—I was given creative license to move beyond the city of Rome—that will be held Saturday, August 27, at Hillary and Danny Goldstine’s home in the Berkeley Hills to benefit the Edible Schoolyard Project.

I was honored to be asked by Waters, and I knew immediately some of the dishes I would include. Carciofi alla Giudia, Jewish-style artichokes, fried and smothered in garlic and herbs, was one definite for the menu. A very old recipe, these artichokes became justly famous in the ghetto of Rome and beyond. I have tasted many variations of this dish, with large artichokes and small, but one I particularly like came from Hava Nathan (no relation), an Israeli cookbook author who years ago interviewed the wife of the chief rabbi in Rome for her recipes. I based my Carciofi alla Giudia recipe on hers.

Another dish I was excited to make was crostada with apples and apricot. I had learned this recipe from the family of the late Francis Luzzatto, who lived in Washington but whose family came to Italy in the 16th century. (For the Chez Panisse dinner we decided to use seasonal figs instead of the other fruit.)

But for the other dishes, I decided I needed to do more research. First I turned to Fred Plotkin, the author of six books on Italian food, including Italy for the Gourmet Traveler. He told me that dishes like goose prosciutto, bacalao (salt cod), and bottarga, also called the Mediterranean caviar and made from dried, pressed mullet roe, were popular foods eaten by Italian Jews. Cities like Rome, Milan, and small towns like Pitigliano, located in the Maremma region of Tuscany, once had thriving Jewish communities. Today, the Jewish population in Italy is only about 28,000. “There have been some interesting adaptations of Italian recipes to a Jewish way of making them,” said Plotkin. “In the small town of Mortara in Lombardy, for example, the ancient Jewish community raised geese whose meat was used to make salami, prosciutto, and other products that were the goose equivalent of their porky relations. If a local risotto asked for crumbled sausage, a Jew in Mortara could prepare it with goose sausage.”

I also consulted Joyce Goldstein’s excellent Cucina Ebraica: Flavors of the Italian Jewish Kitchen. Her Spinaci con Pinoli e Passerine, spinach with pine nuts and raisins, is a favorite dish of mine, with a sweet and savory juxtaposition that you often find in Jewish cooking, and especially in Sephardic traditions.

Her cookbook also includes a helpful history of Italian Jews. I hadn’t realized that one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world could be found in Rome, where Jews have been living since the second century B.C.E. The first major Jewish immigration to Italy came after the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70, when Jews—many as prisoners of war—settled in Rome. By the end of the first century, some 30,000 Jews were living there. Over the years, there have been two other major migrations: the Ashkenazim who came from Central Europe in the early 14th century, and the Sephardim who came after the expulsion of Jews from Spain. Because of the influx, it is sometimes difficult to separate recipes that originated in Rome from those that were imported from Spain and Central Europe. Italy’s Jewish population, always small, was devastated by World War II. Today Italian Jewish food is influenced by the Jews from the world over—Tunisia, Libya, and Iran as well as those from Israel, France, and the United States.

While continuing my research, I turned to Edda Servi Machlin’s The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews, a jewel of a book. It includes a favorite recipe of mine, a wonderful pasta casserole dish that has two names: Tagliolini colla Crocia and also Ruota di Faraone, the latter meaning Pharaoh’s wheel. It is traditionally eaten on Purim, but it is served throughout the year for the Sabbath, too. Fettuccine is first boiled and then mixed with pickled tongue or beef salami and raisins, and baked, an unusual but perfect combination of salty and sweet. The first time I tasted it, I thought, “Of course—Italian Jews had to have their pasta, even on the Sabbath.” I love the dish— and years ago was lucky enough to have Edda prepare it for me—but ultimately decided not to include it on the Chez Panisse menu, as it was too heavy for a summer meal.

But the artichokes, spinach, and crostada all made the cut, plus a variation on the goose prosciutto Plotkin told me about and a salt cod ravioli. The final menu reflects the bounty of the season in California and the poetic license of modern chefs. I hope it will be a perfect meal to celebrate this significant anniversary of Chez Panisse, as well as honoring the rich culinary tradition of Italian Jews.

Carciofi alla Giudia (Artichokes Jewish Style)
Adapted from Joan Nathan’s Jewish Holiday Cookbook

12 small artichokes
Juice of 2 lemons
Olive oil for deep frying
1 cup chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
½ cup fresh basil leaves
2 teaspoon sea salt or to taste
½ teaspoon freshly ground pepper
10 cloves garlic, crushed
Matzoh meal or flour for dredging

1. Trim the tops off the artichokes, working around the globe to retain the shape. Halve the lemons, juice them, and cover with cold water. Soak the artichokes in this lemon water until ready to use, then drain dry.
2. Hold the artichokes by the stems and bang them a little against the countertop to open the leaves.
3. Combine ½ cup of the olive oil, the parsley, basil, salt, pepper, and garlic and sprinkle the mixture between the leaves. Roll each artichoke in matzo meal or flour.
4. Heat a large pot, wok, or Dutch oven with a cover, filled with about 3 inches of oil, to sizzling. Deep-fry 2–3 artichokes at a time for about 10 minutes, turning occasionally with a tongs; they will puff up as they cook. Serve hot, sprinkled with additional sea salt.
Yield: 6 servings

Spinach With Pine Nuts and Raisins
From Joyce Goldstein’s Cucina Ebraica: Flavors of the Italian Jewish Kitchen

2 1/2 pounds spinach
2 to 3 tablespoons olive oil
2 small yellow onions or 6 green onions, minced
4 tablespoons raisins, plumped in hot water and drained
4 tablespoons pine nuts, toasted
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

1. Rinse the spinach well and remove the stems. Place in a large sauté pan with only the rinsing water clinging to the leaves. Cook over medium heat, turning as needed until wilted, just a few minutes. Drain well and set aside.
2. Add the olive oil to the now-empty pan and place over medium heat. Add the onions and sauté until tender, about 8 minutes. Add the spinach, raisins, and pine nuts and sauté briefly to warm through. Season with salt and pepper and serve warm or at room temperature.

Apple-Apricot Crostada
From Joan Nathan’s New American Cooking

4 Granny Smith or other good cooking apples
½ cup sugar
2 sticks unsalted butter or pareve margarine
2 large egg yolks
1 ½ cups unbleached all-purpose flour
Pinch of salt
1/2 cup apricot preserves

1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees and grease a 10-inch fluted tart pan with a removable bottom.
2. Peel, core, and slice the apples into crescents about a fourth to an eighth of an inch thick. You should have about 24 pieces.
3. Place the sugar, butter, egg yolks, flour, and salt in a large bowl and press everything together with your fingers or combine the ingredients in a food processor fitted with a steel blade and process until the dough forms a ball. Either way, do not overwork the dough.
4. Take the ball of dough in your hands and flatten in the center of the tart pan. Working with your fingers and a cake knife or wide spatula, spread the dough evenly around the pan and up the sides. The dough should be about 1/2 inch thick on the sides. Press the dough into the flutes and spread it evenly across the bottom of the pan, then trim and flatten the edges with a knife. Starting on the outside and working toward the center, lay the apple slices in an overlapping, concentric circle.
5. Place the apricot preserves in a saucepan and heat over a low flame until it has liquefied. Using a pastry brush, glaze the apples and the visible crust.
6. Place the tart pan on a cookie sheet and bake in the middle of the oven for 15 minutes. Reduce the oven to 350 degrees and continue cooking until the crust is deep golden brown, about 45 minutes. Bring to room temperature, unmold, and put on a platter or serving dish.

As I’ve said before, nothing is better in the height of summer than freshly picked tomatoes. This summer, I have noticed a number of delicious ways to extend the season by cooking down the tomatoes. It’s a logical way to preserve the largesse of summer.

Recently, I went to a dinner at the house of my friends Jan Buhrman, a caterer on Martha’s Vineyard, and her husband, Richard Osnos. About a dozen people were gathered for a buffet of Moroccan chicken, baked halibut, and Jan’s rendition of salade juive, a cooked salad of tomatoes and peppers. Jan and I first tasted this dish together a few years ago in Provence, France, when she accompanied me on a research trip for my book Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France.

We had heard good things about Le Mas Tourterons, a restaurant located on the outskirts of the quaint village of Les Imberts. I was especially intrigued to try it as I had heard a rumor that its chef was Jewish. We arrived famished, after an hour-and-a-half drive, to a stone house filled with old wooden beams, antiques, and the enticing smells of fresh food. The chef, Elizabeth Bourgeois, greeted us, and I was so hungry I couldn’t think straight. I just blurted out: “Are you Jewish?”

“Pas du tout,” she replied. Not at all.

I was disappointed and felt a little foolish, but the moment was soon forgotten, and Jan and I sat down to a very long lunch. The first course was several delicious cooked salads, and when we tasted the tomato one we were blown away. This ratatouille-like dish, made of tomatoes, peppers, and coriander, was cooked down to a jam-like consistency and was intensely flavorful.

I asked her where she had gotten the recipe. “ Ça c’est la salade juive!” she replied, the Jewish salad, adding that she had learned it from an elderly Moroccan Jewish woman who had worked for her for many years. (Perhaps this dish led to the rumors that Bourgeois was Jewish.)

A few weeks ago, I tasted another, simpler Moroccan Jewish salad at Mémé, a rustic new American restaurant in Philadelphia. David Katz, the chef-owner of this tiny neighborhood place in the heart of Center City, had asked his mother, Suzanne Azran Katz, a native of Casablanca, to take over the kitchen for one night and prepare food from her homeland—dishes like tagine of lamb, couscous with turnips, and merguez sausage—for his local clientele. Mrs. Katz, a slight woman, who lives nearby in southern New Jersey, started the meal with a variety of Moroccan salads, including her delicious salade juive, which she learned long ago in her native Morocco. Her version includes a more recent innovation—tomato paste, which allows her to cook it for a shorter time.

I have found that there are probably as many renditions of Moroccan Jewish cooked tomato salads as there are Moroccan Jewish cooks. They also have various names. In addition to salade juive, they are also called matbucha and salade cuite, or cooked salad. These salads are also easy to prepare and can be made well in advance of serving, which makes them practical for the Sabbath or a dinner party. And they look beautiful.

Another summery tomato dish that I love is a salad of roasted peppers, tomatoes, onions, and garlic; the ingredients are grounded to a paste and served with nuts. In Syria, it is called mahammar and served with pomegranate syrup; in Spain, it is called romesco and local sherry vinegar is added. There are as many romesco recipes as there are versions of salade juive. The recipe I have used here is from Seamus Mullen, the chef of Tertullia in New York, and comes from his forthcoming cookbook, Hero Food, due out next year from Andrew McMeel.

Culinary historians think that this dish was introduced when tomatoes, potatoes, and peppers were brought back to Europe from the New World, ferried by Sephardic merchants who had been expelled from Spain during the Inquisition. Roasted salads historically had been made with eggplants and chickpeas and mashed with a mortar and pestle. The technique was easily adapted to the vegetables from the New World.

I asked Janet Amateau, an American living in Spain who runs a terrific blog, Sephardiccooking.com, if she knew of the specific origins of romesco. “The Romans had many techniques for preserving fish (the Italians have always eaten well!), and this style of sauce (pounded nuts with herbs and spices) did exist in Roman cuisine,” she wrote in an email. While this technique of grinding nuts into sauces is usually attributed to the Arabs, Amateau suggests that the region of Tarragona, located in the northeast of Spain and a formidable citadel in the Roman Empire, gave it the name to indicate it’s a “Roman style” sauce, born of their specific historical identity and culinary traditions.

Eaten scooped up with bread, crackers, or vegetables, romesco and its cooked cousins are absolutely delicious and a wonderful reminder of summer’s fresh offerings.

Salade Juive, Moroccan Cooked Tomato and Pepper Salad
Adapted from Suzanne Azran Katz

1/4 cup canola oil
5-6 long hot peppers, such as yellow wax or Anaheim, diced small or pulsed in food processor
2-3 cloves garlic
1/2 6-ounce can tomato paste
2–3 tomatoes, diced and peeled (about 2 pounds)
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
1 teaspoon sugar (optional)

1. Heat the canola oil in a heavy frying pan and cook the peppers and the garlic, uncovered, until the peppers are soft, adding 1/2 to 3/4 cup water as needed.
2. Dilute the tomato paste with a few tablespoons of water. Add the tomato paste mixture and the tomatoes to the peppers and cook down for about 20 minutes, or until it reaches the consistency of jam. Add salt and pepper to taste and if needed a sprinkling of sugar.

Yield: About 3 cups

Romesco sauce
Adapted from Hero Food by Seamus Mullen

3 red bell peppers
2 tomatoes
1 onion, quartered, skin on
1 head garlic
1 cup cubed bread
1/4 cup blanched Marcona almonds
2 dried ñora or other dried semi-hot peppers
1/4 cup olive oil
2 tablespoons sherry vinegar
Smoked pimentón or paprika
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

1. You can either grill or roast the peppers, tomatoes, onion, and garlic. If grilling them, grill over high heat until thoroughly blackened. If roasting, put the vegetables on a large baking sheet in a 450-degree oven for 45 minutes, until very dark. Once the vegetables are grilled or roasted, remove them from the heat and wrap in newspaper to cool. Once they have cooled, carefully peel away and discard the charred skins.

2. In a deep skillet over medium heat, toast the bread and almonds until nicely browned. Transfer to a food processor or mortar and pestle, add the roasted vegetables and dried peppers, and work into a crunchy paste. Add the olive oil and a splash of sherry vinegar and adjust seasoning with pimentón or paprika, salt, and pepper.

3. This can be served scooped up with grilled kale, or as a dip with grilled leeks, asparagus, or any fresh vegetable or bread.

Yield: About 3 cups

When, a few years ago, Carolyn Hessel from the Jewish Book Council called me and said that Myra Kraft wanted me to call her, I said that I didn’t know anyone named Myra Kraft. “She knows you,” she said. “She even calls you Joanie.” Of course, it was Myra Hiatt with whom I had lost touch.

We had great fun reconnecting. Myra was an extraordinary human being, humble and so eager to help the world. As chairman of a national conference for Federation in Chicago, she had me showing people how to braid challah in the main lobby of the Hyatt Regency. When it came to the grunt work, Myra was right there in the trenches, helping me and others set up the room, rather then asking others to do it. That is what she liked.

A few years ago we were in Israel together. When my daughter Daniela told Myra she loved the Arab hookah that she saw in the Old City, one showed up at our hotel a few hours later from Myra; so did a check later for $10,000 for New Voices, the Jewish magazine that Daniela edited that year. The next day Myra and I trekked to an Arab village outside Jerusalem where Myra bought the olive oil that she got every year, often sending me bottles to use in my own kitchen. But with Myra, it wasn’t just about olive oil. She was deeply connected to this family, as she was to so many Jewish families the world over.

After 9/11, the Krafts invited my husband, Allan, and me to their box at a Patriots game. Not one to really follow football—nor was Myra, though she dutifully converted to the game—I spent the game talking to Jimmy Andruzzi, a brother of one of the players, who is a New York City fireman and a cook. Myra joined the conversation and confided to me that when Robert decided to buy the Patriots, she only wanted one thing: for there to be 150 or so tickets every game for the Boys and Girls Club.

Brandeis and Federation were Myra’s great loves in Boston. When one of my cookbooks came out, she hosted an event for Federation at her home in Brookline, Massachusetts. So many people wanted to attend that they had me giving a cooking class in the kitchen with a video team from Gillette Stadium broadcasting it to the overflow in other rooms (leading to the hilarious juxtaposition of professional videographers milling about as Robert came in from exercising). Then Myra had us all sit around talking about the transferring of cooking traditions from one generation to another.

We would often talk on the phone, me at my home on the Vineyard and she in her home in Mashpee. Myra would talk about cooking her tsimmes and other dishes for her children and grandchildren, the most important people in her life besides her beloved Robert. For her, the Jewish tradition was paramount. We fantasized about her coming over on her fishing boat. I told her she could dock it right near me. We never did. I will miss her greatly.

Philanthropist Myra Kraft, Wife of Patriots Owner, Dies [JTA]

I met Tanis, 58, for the first time on a recent visit to Berkeley, and he told me about his childhood in Dayton, Ohio, and how he considers Jewish food his culinary roots. “Our family was kind of a funny family,” he said. “We always did Friday nights, but it usually wasn’t at our house,” eating instead at their good friends’, whom Tanis called Aunt Edith and Uncle Marvin. “We didn’t do the whole nine yards, but we did matzoh balls to chremsel. I was totally into it.” He considers matzoh brie a “primal craving” and spoke about his love for herring (his new apartment in New York is a block away from Russ & Daughters, he notes). In Dayton, Tanis attended Hebrew school and had a bar mitzvah, but then, “I ran away into the large wide world,” he said.

His first stop: Deep Springs College, an all-male school in the California desert. Later he traveled to Europe, North Africa, Asia, Mexico, and South America. “Food and travel go together for me,” he said. “Eating is like learning a language.” Wherever he travels, Tanis seeks out the local markets and a home base with a kitchen where he can test the culinary waters.

Tanis has been at Chez Panisse, the pioneering Alice Waters’ restaurant, on and off since the early 1980s. During one of his traveling stints to Paris he and his partner, Randal Breski, found a 17th-century apartment on the Left Bank, and he struck an enviable arrangement with Waters: For the past decade he has split his time, working half the year at Chez Panisse and the other half living in Paris, where he has run a small private dining club that he and Breski dubbed Aux Chiens Lunatique, At the Crazy Dogs’ Place, after their dogs, Arturo and Ajax. But this schedule will, in part, be coming to an end; in October he will leave his post at Chez Panisse to move to New York and focus on his writing.

When I met with Tanis last month, lucky for me, he was still behind the Chez Panisse stove. The restaurant features a set menu—you eat what is prepared for you—and this meal was one of the best I have ever tasted. The dishes had all the essential ingredients, but none too many. The first course, salmon à la nage, consisted of a pavet of sweet wild Pacific salmon, the kind that is available for only a few weeks in the late spring. Tanis served it in a court bouillon, a light vegetable broth, one that the former Chez Panisse chef Paul Bertolli had introduced, but to which Tanis added his own spin with Asian ingredients like star anise and lemongrass. He poached the fish in the broth and served it with a melted ginger-cilantro butter, and the result was refreshingly delicious. For dessert we ate lemon verbena ice cream with rose petals coated in egg white and dipped in mint.

In his books, as well as in his first columns for the Times, you sense what one of Tanis’ friends calls his “elusive” presence. His writing is beautiful and modest; he rarely uses the word “I.” Still, he carries you on incredible journeys, with his food providing the way.

Right now, Tanis is focused on salmon. “This year’s fish has been incredible,” Tanis said, “with real sweetness and an almost velvety texture.” I recently made his salmon recipe and savored it as a main course, with a salad, for a summer dinner. This fish and his lemon verbena ice cream, like so many of David’s dishes, accentuate the sweetness but never distract the purity of the flavors.

Salmon à la Nage With Ginger-Cilantro Butter
Adapted by David Tanis from Chez Panisse Cooking by Paul Bertolli with Alice Waters

4 ½ tablespoons very thinly sliced carrot rounds (1 ½ ounces)
3 tablespoons very thinly sliced celery from the heart (1 ounce)
½ cup very thinly sliced yellow onion rounds (2 ounces)
3 sprigs fresh lemon thyme
2 stems lemon grass, pounded
1 large sprig Italian parsley
½ cup Sauvignon Blanc
1 ½ teaspoons salt

For the herb butter:
4 tablespoons unsalted butter at room temperature
1 small shallot (½ ounce), finely diced
1 inch of fresh ginger, peeled and grated
1 handful cilantro
Zest of ¼ lemon
Pinch of salt and pepper
½ tablespoon thinly sliced chives
Four 4-ounce pieces of salmon, cut 1 inch thick
handful of spinach

1. Prepare the court bouillon by putting the carrots, celery, onion, thyme, lemongrass, and parsley in a non-corrosive pot large enough to hold the salmon pieces side by side with room to spare. Add 3 cups of water, the Sauvignon Blanc, and salt to taste. Bring to a simmer, cover, and cook very slowly for 20 minutes.

2. In the meantime, prepare the herb butter: Mix the butter together with the ginger, lemon, cilantro, salt, and pepper. Set the butter aside in a small bowl and keep it at room temperature.

3. Taste the court bouillon and correct it to your taste for salt. Bring the court bouillon to a bare simmer and add the salmon. If you are using a small pot, the salmon will be submerged and will require about 3 to 4 minutes cooking time. (It should be removed when lightly undercooked in the center. With a small knife, part the filet to check.) Otherwise, gently poach the salmon slices, cut side down, in the hot liquid for about 2 ½ minutes on each side. Do not raise the heat during this time. Transfer the salmon to warm soup bowls and put a dollop of herb butter on each slice. Add the spinach to the hot court bouillon and ladle the liquid with the spinach over the butter and salmon, add some of the vegetables from the pot to each bowl, and serve, sprinkled with the chives.

Yield: 4 servings

Lemon Verbena Honey Ice Cream
Adapted from A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes by David Tanis

2 cups whole milk
1 cup loosely packed lemon verbena leaves
1 cup heavy cream or crème fraîche
¾ to 1 cup honey
6 large organic egg yolks
½ teaspoon salt

1. In a medium stainless steel pan, warm the milk until it comes to a low simmer. Turn off the heat and add the lemon verbena. Let steep, covered, for 15 minutes or so, until the milk has a faint lemon flavor.

2. Strain the milk, discard the verbena, and return the milk to the pan. Add the cream and honey and warm gently.

3 . Meanwhile, beat the egg yolks with the salt in a small bowl. Gradually whisk 1 cup of the warm milk mixture into the yolks to temper them, then add the contents of the bowl to the milk, cream, and honey mixture. Cook gently for 5 minutes or so, stirring diligently, until the mixture thickens slightly, enough to coat the back of a spoon.

4. Strain this thin custard into a large bowl and set aside to cool. Once cool, chill in the refrigerator overnight.

5. Freeze the custard in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions. After churning, transfer the ice cream to the freezer for an hour, then serve (or store it in the freezer and leave it out to temper for 15 minutes before serving).

Yield: about 1 quart

Beit Shemesh has long been an immigrant town. After World War II, Holocaust survivors settled there, followed by North African immigrants and, most recently, Russians. In the 1980s, Mickey Blumberg, a South African immigrant living in Jerusalem, started the Women’s Empowerment Program in the Negev, and in 2004, she brought it to Beit Shemesh. With support from the South African Women’s Zionist organization, the program offers low-income women seed money to develop small businesses—sponsoring open houses that showcase cooking projects and getting micro-dairies and olive-oil presses off the ground—and organizes overseas trips for them to introduce their food to Jewish communities around the world. “In the 1980s, the Beit Shemesh area began to suffer particularly,” Blumberg told me as we drove through the countryside where David slew Goliath. “Many of the older women cannot read; they work as maids in houses in Jerusalem, have no pensions, and have little pride in what they do. Cooking they do well.”

And their contribution goes far beyond individual meals. There was a time when hummus and falafel were considered the epitome of Israeli food, but ethnic dishes such as the ones these women cook—heavily influenced by Moroccan, Persian, Russian, Afgan, and Yemenite cultures—have changed all that.

I started my food-packed tour of Beit Shemesh with breakfast at Dina Alfasi’s home, surrounded by olive trees. Alfasi, who came to Israel at 16 years old from Tunis, Tunisia, spent many years working as a nurse. Now widowed and retired, she dreams of opening a restaurant in her home—serving Tunisian meals to visiting tourists. We ate breakfast on her kitchen table, first enjoying her home-cured olives. Margalit Ozeira from moshav Zlafon, a Yemenite friend who works as a cleaning woman in Jerusalem, came by and brought a salouf, a type of large flat Yemenite bread, which we dipped in zhug and hilba, a sauce made out of fenugreek with cilantro, tomato, and garlic. Then Alfasi brought out an avocado salad, a recipe she surely learned during her long tenure in Israel, which she served alongside her wonderful shakshuka.

Shakshuka is a cooked tomato dish from North Africa that usually features garlic (but no onions) and is often served with eggs or poached salmon. I particularly liked Alfasi’s version with fresh tomatoes, peppers, and cauliflower (she uses whatever vegetables are in season). It can also be made as a pasta sauce or even as a cooked salad. We finished off this wonderful meal with tea steeped with lemon verbena from her garden.

We moved on to moshav Gefen, an agricultural settlement, where we stopped in to visit Tsiona Levi, a hairdresser. Her husband, a retired postal worker, now spends his days working on his art and has turned their house into a veritable Kurdish museum of daily life, with his paintings on the walls and sculptures made from found material outside. We had cherry jam and chocolate that Levi’s daughter helps to make in Tel Aviv.

We ate lunch underneath a beautiful fig tree at Lea Avraham’s home in the moshav. She served us a delicious Kurdish chicken and cabbage soup with kubbeh, dumplings made out of semolina and bulgur and filled with meat, and stuffed grape leaves with meat, rice, onion, and parsley. Avraham’s Moroccan neighbor, Batsheva Gabai, brought over fig jams served with fresh tea infused with mint leaves grown in her garden.

Just last week, I had the opportunity to see some of these women again—and taste their wonderful cooking—when a group from Partnership 2000 came to my synagogue, Adas Israel, in Washington, D.C. Smadar Kaplinsky, who develops small businesses for women in Israel, helped organize the trip to the United States, and last Friday night the women showcased their food. They served Iranian chicken soup with gondi—plump dumplings made from chickpea flour—Moroccan stuffed onions, peppers, and tomatoes with meat and rice, Russian blinchiki stuffed with beef. Speaking in Russian, Farsi, Arabic, and Hebrew, the women stood behind their buffet stations, serving up their delicious food with pride.

To better understand these women’s lives, Kaplinsky, Mickey Blumberg, and Mickey Feinberg, from the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, assembled a booklet of their stories and their recipes—along with some dishes from Israeli chefs who have helped them. (They are currently looking for a publisher.) The booklet happens to contain one of my favorite recipes, made by Amos Sion, a chef who helped organize a similar group of women from Beit Shemesh to visit South Africa. The dish is malabi, also known as Mouhalabiye, a pudding or custard drizzled with pomegranate syrup and pistachios. It’s the perfect recipe for Shavuot, coming up in early June, or any time you’re looking for a sweet taste of spring. (For information on obtaining the booklet, contact Smadar Kaplinsky at Smadar4848@gmail.com.)

SHAKSHUKA (Tunisian Tomato, Pepper, and Cauliflower Sauce With Eggs)
Adapted from Dina Alfasi

2 green peppers
4 large red tomatoes (2 pounds) or one 28-ounce can of San Marzano tomatoes
1/3 to ½ cup olive oil
4 to 5 cloves garlic
½ small hot green pepper, like a jalapeno, seeds removed
½ cauliflower, cut in florets
2 cups green fava beans, or carrots, depending on the season
1 teaspoon crushed red pepper or to taste
1 cup tomato juice or water (about)
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
1 to 2 teaspoons sugar (optional)
Juice of 1 lemon (optional)
4-6 large eggs
4 ounces feta cheese
½ cup fresh cilantro

1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees and put the green peppers on a cookie sheet. Bake in the oven, turning once for about 20 minutes, or until charred and soft. When cool enough to handle, peel them, removing the seeds and any white pith from the peppers. Then cut them into large squares.

2. Bring a pot of water to a boil. Plunge the tomatoes into the boiling water for a minute or two, remove with a slotted spoon, and cool in a bowl of ice water. When they are cool enough to handle, peel and dice, keeping most of the liquid but discarding the skin.

3. Heat the olive oil in a large frying pan. Add the garlic and cook for a minute or two until fragrant but not burnt. Stir in the hot pepper, the peppers, tomatoes, the cauliflowers, the fava beans or carrots, the crushed hot pepper, and 1 cup tomato juice or water, simmering very slowly, uncovered, for about an hour or until much of the liquid has evaporated, stirring occasionally. Season with salt and pepper to taste and, if needed, add sugar and lemon juice. You can do this a day in advance.

4. Reheat the sauce, adding a little tomato juice or water if it seems too thick. Carefully break 4 to 6 eggs in the sauce, sprinkle the feta cheese around the eggs, cover for about 3 minutes until the yolks are hard, shaking the pan every once in a while (thus the word shakshuka). Remove the cover and serve, sprinkled with the cilantro.

Yield: 4-6 servings

ALMOND MALABI (PUDDING) WITH PISTACHIOS AND POMEGRANATE MOLASSES
Adapted from Chef Amos Sion

¾ cup plus 2 tablespoons cornstarch
2 cups whole milk
2 cups heavy cream
2 cups unsweetened almond milk
½ cup sugar
¼ cup pomegranate molasses
1 cup pistachio nuts, roasted and chopped

1. Dissolve the cornstarch in 1 cup of the milk, stirring carefully until totally dissolved, and set aside. Bring the remaining milk, cream, and almond milk to a simmer in a medium saucepan.

2. Stir in the cornstarch slurry and mix with a whisk until thick, for about 2 minutes. Whisk in the sugar, and pour the mixture into 8 individual bowls or 1 large bowl, making sure to thoroughly scrape the sides of the pot.

3. Cool overnight in the refrigerator. Before serving drizzle a little of the pomegranate syrup on top and sprinkle with the pistachio nuts and/or fresh berries.

Yield: 8 to 10 servings

Correction, May 31: This article originally stated that Mickey Blumberg started the organization Partnership 2000. She did not. She established the Women’s Empowerment Program, within the framework of Partnership 2000. It has been corrected.

I never thought that Jews would voluntarily live in this vast, distant part of Russia that extends from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean and north beyond the Arctic Circle. But once when I was giving a talk in Providence, R.I., a woman named Eleanor Elbaum quietly approached me. “Would you like some Passover recipes from a Jewish family in Siberia?” she asked. She said her family had lived there for generations.

I had read about Dostoevsky and others being exiled to Siberia, and now I learned the Jewish Siberian story. In 1632 the first Jews were sent there from Lithuania, after being captured during the Russo-Polish war. In the early 19th century Jewish convicts from Moscow landed in Siberia too, sentenced to hard labor. In 1859, after the Crimean War ended, merchant classes of Russian Jews were permitted to settle outside the Pale, and some found their way to Siberia.

The next time I was in Providence, I stopped by Eleanor Elbaum’s brick home on a quiet residential street. She had made a few dishes that were waiting for me on her table. But first we talked.

“My great-grandparents on both sides came to Siberia after the Crimean War in 1859,” she said. “My great-great-grandfather was in the army and when the war ended he was permitted by the czar to move to Siberia from Lithuania.”

Her father, who was born in Ishim, Siberia, and served in World War I, went into the hotel business. He and her mother, who was born in the old Siberian town of Tomsk, married and lived in Vladivostok, Russia’s biggest port on the Pacific side of the country. In 1922, they  took a leg of the Trans-Siberian railroad to Harbin, Manchuria. Manchuria served as an escape route for Russian Jews after the revolution and remained one during World War II.

Elbaum, who was born in 1932 in Harbin and grew up in Japan during the World War II, knows about Siberia primarily through the food she ate as a child. “There was no discussion about Siberia when I was growing up,” she said. “My mother would make piroshky and pelmeni, the Jewish ravioli, and put them outside to freeze. They told me they didn’t need a freezer. They had a sort of igloo outside for the food.” Because it was practically impossible to buy fresh lemons, her mother would use sour salt when making jams and curing meat like brisket. They also ate typical Russian Jewish fare—cucumber and sour cream salad, cabbage rolls stuffed with meat and rice, borscht, kasha, and sauerkraut.

Sharon Hudgins’ wonderful saga, The Other Side of Russia, A Slice of Life in Siberia and the Russian Far East, gives a vivid account of life there in the late 1990s, when she spent several years in the region. “Now it has changed completely,” she told me. “But when I lived there it must have been like it was in the late 19th and early 20th century.” There were few middle men. You would get what little food was available off of farmers’ trucks. The staples were beets, potatoes, cabbage, onions, and leeks; they were kept in root cellars until late in the season. Berries, lemons, and even flour were scarce. They couldn’t count on having sugar either, and if it did appear, it was often laced with impurities.

After a childhood in the Far East, Elbaum—who speaks Russian, English, and Japanese and understands French—made her way to California for college, then to Toronto, where she met her husband, and they eventually settled in Providence. Now she frequents farmers’ markets, where she buys strawberries, cherries, apricots, and blueberries for her jams. When she was a child, these jams constituted dessert, eaten with a spoon and served with tea. Each time Elbaum puts out her canning jars, she spends a few moments remembering her parents and wondering about their life in Siberia.

Whenever she meets Russians they tell her that the best food is in Siberia. “I really don’t know what they have in mind when they say that,” she said. “I just remember that whenever we complained about having something too often, like chicken, my father would remind us to feel lucky to eat chicken. I tried so many times to get my parents to talk about the past. That generation just wiped out segments of their lives.”

As she told me her story, I looked around her house for more on Siberia—artifacts, books—but she there was little. All she had were the stories from her parents and the recipes her mother made.

On her table was a Passover candy she grew up with, a candy made from Siberian nuts and honey, the precursor to our commercial peanut brittle and fruit-and-nut bars. I have seen similar candies in other Jewish homes made with radishes, carrots, and beets; no matter how different the mixture, it always includes honey and ginger. You can also add cranberries, chocolate chips, chopped apricots, whatever you want. I love old recipes like this; they give a hint at what life before the commercialization of so many food products.

Elbaum served us tea in glasses, and with it she brought out Siberian chremsel. It’s a matzoh fritter of sorts, probably based on a blinchiki, eaten in Siberia and perfect for breakfast during Passover. I have eaten chremsel before, made out of fried potato and matzoh meal and stuffed with meat. I’ve also made a doughnut-like chremsel with nuts that I serve for dessert at Passover. I had never seen one like this before, made from matzoh meal and stuffed with tart blueberry, cranberry, or any other fruit jam, then browned and baked with a little more jam, fresh blueberries or cranberries (it should be a little tart), and honey. It’s delicious—and all the more so for the remarkable journey the recipe took from its birthplace in Siberia (or maybe Lithuania), across Manchuria to Japan, California, Toronto, and then to Providence, Rhode Island.

SIBERIAN CHREMSEL

I recommend making this dish the night before and baking it before breakfast.

1 ¼ cup matzoh meal, about
3 large eggs
5 tablespoons honey
Vegetable spray or oil for frying
1 cup blueberry jam, prune or apricot lekve, or cranberry sauce (you want a little tart and sweet together)
1 cup fresh blueberries or cranberries
1 cup sour cream

1. Bring 1 cup of water to a boil in a saucepan. Put the matzoh meal in the water, remove from the fire, and beat as you would for a gougere or put it in the food processor. Let cool slightly.

2. Beat in or process 1 egg at a time, mashing well to eliminate lumps.

3. Remove  to a bowl, and add 1tablespoon of the honey. Let rest overnight in the refrigerator.

4. Put vegetable spray on your hands and on a board or counter-top. Take a tablespoon of dough and press in your hand into a large circle, keep moving from one hand to the other because it sticks. Put a heaping teaspoon of the jam in the  center. Then, taking a knife, carefully enclose the jam to make a ball, making sure it is completely sealed. As you finish the chremslach, put them on the greased board.

5. Put a little oil or spray a frying pan and heat to medium. Add the chremslach and fry them, adding more oil if needed. Drain on a paper towel and put in a Pyrex pan large enough to hold them in one row.

6. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees and then put ½ cup jam and the blueberries or cranberries, the remaining 4 tablespoons of honey and ¼ cup water in a bowl and mix well. Pour over the chremslach and bake in the oven for 20 minutes. Serve immediately with sour cream on the side.

Yield: about 12 chremslach

NUTS IN HONEY AND SUGAR

¾ cup sugar
5 tablespoons honey
1 teaspoon ground ginger, or to taste
1 pound walnuts, roughly chopped
Matzoh meal for sprinkling

1. Mix the sugar, honey, and ginger together in a large saucepan. When it is bubbling and syrupy, remove from the heat, add the walnuts, and quickly mix to coat the nuts in the syrup.

2. Wet a wooden cutting board slightly to prevent sticking. Spread the nuts on the board in a rectangular shape and use another moistened board to push down on the nuts and pack them tightly. As the bars cool, sprinkle with matzoh meal. Once they’ve cooled, cut bars into 1-inch squares.

Note: The matzoh meal will stop the bars from sticking to each other when stacked for serving.

Yield: about 36 one-inch squares

Joan Nathan is the author of Quiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France, among other books.

Auntie L,
Marc Tracy passed your email on to me. Thank you for sending the lovely request for stuffed kneydlakh with neshama (which refers to a sweet center or the soul). In the 18th and 19th centuries, recipes for matzoh balls in Eastern Europe began to vary by region. Called “kleis” or “knoedel” in German and “kneydlakh” in Yiddish, they were spiced with mace, ginger, nutmeg, and cinnamon.

But stuffed kneydlakh was a Lithuanian dish: Dumplings made with a filling sometimes of liver, potato, carrot, or even ground almonds, and served with chicken or beef broth, or a milk soup where appropriate. One version from South Africa calls itself “the kneydlakh with a heart” because it is filled with a cinnamon-matzoh stuffing. Dr. Dov Noy, professor of folklore at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and winner of the Israel Prize, who taught me so much about Yiddish folklore, told me many years ago that the cinnamon is crucial: “It is like the secret sweetness within the spice box at the Havdalah service that ends the Sabbath,” he said. “The cinnamon stuffing represents a wish to stretch the sweetness of the Sabbath meal (or Seder meal) for as long as possible.”

I have located many recipes for it in South African Jewish cookbooks, where many Litvaks went at the end of the 19th century, right when many more arrived in the United States. Since they lived more isolated existences in South Africa, many authentic Lithuanian recipes can easily be found in Jewish cookbooks from there. (Curiously, I also found a recipe in Mississippi for baked stuffed kneydlakh in muffin tins.)

Here is a recipe which I hope will give your Seder neshama.
Joan Nathan

South African-Lithuanian Stuffed Matzo Balls, adapted from Joan Nathan’s Jewish Holiday Cookbook

Meat Filling:
1/4 pound ground beef

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

2 large egg yolks

2 tablespoons chicken fat, softened 

2 tablespoons matzo meal, approximately
Pinch of salt
¼ teaspoon 
cinnamon

Matzoh Balls:

2 large eggs 

10 teaspoon chicken fat plus fat for greasing pan

1 1/4 cups matzoh meal, approximately

1 teaspoon salt, or to taste

3 quarts salted water, rapidly boiling

2 teaspoons cinnamon 


Instructions:
1. To prepare the filling, saute the meat in the oil in a skillet until brown. Drain and cool and combine with the egg yolks, chicken fat, matzoh meal, salt and cinnamon. Refrigerate at least one hour.
2. Meanwhile, to prepare the matzoh balls beat the eggs well in a bowl. Add 2 cups of water and 6 teaspoons of the chicken fat and mix well. Add enough matzo meal and salt to make a soft mass. Refrigerate at least one hour.
3. Divide the matzoh meal mixture into 8-10 balls of equal size. Flatten them and put 1 teaspoon of meat filling in the center of each. Enclose the filling, pinch the edges together and form into balls.
4. Place the matzoh balls into the boiling salted water and simmer, covered for 20 minutes.
5. 

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Drain the matzoh balls and place in a pan greased with chicken fat; cover with the remaining 4 teaspoons of chicken fat and sprinkle with the cinnamon. Bake 15-20 minutes or until slightly browned. Serve each matzoh ball in a soup bowl with chicken soup ladled over it.

Yield: 8 to 10.

In the early 1970s the only ones selling hummus (which also means “chickpeas” in Arabic and modern Hebrew) in the United States were Middle Eastern ethnic stores like Sahadi’s in Brooklyn, which has been catering to the Arab community since 1895, when Abraham Sahadi immigrated from Lebanon. “In the early 1970s we had outside contractors making hummus for us or we would buy it already prepared from the Middle East,” Charlie Sahadi, Abraham’s son, told me as we browsed the shelves of his store. “In 1985 our hummus was so popular that we put a deli in the store. Today you go to a specialty food store and you see seven varieties of Americanized hummus: sun-dried, basil, pepper, black bean … I don’t know what [it is], but it isn’t hummus.”

When I was recently in Israel, I met with Yehuda Litani, a former correspondent for Haaretz and the co-author, along with the Druse poet Naim Ariedei, of Not on Hummus Alone, an Israeli best-seller published in 2000 about hummus’ culture and history. (The book is not available in English yet.) A hummus purist, Litani almost choked when I told him that I throw a preserved lemon in my version. “Don’t tamper with my hummus,” he told me while we were driving around Jerusalem. Then he added, rubbing salt in the wound, “Whoever makes good hummus can’t speak English. Whoever speaks English can’t make good hummus.” To research his book, Litani visited 1,200 hummus haunts in Israel, and he sent Arab friends to check out hummus places in Syria and Lebanon.

Litani likes hummus so much that he eats it every other day. He told me that at Jerusalem’s renowned Hadassah hospital, “the psychology department recommends that people eat hummus to calm the nerves twice a week.” In 2005, 75 tons of chickpeas were stolen from Kibbutz Einat, and this hummus heist became news.

It is not a surprise, then, that Litani hears from many people about their passion for hummus. The novelist Meir Shalev contacted him, saying that the first hummus reference in print was in was in the second chapter of the Biblical Book of Ruth. “And Boaz said unto her at mealtime, ‘Come hither, and eat of the bread and dip thy morsel in the chometz’ ” which most translations call vinegar but was probably chickpeas, which ferment quickly. According to Shalev, whom I reached in Jerusalem, the letters “chet” “mem,” and “zadek” are the same letters that make up the words for chamootz (which means vinegar) and chimtza (hummus). “In biblical Hebrew there were no vowels, so words were more confusing,” he said. This first recipe for hummus, more than 3,400 years old, would have probably been a paste of cooked chickpeas (called chimtza in classical Hebrew) mashed with a mortar and pestle and mixed with lemon juice, tahina, and perhaps salt. “Anyway, if Boaz served his workers pita dipped in vinegar instead of something more substantial like hummus, they wouldn’t have been very happy,” said Shalev.

“Hummus places in Israel and Palestine are like Starbucks in the States,” said Litani, as we dipped our warm pita bread in hummus at Ikramawi, one of his favorite joints in Jerusalem. It was 11 o’clock in the morning, and workers were coming in to eat the dish, served in a dark amber ceramic bowl with white stripes, sprinkled with fava beans (or foul, in Hebrew), pine nuts, and ground meat. As Mr. Litani speaks good Arabic and is friends with the owner, we were served a particularly delicious warm hummus with hints of garlic, parsley, and cumin.

The other place we visited was Abu Shukri in Beit Hannina, a suburb of Jerusalem, near Ramallah. As we entered, we passed a man praying on his prayer rug. It was noon, late for hummus. In a nearby bakery, we also saw cooked, creamy eggs for sale, similar to the overnight eggs that Sephardic Jews put in their hamim (Sabbath stew).

I know Abu Shukri’s hummus well. Years ago I learned to make hummus by watching Abu Shukri’s father, then an elderly gentleman, at his other shop near the 5th Station of the Cross in the Old City of Jerusalem. He stirred the warm chickpeas in a cauldron, pounding with a mortar and pestle and ladling them out to customers as they came for breakfast early in the morning. My boss at the time, the mayor Teddy Kollek, considered it his favorite place to eat.

Fath Shukri, Abu Shukri’s son, told us that his chickpeas are soaked for a day, then cooked in a large vat with water and a tiny amount of baking soda starting at about 3 a.m. Later, when they are soft, they are blended in a large robot coupe or food processor. “He knows by tasting how much garlic and tahina to put in his hummus,” Litani said.

Inside his son’s shop we tasted his delicious hummus; it has a bit more chickpeas in it than some others I’d tried. Then he served us Msbaha, a dish I had never tasted before, lighter than the typical hummus. A deconstructed hummus with tahina sauce, drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with chickpeas on top, it is eaten in the summer months.

Besides the use of a food processor, the only difference between hummus-making in the ’70s and now is the type of chickpeas used. About five years ago the Volcani Institute of Agricultural Research in Beit Dagan, Israel, developed a new kind of chickpeas whose peel dissolves in cooking: The Arabs call it the “kibbutz” chickpea, and the Israelis call it “hadas.”

After years of hummus-making I have concluded that despite the temptation to use canned chickpeas, the flavor is much better when it is made with the tiny Turkish, Bulgarian, or Israeli dried chickpeas found in Middle Eastern stores. First I soak a large quantity overnight, cook some, and then drain and freeze the rest in two-cup batches in plastic bags. Whenever I need them for hummus, falafel, or for the many chickpea soups and stews I make, I just take them out of the freezer. When substituting canned beans, figure one cup of raw chickpeas equals two cups of cooked or canned. I add to my hummus a little bit of cumin and, despite Litani’s objection, throw in a preserved lemon that blends beautifully with the garlic and lemony flavor and tastes so good.

HUMMUS WITH PRESERVED LEMONS
Adapted from my cookbook Foods of Israel Today

1 cup dried chickpeas
1 cup tahina
1 preserved lemon
1/4 cup lemon juice, or to taste, including
2 cloves garlic, or to taste
½ teaspoon ground cumin, or to taste
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons pine nuts
Dash of paprika or sumac
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley or cilantro
1 teaspoon salt
Freshly ground pepper to taste

1. Put the raw chickpeas in a bowl with cold water to cover and soak overnight.

2. Drain and rinse the chickpeas, then place them in a heavy pot with enough cold water to cover. Bring to a boil, skim off the scum that accumulates, then simmer, partially covered, for about an hour or until the chickpeas are soft and the skin begins to separate, adding more water if needed.

3. Drain the chickpeas, reserving about 1 ½ cups of the cooking liquid. Set aside ¼ cup of the cooked chickpeas for garnish. In a food processor fitted with a steel blade, process the remaining chickpeas with the tahina, preserved lemon, lemon juice, garlic, salt, pepper, cumin, and at least ½ cup of the reserved cooking liquid. If the hummus is too thick, add more reserved cooking liquid or water until you have a paste-like consistency.

4. Heat a frying pan and add 1 tablespoon of the olive oil. Spread the pine nuts in the pan and stir-fry, browning on all sides.

5. To serve, transfer the hummus to a large, flat plate, and with the back of a spoon make a slight depression in the center. Drizzle the remaining olive oil and sprinkle the reserved chickpeas, pine nuts, paprika or sumac, and parsley or cilantro over the surface.

Serve with cut-up raw vegetables and warm pita cut into wedges.

Note: You can also add cayenne pepper to the hummus. Sometimes leftover hummus tends to thicken; just add some water to make it the right consistency.

Yield: About 4 cups, or 6 to 8 servings

PRESERVED LEMONS
8 lemons, about 1 ½ pounds
1/2 cup coarse kosher salt (about)
1 cup fresh lemon juice, plus more if necessary
2 tablespoons olive oil

1. Cut off the ends of each lemon. Cut each one lengthwise into quarters, cutting to but not through the opposite end. Sprinkle 2 tablespoons of salt into the cut sides of each lemon.

2. Put the lemons in a large jar (it’s fine if you have to squeeze them in; they will shrink), and cover completely with lemon juice, using a heavy stone to keep them down. Let sit for a day.

3. The next day, weigh the lemons down with a stone or, if not covered with lemon juice, seal them with a thin film of olive oil over the lemons. Put the jar in the refrigerator and allow to cure for 2 to 3 weeks. Before using, scrape off the pulp if desired.

Yield: 8 preserved lemons

MSBAHA, TAHINA WITH CHICKPEAS
¾ cup tahina
½ cup lemon juice
¼ cup warm chickpeas
1 clove garlic
1 cup roughly chopped Italian parsley
1 to 2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

1. In a food processor fitted with a steel blade, puree the tahina, lemon juice, and garlic until smooth. If the tahina is still too thick, add a few tablespoons of water and it will thin down and become a pleasing white color.

2. Add the parsley and salt and pepper and pulse until blended. Adjust the seasonings and put in a flat bowl.

3. Drizzle some olive oil over all, scatter the warm chickpeas on top, put in the microwave for about 10 seconds, and serve.

Yield: about 1 ½ cups or 4–6 servings as a dip.

Today, one of the challenges that professionals within the Jewish world say they face is creating interesting events during which young people can connect and explore Judaism. Food is a wonderful vehicle to do just that; never underestimate the power of a homemade cheesecake to attract a crowd. As one community organizer from the Centre Bernard Lazare in Paris told me: “People listen to lecturers more attentively if they know a little food will be served.”

The New Center for Arts and Culture in Boston, a Jewish nonprofit that plans events at venues around the city, is one organization that has embraced the power of food. Recently I spoke at “Beyond Bubbie’s Kitchen,” an event for Prism, the Center’s program that targets people in their 20s and 30s.

Prism invited 15 well-known chefs from the Boston area, many not Jewish, and asked them to reinvent a traditional Jewish dish. Chefs like a challenge, and this certainly was one. They set up stations in an event space at Moakley Courthouse in South Boston, serving food that night to about 300 people. Prism produced a pamphlet for attendees that traced the history of the traditional dishes and included the chefs’ thoughts on their reinterpretations. The event was inspired, in part, by the increasing popularity of Jewish food in mainstream American cuisine, says Lynne Krasker, Prism’s director: “It is important to understand why we eat Jewish foods at certain times and to understand their significance within culture and society,” she said. “One of the reasons we chose non-Jewish chefs was to see how they perceived Jewish food.”

Japanese-born Ting Yen, chef at Oishii in Chestnut Hill, prepared a yam tempura maki appetizer, which he said was inspired by the carrots and yams he often found in side dishes prepared by his Jewish chef friends. His dish resembled a modernized, reinvented, Japanese version of carrot tsimmes.

Steven Brand of Cambridge’s Upstairs on the Square chose a braised lamb knish, a Sephardic take on an Ashkenazic classic. “I love to eat knishes,” he wrote in the Prism handout, “but I thought it might be fun to update the traditional style and recipe to make it more interesting.”

Michael Madden, of the Asian-inspired restaurant Om, also in Cambridge, made a cold-smoked cherry-wood salmon with a potato apple galette. “It was a pleasure to get away from Asian food for a change,” he told me.

To me, the most creative and tasty of these appetizers was a caraway and matzoh cake with Arctic char, Vermont fromage, and micro-greens prepared by Michael Scelfo, chef at Russell House Tavern. He told me he is a big fan of Jewish food, and he wanted to create a version of a matzoh cake “using local and sustainable ingredients—matzoh, smoked fish, caraway, and cream cheese. The flavors are traditional but the presentation is modern.”

For the main course, Julio de Haro from Estragon took an unusual approach to brisket, the zelig of the food world. Spanish-born de Haro braised his brisket in pomegranate juice and served it topped with a confit of onions. “Pomegranate is integral to southern Spanish cuisine,” he said. “We wanted to incorporate it somehow. Granada happens to be the Spanish word for pomegranate”—and, of course, there was a large Jewish population in Granada until the Inquisition.

Also on the menu that night: kasha varnishkes with real gribenes, cracklings made of poultry skin; rolled pasta made of rye; duck pastrami; poppyseed oreo cookies; a chocolate tamale that was a play on cheese blintzes; and an extraordinary croquembouche made of a supple honey caramel and choux pastry.

This last dessert, inspired by teiglach, was my favorite. Teiglach, a traditional Lithuanian dessert served on holidays, is made out of dough that’s boiled and covered in honey, but the result is often hard and unwieldy. The reinvented dessert was prepared by Siberian-born pastry chef Diana Kudajarova, from the restaurant Journeyman in Somerville, and her Singaporean husband and business partner, Tse Wei Lim. “We picked teiglach having never tasted it,” Tse wrote, “because we loved its connection with family, community, and celebration. Picking bits of honey-covered dough out of a giant pile sounded like great fun to us. But the experience of eating actual teiglach, once we made it, didn’t quite live up to the potential.” So they used cream puffs instead and used honey to bind them together. The result was delicate, honey-scented, and delicious. I found a version of teiglach that I actually like—and maybe even a way to reconnect with my own Judaism!

Caraway & Matzoh Cake With Smoked Fish, Fromage Blanc, & Micro Greens

Adapted from Michael Scelfo

2 cups matzoh meal

1 tablespoon baking powder

1 tablespoon ground caraway seed

4 tablespoons sliced chives

1 teaspoon kosher salt

1 teaspoon ground black pepper

3 egg yolks

3/4 cup whole milk or as needed

4 tablespoons olive oil

8 ounces fromage blanc or sour cream

4 ounces shredded smoked char, salmon, or smoked fish of your choice

A handful of micro greens

1. Whisk together the matzoh meal, baking powder, caraway seed, salt, and pepper in a small bowl. In a separate bowl mix the eggs, milk, and 3 tablespoons of the chives. Slowly add the wet ingredients to the dry, mixing with a whisk, trying to keep the batter smooth and adding additional milk if needed. The batter should be just thick enough to drop off a spoon.

2. In a medium nonstick frying pan, heat 3 tablespoons of the olive oil over medium heat. Add spoonfuls of batter and cook until golden on each side, spreading them to about 2 inches in diameter, and about ¼ inch thick. Drain on a paper towel.

3. Gently mix the fromage blanc or sour cream with the smoked fish. Drop a dollop of the mixture onto each cake and serve at room temperature. Garnish with the remaining tablespoons of chives, micro greens, and a drizzle of olive oil.

Yield: 10 to 12 servings

Brisket Braised in Pomegranate Juice

Adapted from Julio de Haro

One 4 ½-pound brisket

Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 medium onions, peeled and coarsely chopped

2 leeks, cleaned, and chopped, using the white and light green only

6 cloves garlic, crushed

2 large carrots, peeled and coarsely chopped

1 celery stalk, peeled and coarsely chopped

2 ½ to 3 cups pomegranate juice

3 sprigs fresh thyme

2 sprigs fresh rosemary

2 bay leaves

1. Season the brisket with salt and pepper. Heat 2 tablespoons of the oil in a heavy pan or Dutch oven, brown the brisket on all sides, and set aside.

2. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Add the onions and leeks in the pan in which you browned the brisket, and cook until soft. Add the garlic, carrots and the celery. Continue cooking for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

3. Add 1 1/2 cups of the pomegranate juice to the pan and bring the mixture to the boil, making sure to scrape the bottom of the pan as you stir. Add another cup of pomegranate juice, the thyme, rosemary and bay leaves to the pan and allow to simmer. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

4. Return the brisket to the pan, fat-side up, spooning the vegetables and juices over the meat. Cover the pan tightly (use foil if the pan doesn’t have a lid), and braise the brisket in the oven, basting every half hour or so until the meat is tender, for about 3 hours.

5. Allow the brisket to rest before slicing and serving. (I leave it overnight in the refrigerator. The next day I cut it thin, against the grain, on the bias.) Lay the brisket over the onions and leeks and the gravy, reheat, and serve with the onion confit (see below.)

Yield: about 8 servings

Onion Confit

3 large onions, peeled and cut in slivers

4 tablespoons vegetable oil

Salt and pepper to taste

1 cup red wine

1 cup chicken broth

1. Sauté the onions in the oil for about 10 to 15 minutes or until they start to turn golden.

2. Add salt and pepper to taste, the sugar, the wine, and the chicken broth. Cook them, uncovered, for another 10 minutes or until the onions are very soft. Taste, adding more sugar or salt, if necessary, and serve.

Schnecken—the word means snail in German—are made of a rich and sweet yeast dough enriched with egg, sour cream, and butter. The dough is pressed out in a large rectangle shape, sprinkled with sugar, cinnamon, raisins, and ground nuts, and rolled up like a jelly roll. Cut on the cross section, the roll is sliced, baked, and served open-side up in small coiled rounds. Schnecken were very popular as breakfast treats throughout Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where many bakers happened to be Jewish.

Schnecken are the predecessors to the American sticky bun, the sweet roll, the iconic rest-stop treat Cinnabon, and the delectable pecan roll that I used to eat at Drake’s in Ann Arbor, when I studied at the University of Michigan. The popular Settlement Cook Book documents the evolution of this pastry: The first edition of the cookbook, issued in 1901, includes a recipe for “Cinnamon Rolls or Schnecken”; the 1920 book contains two versions, the original and one for “Cold Water Schnecken“; but by the 1940s the Settlement Cook Book had edited the name of the treat down to simply “cinnamon rolls,” and still later editions find the same yeast dough appearing as pecan rolls baked in muffin pans.

Schnecken arrived in America with Germans and German Jews in the 19th century. One of the most popular schnecken recipes comes from the German Jewish Bake Shop in Cincinnati, Ohio. The United Jewish Social Agencies opened the Bake Shop in 1929 as a venue to provide part-time employment for women, and the place was an immediate success. “It takes them out of their homes temporarily and provides employment for which they are particularly fitted,” the American Israelite reported the year the Bake Shop opened. “Recipes made locally famous by Cincinnati housewives interested in the bakery are being utilized in the making of cakes, cookies and the like.” German Jews who settled in Cincinnati in the years prior to and during World War II often found employment at the Bake Shop and put their own spin on Old World recipes. Although the Bake Shop shuttered in 1966, its schnecken remains a fond memory for some Jewish Cincinnatians.

Classic schnecken are a bit crisper than American sticky buns. They are washed in caramel syrup and baked open-side up in a round or square baking pan. The best I ever tasted was at New York’s renowned William Greenberg Jr.’s bakery on Madison Avenue. Michael London, a former baker at Greenberg’s, now of Mrs. London’s Bakery in Saratoga Springs, New York, showed me how to make the recipe. Just thinking about his schnecken makes me hungry.

In Russia, Ukraine, and Poland, similar pastries were called rugelach. These were rolled in a circle like pie dough, cut in wedges, and then rolled up. Rug means spiral or crescent-shaped in Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish; a miniature spiral-shaped dough was, therefore, a rugelach. In Europe, rugelach were often made from a yeast dough free of sour cream to keep them pareve. Here in America, they are often made with cream cheese. I imagine that someone in the test kitchen of Joseph Kraft worked cream cheese into the cookie dough, thus creating the flaky and rich American version (and a Kraft marketer’s dream). One of the early recipes for cream-cheese dough appeared in The Perfect Hostess, written in 1950 by Mildred Knopf. Mrs. Knopf, the sister-in-law of publisher Alfred Knopf, credited Nela Rubinstein, the wife of the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, with her recipe.

The addition of cream cheese is not the only change that has been made to an old recipe. Stephanie Levine, from New Haven, Conn., who shared her grandmother Bessie’s schnecken recipe with me, explained that her grandmother always made schnecken (or were they rugelach?) filled with raisins and chopped walnuts and topped with cinnamon sugar. At her aunt’s urging, Ms. Levine added raspberry preserves to the filling. Finally, she replaced her grandmother’s filling with one of pecans and golden raisins. Lately I’ll find people who make the cookies with Craisins instead, thus continuing the evolution of an old family recipe.

Mrs. Knopf’s friend Maida Heatter, the pastry chef and author of the wonderful Maida Haetter’s Book of Great Desserts, popularized rugelach with her grandmother’s recipe, which was quite similar to Mrs. Rubenstein’s. Mrs. Heatter’s recipe is the inspiration for both the rugelach found in upscale bakeries and the mass-produced cookie that you’ll see at places like Costco.

It seems that on this side of the Atlantic, schnecken often loses the yeast and the sour cream and became more like rugelach. Sometimes the cookies seem to be only different in name. However, to borrow loosely from Shakespeare, a filled pastry by any other name would taste as sweet. If nothing else, the different names offer the perfect excuse to start the day with a schnecken and end it with a rugelach—what could be better than that?

My Mom’s Yeast Rugelach
Adapted from Linda Solomon

Dough
1 package active dry yeast
1 teaspoon plus 3 tablespoons sugar
3 cups all purpose flour
8 ounces butter or pareve margarine, melted
2 large eggs, well beaten

Fillings
1 teaspoon cinnamon
½ cup sugar
1 cup apricot preserves
¼ cup golden raisins (optional)

1. In a small bowl, dissolve the yeast in ¼ cup warm water. Add 1 teaspoon of the sugar. Stir well and set aside for 5 to 10 minutes.

2. Sift the flour and remaining sugar into a large bowl. Make a well in the center and add the cooled butter or margarine. Add the eggs and yeast mixture. Mix together all ingredients thoroughly and form into a ball. Cover and put in the refrigerator overnight.

3. The next morning, remove the dough from the refrigerator and uncover for about 1 hour.

4. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and grease 2 cookie sheets.

5. Divide the dough into 5 equal parts and mix the cinnamon and sugar. Cover a hard surface with the cinnamon and sugar. Flour the rolling pin and roll out each piece of dough into a 9-inch circle. Spread with some of the apricot preserves and sprinkle with the raisins. Cut into 10 wedges and roll each wedge from the wide end to the point. Curve to make a crescent, making sure the points are on the bottom.

5. Put the crescents on the cookie sheets. Bake until golden brown, about 15 to 20 minutes. Remove from the cookie sheet immediately or they will stick. Rugelach freeze very well.

Yield: About 50 rugelach

Grandma Bessie Weinstein’s Schnecken
Adapted from Stephanie Levine

8 ounces cream cheese
8 ounces butter
2 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for rolling out dough
1 18-ounce jar apricot preserves
2 cups chopped walnuts
3 cups golden raisins
4 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon

1. Mix the cream cheese and butter in an electric mixer or by hand. Add enough flour to form into a ball. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and let sit overnight in the refrigerator.

2. The next day, take the dough out of the refrigerator at least an hour before working. Separate the ball into 4 pieces. Put the apricot jam, walnuts, raisins, sugar, and cinnamon in separate bowls.

3. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees and line 2 cookie sheets with parchment paper.

4. Flour the surface and roll one piece of dough into a thin 8-by-12 rectangle. Spread the dough with 1/4 of the preserves and sprinkle with 1/3 of the nuts and raisins. Carefully roll the rectangle up until it is 12 inches long. Place seam side down on cookie sheet and liberally sprinkle with the cinnamon/sugar mixture. Repeat with the remaining 3 pieces of dough.

5. Bake logs for 30-40 minutes until slightly brown. When cool, cut with sharp knife into 2-inch pieces (any smaller and they will crumble) and serve.

Yield: About 5-6 dozen cookies

Note: You can freeze the uncooked logs and bake them (even) months later.

William Greenberg Jr.’s Schnecken
Adapted from Joan Nathan’s Jewish Holiday Cookbook

Dough
¾ pound (3 sticks) salted butter, at room temperature
½ cup sugar
3 large egg yolks
1 cup sour cream
3 tablespoons (3 packages) active dry yeast
1 ½ teaspoons white vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
5 ½-6 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

The Glaze and Filling
1 pound (4 sticks) salted butter
5 cups light brown sugar, loosely packed
2 cups roughly chopped pecans
1 tablespoon cinnamon
2 cups raisins, soaked in warm water a few minutes and drained

1. Place the butter and sugar in an electric mixer fitted with the paddle and cream at low speed until smooth. Add the egg yolks, 1 at a time, then the sour cream, yeast, vinegar, and vanilla, mixing at medium speed for about 3 minutes, until well incorporated.

2. Replace the paddle with the dough hook and add the flour gradually, mixing at a low speed for about 10 minutes. The dough will be soft and slightly sticky. Remove it, dust with flour, and divide into 2 pieces. Press each piece into a rectangle about 2 inches thick. Cover each piece with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.

3. The next day, cut 2 sticks of butter into 2-inch pieces and place them in a food processor fitted with the steel blade. Add 1 ¼ cups of the light-brown sugar and process until smooth. Remove the mixture to a bowl. Repeat with the remaining butter and 1 ¼ cups more of the sugar. Spoon the creamed butter-sugar mixture into the bottoms of 24 3-inch or 48 2-inch muffin cups. Using a pastry brush or the back of a spoon, coat the inside of the cups completely with the butter mixture. At Greenberg’s, a pastry bag is used to do this.

4. Scatter the nuts generously over the butter-sugar mixture in the muffin cups and pat down gently.

5. Remove the dough from the refrigerator. Roll each portion into an 8-by-13-inch rectangle about ¼ inch thick for the 3-inch cups and 1/8 inch thick for the 2-inch cups.

6. Sprinkle each sheet of dough with 1 ¼ cups light-brown sugar, 1 ½ teaspoons cinnamon, and 1 cup raisins. Press a rolling pin gently over the filling. Roll the dough up carefully and tightly from the long side.

7. Trim the ends of the rolls slightly and cut each into 12 slices, about 1 inch thick for the regular schnecken and ½ inch thick for the mini schnecken. Place in the muffin tins, cut side down, so that the swirls are face up. Press them down gently into the tins. Then let the schnecken rise, covered with plastic wrap, for 30 minutes.

8. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees and bake the schnecken on the middle rack until golden, about 40 minutes, resting the tins on top of a cookie sheet in case there are spills. Remove them from the oven and immediately invert them onto waxed paper.

Yield: About two dozen

When I heard about the burekas at Avigdor’s Café in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., I was so eager to try them that I headed to this glatt kosher dairy café set back from Stirling Highway late at night, after a book talk. I have been in love with burekas, Turkish turnovers, since I lived and worked in Jerusalem in the 1970s. Every Friday morning, a municipal worker named Simontov brought them on a tray—flaky and filled with cheese or spinach or both—with Turkish coffee to the office where I was working. Although I have never found their equal, Avigdor’s, filled with spinach, cheese, and potatoes in a variety of shapes, made with prepared puff pastry, were quite good. In addition, the menu included such dishes as jahnoun, that Yemenite precurser to the kugel, served with hot sauces for Sabbath breakfast, and panko-coated fried eggplant with pesto and mozzarella. There was something very Israeli—with its good coffee and mint tea—and nostalgic about the café, which is located in a house next to a religious fellowship center that plays evangelical music.

Neal Cooper is the Jewish chef-owner of the tiny Petit Rouge on Biscayne Boulevard in Miami. Neal had contacted my publisher and invited me to dinner at his restaurant while I was in town. His menu, featuring French bistro food with touches of American cuisine, did not disappoint. It includes a tarte flambee, a thin crisp Alsatian tarte with cheese on top, trout from Grenoble, with a beurre blanc sauce and capers, and delicious tarte au citron.

In Dallas, Natalie’s Kosher Kitchen is the fleyshig equivalent of Avigdor’s, housed in one of the few kosher markets in the area. Natalie’s is run by Mordecai and Natalie Pinhas, he from Israel and she from Malaga, Spain, where members of her family have lived since before the Inquisition. Natalie’s is typical of many kosher restaurants I have seen around this country: Usually run by ex-Israelis, they either offer a small grocery within the restaurant or serve meals as part as a larger kosher market, always with bare-bones decor. In addition to good homemade hummus, Natalie’s features schwarma and Israeli and Mediterranean salads such as mambuchta, one of my favorites, with tomatoes cooked down to perfection. It also serves grilled meats and yummy eggplant dishes for vegetarians.

When I started this tour, I thought I would write about the many delis around the country, but for the most part they disappointed me. The exceptions were the smoked fish and the huge black-and-white cookies at the white-tiled 4th Street Deli in Philadelphia and the Montreal smoked meat I tasted at Brooklyn’s tiny Mile End.

In Los Angeles, I had hoped to get to Langer’s for my favorite pastrami sandwich. But in San Francisco, where people eat and breathe food, I met Leo Beckerman and Evan Bloom, two twentysomethings who are opening their own deli, Wise Sons Jewish Delicatessen, in several months. (Location yet to be determined.) Like Mile End’s Noah Bernamoff, these thoughtful boys are updating familial cuisines with bold style. I tasted their breads, a salty challah and rye bread, good enough to replace most caraway ryes and challahs in bakeries today. Stay tuned.

At the Hummus King, located in a strip mall on Burbank Boulevard in North Hollywood, Calif., the bar boasts 10 different kinds of hummus, all delicious, made from dried chickpeas from such places as Jerusalem, Jaffo, Akko, and Jordan. The varieties were similar—how dissimilar can hummus be?— but the Jerusalem was thicker and chunkier, with Jaffa and Akko thinner and smoother. Some had cilantro, some had garlic with a hint of cumin, some hot pepper, and some were simply sesame paste, salt, and chick peas. (It’s interesting that the word hummus refers to both chick peas and the dish in both Arabic and Hebrew.) The Hummus King also features a unique vegetarian schwarma made from soy. Its young owner, Jason Aballi, roamed Israel, Greece, and Jordan in search of the ultimate hummus and opened his operation, featuring the fruits of his labor, six months ago.

I have wanted to visit the modern Israeli restaurant Zahav in Philadelphia since it opened in 2008. Run by Israeli-born chef Michael Solomonov, who has been named a finalist for the James Beard award, Zahav serves elegant but homey dishes like fried cauliflower with labneh and a flatbread pizza that emerges from an authentic wood-burning taboon oven. Philadelphia, it seems, fosters Jewish chefs. Solomonov’s friend Alon Shaya, also from the City of Brotherly Love, is now the chef at John Besh’s Domenica in New Orleans, a beautiful restaurant featuring great inventive pizza, charcuterie, and pastas.

Like Philadelphia and New Orleans, Pittsburgh has lots of young people flocking to it, and it features one of the coolest fish stores I have ever seen. Located in the Strip District, the city’s historic market, the Penn Avenue Fish Company is part fish store, part restaurant. Henry Dewey, the co-proprietor, has an edgy aesthetic (his warehouselike space has a fisherman’s boat suspended from the ceiling) and spent years working at Benkovitz, the oldest fish market in Pittsburgh. Today many of the city’s Jewish residents buy the carp, whitefish, and pike they use for gefilte fish from Penn Avenue.

While on a TV show in Pittsburgh, I met Bill Fuller, the corporate chef of the Big Burrito Restaurant Group, and later stopped by Casbah, one of its restaurants, where Bill was cooking dinner. I tasted a delicious diced sautéed eggplant, slightly sweet and more than slightly sour, with the addition of citric acid usually served with roast lamb. It’s just the thing with which to ring in the new year.

Caponata
Adapted From Bill Fuller

2 large eggplants, peeled and diced into ½-inch cubes
2-4 tablespoons olive oil, as needed for sautéing
Salt and pepper to taste
2 lemons, zest and juice
1 orange, zest and juice
2 tablespoons sherry or apple cider vinegar
¼ teaspoon citric acid or sour salt to taste
1 tablespoon capers, drained, rinsed, chopped finely
2 tablespoons fresh oregano, chopped, or one tablespoon dried oregano
2 teaspoons garlic, finely minced
3 tablespoons honey or to taste
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 cup celery (about 2 stalks), cut first in julienne strips and diced

1. Heat a wide skillet over high heat, and add some of the olive oil. Sauté the eggplant in batches (adding more olive oil with each batch) so that the pan is never crowded, adding salt and pepper to taste. When the eggplant is soft but not mushy (about 10 minutes) remove to a wide baking dish or bowl.

2. Stir in the lemon and orange zest and juice, the vinegar, citric acid, capers, oregano, garlic, honey, cayenne pepper, and celery. Mix well, taste, and adjust spices accordingly. Serve at room temperature as a dip or spread, or as a warm garniture for lamb. Can be made up to five days in advance.

Yield: 5 cups (serves 8-10 as an appetizer).

It was a funny moment, but the daughter was making a crucial point: She felt her mother’s cooking made her family different from other families, and she wanted to protect that difference. Like many Jewish women, she was also superstitious. K’naina hora—even recipes should stay in the family.

There’s a good argument for those kinds of traditions, too. I believe that children not only need but crave repetitive traditional foods to reinforce the folkways of their household. The question of traditions and how we impart them to our children is especially on the mind at this time of year, with Thanksgiving and Hanukkah right around the corner. We’re all busy, and it can be time-consuming to put a meal on the table, but if someone lives on a steady diet of take-out dishes, no matter how healthful, then take-out dishes are what their memories will contain. One young woman told me that she had perhaps three homemade meals in her home per year. What memories will she have, and what traditions will she transmit to her own children?

The encounter in Detroit recalled another book tour of mine, five years ago, when I made a stop in Brookline, Mass., at the home of Myra Kraft, a childhood friend, and her husband, Robert, the owner of the New England Patriots and a sponsor of the Israeli Football League. The Krafts had organized a get-together of about 35 people, mostly mothers and daughters, for a cooking demonstration.

Because many more people attended than Myra had originally planned, not everyone fit in the Krafts’ kitchen. With the help of the video team from Gillette Stadium, where the Patriots play, many of the Krafts’ guests watched me on closed-circuit television throughout the house as I cooked newfangled Jewish food, like fish with ginger and scallions and wafer-thin chocolate macaroons, both recipes that appeared in my book New American Cooking. After the demonstration of these modern foods, we discussed the transmission of recipes from one generation to the next and the importance of traditional food in making memories for children.

“Foods at different holidays are very important for children to remember,” said Myra, whom I first met years ago at a meeting of the New England Federation of Temple Youth in Hartford, Conn. Two dishes that she says her grandkids love to eat are her brisket and her tsimmes, made of sweet potatoes and carrots and topped with a potato crust. She serves her tsimmes for Rosh Hashanah and Passover. I serve mine for Hanukkah.

Her brisket is first cooked, then the vegetables are added, and then it is sealed and cooked again in a golden potato crust. She got this recipe from her Russian forebears, who originally settled in Worcester, Mass. Like many of us, Myra is busy—she is a leader of the Boys and Girls Clubs and the Jewish Federation, to name two organizations—and she sometimes cooks her dishes ahead of time and freezes them, to ensure she’ll have them whenever she needs them.

For the Krafts and other families, these recipes bind the family. There are jokes made about them, and love transmitted through them. They are what make family folklore and what helps to differentiate one family from the next.

Annette Lerner, of Chevy Chase, Md., agrees. “Once I got a phone call from my grandson Jonathan, who was at NYU,” said Annette, who represents a new type of grandmother, one who exercises, sculpts, and cooks. “ ‘Nana,’ he said. ‘I want your chicken soup.’ When I told him that he could get better soup from the Second Avenue Deli, located around the corner from his dorm, he said, ‘But it is not your chicken soup.’ ” So, Annette dutifully made chicken soup, packed it in dried ice, and sent it to New York, where her grandson put it in his dorm refrigerator. “That was the most expensive chicken soup he ever ate,” she said.

For Annette and her husband, Ted, owners of the Washington Nationals, Jewish traditions are such an important part of their lives that they will not go to ballgames on Friday nights. “Ted is rather observant,” she said. “We always have Friday-night dinner at home. When the children are in D.C., they always come to our house for Friday.”

Not only does Annette serve kosher food at home, but her butcher sends kosher meat to the president’s suite at Nationals Park, to be cooked there and served to guests. Annette is known for her apple cake and mandelbrot, which she brings to guests at the Nationals games. “These foods are ‘Grandma love,’ ” she said, adding that her apple cake is “a very, very old recipe from Russia” that her mother used when she started baking in Northern Virginia. “She measured by eggshells instead of cups. I updated the apple cake by adding the nuts, chopping the apples more, and I make the layers fancier. We have been making that cake for over 75 years, and it is still the family favorite.”

BEEF TSIMMES WITH POTATO KUGEL TOPPING
Adapted from The Way We Cook, by Sheryl Julian & Julie Riven

For the Brisket:
1 6-pound double brisket of beef
2 quarts of water, or more as needed
½ teaspoon coarse salt, or to taste
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, or to taste
6 large sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into 2-inch pieces
2 pounds carrots, peeled and cut into ½-inch pieces
1 cup pitted prunes
1 cup dried apricots
1 cup honey
1 cup pineapple juice
1 cup orange juice

1. Put the meat in a large flame-proof casserole and add enough of the water to cover it. Sprinkle with the salt and pepper and bring to a boil. Cover the pot and reduce the heat to low and simmer for 1 ½ hours.
2. During the last 15 minutes of simmering time, set the oven at 300 degrees. Transfer the meat and liquid to a large roasting pan. Add the sweet potatoes, carrots, prunes, apricots, honey, pineapple, and orange juices. Sprinkle with salt, cover with foil, shiny-side down, and transfer the pan to the oven.
3. Cook for 4 ½ to 5 hours, adding more water to the pan, ¼ cup at a time, if the mixture seems dry, until the meat is very tender.
4. Remove from the oven and set aside to cool. Cover, refrigerate overnight, and skim the fat from the cooking liquid.
5. Cut the meat on the diagonal into thin slices. Arrange the meat, vegetables, and cooking liquid in a large roasting pan and set aside while you prepare the kugel.

For the Potato Kugel:
4 large eggs
1 teaspoon coarse salt, or to taste
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, or to taste
2 medium Spanish onions, grated
2 russet (baking) potatoes, peeled and grated
2-3 tablespoons chicken fat or vegetable oil
2/3 cup matzo meal
1 ½ cups cold water

1. Set the oven at 350 degrees. Combine the eggs, salt, and pepper in a large bowl. With a wooden spoon, stir the mixture for 1 minute. Stir in the onions, potatoes, chicken fat or oil, matzo meal, and water. Cover the bowl and refrigerate for 1 hour, or until it thickens. The mixture may seem watery, but it will thicken as it sits.
2. Spoon the potato mixture in mounds over the meat in the roasting pan. Bake for 1 hour, or until the kugel topping is golden brown and the meat and vegetables are hot.
Yields: 10-12 servings

GRANDMA LILL’S APPLE CAKE
Adapted from Annette Lerner
4 medium baking apples, such as McIntosh or Cortland
2 ¼ cups sugar
1 tablespoon cinnamon
1 cup chopped walnuts or raisins (optional)
4 large eggs
3 cups all purpose or pastry flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup vegetable oil
7 tablespoons orange juice
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 tablespoons confectioners’ sugar

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and lightly grease a spring-form pan or a bundt pan and dust with flour. Set aside.
2. Core, peel, and cut the apples into ¼-inch slivers in a bowl. Mix ¼ cup of the sugar, the cinnamon, walnuts and/or raisins, and sprinkle over the apples. Set aside.
3. In a large bowl, beat the remaining sugar and eggs together until creamy. In a separate bowl sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt.
4. Gently stir in 1/3 of the dry mixture to the sugar/eggs and then add ½ of the oil. Continue alternating until all ingredients are used. Add the orange juice and the vanilla.
5. Pour a layer of batter into the pan then top with a layer of apples. Repeat, creating layers, until all the ingredients are used. Finish with a thin layer of apple slivers.
6. Bake for 60 to 70 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Be sure not to underbake. When the cake has cooled, sprinkle with confectioners sugar and serve.
Yields: 12 servings

Today, France has the third-largest Jewish population in the world, about 600,000, with approximately half that number living in Paris. Despite successive waves of anti-Semitic violence, expulsion, and disfavor throughout history, France has generally been a pays d’accueil, a welcoming country for Jews. While the population has waxed and waned, there has been a continuous presence of Jewish communities in much of what is now France since the 1st century, and possibly before.

Paris has seen an enormous ebb and flow of Jews since the first Jewish community was established in the 6th century just south of what is now the Cathedral of Notre Dame. The Parisian Jewish population surged in the late 19th century, with more than 100,000 Jews coming to France after fleeing pogroms and poverty in Russia, Poland, and Romania. And, in 1870, the Jewish population of Algeria received French citizenship, making it easy for Jews to immigrate. In July 1942, some 13,000 Jews living in Paris were arrested in a mass roundup by the French police and killed at Auschwitz. The Jewish population of France didn’t see growth again until the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the Jews of North Africa immigrated in droves to France after countries like Tunisia and Algeria declared independence. This doubled France’s Jewish population almost overnight.

Today, the second generation of North African Jews has given a positive boost to Jewish French life, creating and sometimes resurrecting communities in Paris and other cities from which so many left during World War II. Jews have also moved to new areas of Paris and its suburbs and redefined certain traditional Jewish neighborhoods like the Grands Boulevards, the 9th Arrondissement, and Rue des Rosiers in the Marais. Lubavitchers and other Hasidic sects have also come to France, directing Orthodox schools, kosher restaurants, and grocery stores.

Contemporary Parisian life is very different from the 1960s, when I spent a year there as a student. That was a time when Jews who had been in France for generations were still in the majority, as were their traditions and their palates. In more recent years, as the children of these French Jews intermarried and became more adventurous about trying different recipes, Paris has seen a new and exciting openness in its Jewish population.

Many years ago I discovered Le Monde des Épices (the world of spices), a tiny shop on the rue François-Miron near the Marais, the area where Jews were ordered to live in the 13th century after being expelled from the city limits. As the years pass, this food emporium, first on my list of places to visit, seems to get better and better. Inside, signs written on cracked pieces of pottery label burlap sacks filled with bulgur for taboulleh and barrels overflowing with homemade preserved lemons from Morocco. Olives are marinated with a variety of pungent flavors: orange peel, fresh garlic, kumquats, cranberries, parsley, Indian Tellicherry peppers, and star anise from Asia.

In the postwar years, the shop, originally opened in 1945 by Samuel Izrael, a Polish immigrant, catered to a largely Jewish clientele, mostly Eastern European refugees who came for the homemade pickles. By the time I first discovered the store in 1964, the shop was frequented by recent immigrants from Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. Spices like cumin and coriander were completely new to me then. Today, most people who walk in don’t have a clue that it is a Jewish store; it caters to all lovers of exotic cuisine. The spices themselves illustrate a colorful history of food in France, a history that stretches back for centuries.

The heart of Jewish Paris is a central square near the Metro St. Paul, often referred to in Yiddish as the pletzel. As holidays approach, Parisian Jews flock here to buy skullcaps, prayer books, challahs, and cakes.

Like the Lower East Side of New York City, the Marais is now filled with chic fashion boutiques and bars, transforming it from a quaint shtetl into a buzzing neighborhood. Many of the old bookshops and restaurants have closed, but the shops that are left in this ancient quarter with its narrow streets still overflow with delicacies from Eastern Europe, France, Israel, and North Africa. Today you’ll find homemade farfel (tiny bits of pasta) and great falafel as well as fijuelas and other Sephardic delicacies.

In the past the pletzel has also served as a meeting place for Jews in less auspicious circumstances. Escaping the pogroms of Eastern Europe in 1881, Jews flocked here in large numbers, more than half of them from Poland. During World War II’s police rafles (round-ups) of Jews, many called out to each other as they were separated to meet in the pletzel if they survived.

Whenever I visit the Marais, I stop in at Florence Finkelsztajn’s Traiteur Delicatessen. The quarter has two Finkelsztajn delicatessens, one trimmed in yellow (Florence’s ex husband’s) and one in blue (Florence’s). According to Gilles Pudlowski, a gastronomic critic of Polish Jewish origin who writes the popular Pudlo restaurant guides, Florence’s store is the best place to satisfy a nostalgic craving for Eastern European cooking. In addition to Central European Yiddish specialties like herring, chopped liver, and pastrami, Florence also sells pletzel—a round, flat onion bread; like a bialy, only larger— baked in the back of the shop. Eat the pletzel hot from the oven or as a big pletzlach sandwich stuffed with fillings as varied as the different ethnicities of Jews living in Paris today: Alsatian pickelfleish (corned beef), Romanian pastrami, Russian eggplant caviar, North African roasted peppers, and French tomato and lettuce.

What would Paris be without outdoor markets? You can see so many all over the city. But for me, “little Tunis,” the multicultural and bustling Belleville market, populated with French farmers and merchants from North Africa, is a must. In the restaurants and stores bordering the market, you feel as if you are actually in North Africa as Tunisians and others congregate at kosher and halal restaurants, bars, and bakeries. You also feel the influence of the Italian tenure in Tunisia: Italian bread, beignets shaped like the Italian manicotti, and canned tuna in olive oil.

In 1966 when Alexandre Zbirou came to France from Tunisia to study marketing, few good kosher restaurants existed in Paris. In 1976, he opened a French restaurant called Au Rendez Vous, La Maison du Couscous in the 8th Arrondissement near the Champs Élysées. Four years later, he turned it into a kosher Tunisian restaurant, the only one of its kind in the quarter. Today, there are more than 38 kosher restaurants in the 8th Arrondissement alone. “I saw Jews arriving in the quarter,” he told me over lunch at his restaurant. “They came and I was waiting for them. It was home cooking for Tunisians and Ashkenazim. After all, there are lots of mixed marriages here in France.”

Despite the kosher menu, his restaurant does not close on Friday night or Saturday. “I feel that we are rendering a service to kosher clientele, to give them a kosher meal for the Sabbath,” he said. Other restaurants, under the supervision of the Parisian Rabbinical Authority called the Beth Din, are either closed for the Sabbath or are open only to customers who pay in advance.

Sitting down at Zbirou’s restaurant, we were first served an array of kemia, similar to the ubiquitous mezze at Arab restaurants. We began with flaky brik, filled with potatoes, parsley, and hard-boiled eggs. At least a dozen salads followed, served on tiny plates, all brimming with bold colors and flavors. Some of my favorites were raw artichoke slivers with harissa, oil, and onions and turnips with bitter orange.

Recently, a second generation of North African Jews has opened a number of stylish kosher restaurants in Paris. One is the super chic l’Osmose, which calls itself a fusion and health-food restaurant. The evening that I dined there, the space was packed with well-dressed young French couples who could clearly afford the steep prices. The food, prepared by the Tunisian-born Jewish chef Yoni Saada and his family, is delicious and sophisticated. Our meal began with a long narrow plate filled with cumin-roasted almonds, fava beans, and tiny olives, and a tasty carrot-and-mango soup served in a champagne glass. The first course was a tomato cappuccino and a salmon tartare with avocado. The second was a sizable entrecôte steak with tiny roasted potatoes and a confit of onions. And for dessert: an extravagant plate of the now-classic molten chocolate cake topped with little marshmallow lollipops. The restaurant’s menu could have fit in anywhere, but only in Paris could it be both chic and kosher. Yoni confessed to me his great ambition: to be the first kosher Michelin-star rated chef in France.

What was most fun for me in Paris was to peek into the kitchens of home cooks. On a fall Saturday afternoon, I was invited for lunch at the home of my cousin David Moos, an investment banker, and his wife Carène, a divorce lawyer. As I walked to their apartment building on the outskirts of Paris in Boulogne, I passed by the Edmond de Rothschild Park and the Albert Kahn Museum and Gardens, both reminding me of the Jewish presence in this lovely suburb. David, Carène, and their three adorable children, Hanna, Simon, and Natan, live in a top-floor duplex strewn with the happy clutter of children’s playthings.

Carène comes from very humble Jewish origins in Algeria, where her grandmother was a cleaning lady for rich French colonists, but her food is not humble at all. David, whose family is of southern German and French Jewish background, loves her North African dishes. At this Sabbath lunch, Carène prepared many salads for the first course: fennel, avocado with lemon and cilantro, sautéed eggplant, eggplant caviar, sautéed mushrooms, and tchoukchouha (grilled peppers and tomatoes slowly cooked to a jam-like consistency).

The entrée was adafina, a Moroccan Sabbath dish, cooked overnight. Adafina varies according to the cook. Algerians who live near Tunisia, for example, might add white beans while some Tunisians add spinach. For dessert we had strawberries and raspberries topped with meringue. Afterward we sipped our coffee on the rooftop, where we could hear the sounds of children playing outside and enjoy a lovely view of the Eiffel Tower. It was a beautiful and relaxing Shabbat lunch in Paris.

CARENE MOOS’ DAF MAROCAINE (SABBATH MEAT STEW WITH CHICKPEAS AND RICE)

1 cup dry chickpeas
3 cups wheat berries
1 cup vegetable oil
2 onions, roughly chopped
1/3 cup raisins (In Alsace and the south of France, prunes or dates are often substituted for the raisins.)
2 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons sea salt plus more to taste
3/4 teaspoon turmeric
½ teaspoon paprika
½ teaspoon hot red pepper, such as cayenne pepper
½ teaspoon crushed pepper flakes
3 pounds chuck roast or brisket
12 small red bliss, Yukon gold, or new potatoes
½ teaspoon cumin
2 cups long grain rice
1 garlic clove, peeled, plus 1 whole head of garlic
2 sweet potatoes, peeled and halved
4 large eggs in the shell
½ cup honey

1. Two days before serving, fill 2 bowls with warm water. Pour the chickpeas into one bowl and the wheat berries into another. The next morning drain both and set aside separately.

2. Heat 4 tablespoons of the oil in a large ovenproof casserole. Add the chickpeas, onions, raisins, and sugar, sautéing for about 5 minutes.

3. Make a rub of ¼ teaspoon each of the salt, turmeric, paprika, hot pepper, and pepper flakes and rub on the meat. Put the meat in the casserole and scatter the potatoes around, then fill the pot with enough water to cover and bring to a boil.

4. In a separate bowl, mix the wheat berries with another 2 tablespoons of the oil, 1 teaspoon salt, and the cumin. Then place the berries in a cheese-cloth and loosely tie it up, keeping in mind that the wheat berries will expand as they cook.

5. In another bowl, mix the rice with the remaining 2 tablespoons oil, another teaspoon salt, the garlic clove, and the remaining turmeric, paprika, hot pepper, and pepper flakes. Tie the rice up in another piece of cheesecloth as you did for the wheat berries, again leaving room to expand.

6. Place the sacks in the casserole and add the head of garlic, the sweet potatoes, and the eggs. Bring the stew to a boil and simmer, covered, for an hour and 45 minutes.

7. Preheat the oven to 250 degrees and remove the cover, drizzle honey over all, and cook in the oven for at least 5 hours or until the vegetables are reddish brown. (You can also cook the adafina in a 200-degree oven overnight.)

8. To serve, remove the bundles of rice and wheat berries. Spoon the meat and vegetables onto a platter with a slotted spoon, and pile the grains and eggs in their shells around them.

Yield: 8 to 10 servings

FLORENCE’S PLETZLACH

1 scant tablespoon active dry yeast
4 tablespoons sugar
4 to 5 cups all-purpose flour
2 large eggs
¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 teaspoons salt
3 cups diced onions
¼ cup poppy seeds

1. Pour 1 cup lukewarm water into a large bowl. Stir in the yeast and the sugar. Add 4 cups of flour, the eggs, ¼ cup of the oil, and the salt. Mix well and knead for about 10 minutes or until smooth, adding more flour if necessary. Or use a food processor or a standing mixer with a dough hook.

2. Transfer the dough to a greased bowl and let rise, covered, for 1 hour. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees and grease 2 cookie sheets.

3. Divide the dough into 12 balls, and roll or flatten them out into rounds about 6 inches in diameter. Put the rounds on the cookie sheets, and make thumbprints in the centers.

4. Brush the dough with cold water, and sprinkle about 1/4 cup of onion in each indentation. Brush the onions with the remaining vegetable oil, and sprinkle the poppy seeds on top. Let sit for 15 minutes, uncovered.

5. Bake for 20 minutes. Then, if you like, slip the pletzel under the broiler for a minute to brown the onions. Serve lukewarm as is or in a big pletzel sandwich.

Yield: 12 pletzlach

L’OSMOSE’S MOLTON CHOCOLATE CAKE

Cocoa powder, for dusting
2 sticks unsalted butter or pareve margarine, plus more for greasing
10 ounces bittersweet chocolate
6 large eggs
1 1/3 cups sugar
½ cup all-purpose flour
Pinch of salt
Confectioners’ sugar for garnish
Strawberries or raspberries for garnish

1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees and grease a 9-inch round cake pan or 18 muffin tins with butter or margarine and lightly dust them with cocoa powder. Tap out the excess cocoa.

2. Melt together the butter and the chocolate in a double boiler. Remove from the heat and let cool for about 10 minutes.

3. Beat together the eggs and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer set on medium-high speed until pale yellow. Lower the speed, and pour in the chocolate. Add the flour and salt, mixing gently, until just combined. Do not over-beat.

4. Pour the batter into the cake pan or divide evenly among the muffin tins, filling them about half full. (At this point, you can cover and refrigerate the batter for several hours or overnight; just make sure to leave time to bring them to room temperature before baking.)

5. Bake for about 10 minutes for the muffins or about 20 for the cake. The center should still be soft, but the sides should be dry and set. Let cool for a few minutes before running a knife around each tin and inverting the cakes onto a cookie sheet. Quickly turn each cake back over and place on a large platter or individual serving plates. Serve sprinkled with confectioners’ sugar and garnish with fresh berries.

Yield: One 9-inch cake or 18 individual cakes

This column and its recipes are excerpted in part from Joan Nathan’s new book, Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France, which has just been released.

At the height of its powers, the empire’s mighty reach extended from Sudan in the south to Herzegovina and Budapest in the north. The Turks introduced an enormous number of culinary techniques and recipes to their lands. In Palestine, Turks taught Arab bakers to make flat, layered pastries like baklava. In Hungary, which the Ottomans ruled between 1541 and 1699, Turks instructed the Hungarians on how to make layers of paper-thin pastries, while the Hungarians shared their custom of twisting them into rolls like strudel. A sweet roll made with yogurt in Turkey became a buttery delicacy called pogaca in Hungary. Jews, too, picked up these techniques in the latter part of the reign. Under Ottoman tutelage, Turkish, Balkan, and Greek Jews prepared burekas, boyos, baklava, eggplant dishes, and some kinds of yogurt. It is difficult to pinpoint where these recipes originated but they evolved and moved throughout the Balkans and Turkey.

According to Edward Luttwak, a historian and the author of The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman army was the first to spread recipes and cooking techniques. The elite Janissary corps, which Luttwak calls “the first modern force since Roman times,” made a big soup called chorba an integral part of its soldiers’ diet. “Only by eating this thick halal meat soup with vegetables and beans were they able to avoid dysentery, which was responsible for most deaths,” Luttwak says.

The soldiers also ate basturma as a part of their rations, a halal meat that is sliced, wind-dried, and pickled with dried spices before being pressed together again. “This technique was invented by the Byzantines, adopted by the Ottomans, and circulated everywhere,” says Luttwak. He points out that pastrami has its roots in basturma. Romania and Transylvania, which were part of the Turkish Empire from the mid-16th to the 18th century, “had the highest fertility rates … and the lowest population density,” Luttwak says. “With lots of animals there was lots of meat. This technique of curing was important for the Jews, who were a mobile community.” Jewish peddlers in Romania and elsewhere quickly learned how the Turks cured their meat and began curing kosher meat in the same way, no doubt adding more garlic, black pepper, and lots of paprika. It served them well on their long journeys away from their kosher homes.

Jews who lived on the coasts of the Turkish Empire in places such as Izmir, Salonika, and Istanbul, had different ingredients available to them; they could rely on the abundance the Mediterranean had to offer.

After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal in 1492, merchants fanned out across the Mediterranean. “With Istanbul, Izmir, and Salonika as centers of Judeo-Spanish culture, the dishes brought from Spain were adopted in many Muslim countries, including Egypt,” says Claudia Roden, the author of The Book of Jewish Food and a scholar-in-residence at Yale University this year. The Jews played an essential role as merchants. “In Aleppo”—in Northern Syria—“they were in the caravan of camels,” Roden says. “Theirs was a sort of symbiotic relationship. Jews and Armenians were the merchants and traders.”

As Jewish Sephardic merchants settled in these cities they adapted their own dishes to the local provisions and the dietary laws. Roden cites distinctly Jewish Sephardic dishes, like calzone, a ravioli stuffed with cheese, and her famous gâteau à l’orange, a Jewish orange cake that she learned about from a relative in Salonika, Greece, whose ancestors came from Livorno and, before that, Portugal. These recipes wound their way through the Ottoman Empire. “No Muslim makes an orange cake,” says Roden, whose family carried their own recipes from Spain to Egypt to England. “Only Jews make an orange cake.”

During the Turkish Empire, from the late 16th to early 18th centuries, Jews played an important part in spreading tomatoes, potatoes, and peppers from the New World to the Old. Jewish and Arab doctors knew that tomatoes were edible despite fears among many Jews that this member of the nightshade family was poisonous. Between the doctors and the merchants, these foods were slowly accepted, and people began eating them, first cooked and eventually raw.

A few months ago, when I was testing a stuffed vegetable recipe with meat for an article I was writing, I invited some friends over. The guests loved the stuffed tomatoes, peppers, squash, and onions, infused with fragrant spices. Stuffed vegetables, often called medias, is a Spanish dish of likely Jewish Catalonian origins that journeyed throughout the Turkish Empire, possibly beginning with Sephardic Jews who left Spain during the Inquisition. One of my guests, a Jewish woman who grew up in Egypt, had remained quiet during the dinner conversation. I feared her silence meant she didn’t like the dish. I called her the next day, and she reassured me this wasn’t the case. As a young girl in Alexandria, the daughter of a Syrian mother and an Egyptian father, she ate a stuffed vegetable that was similar to the one I had made. Similar and yet different; the stuffed vegetable of her childhood had a lighter meat mix.

Even one recipe, like stuffed vegetables, can vary tremendously. Depending on the route each family took, the filling of meat might be mixed with eggs, matzo meal, or nuts and condiments like cinnamon, allspice, and mint. The casing itself might be artichokes, carrots, or even beets covered in a sauce made from the spices of the filling and tomatoes. Each ingredient can speak volumes of a family’s history.

Recently I learned of a 90-year-old woman with the wonderful name of Violette Corcos Abulafia Tapiero Budestchu. Born in Mogador, on the Moroccan coast, Madame “Granny” Budestchu, who now splits her time between Israel and France, is a fabulous cook. According to her granddaughter Dafne Tapiero, Granny is a descendant of Kabbalists, prominent merchants, and royal counselors to the sultans and kings of Morocco.

When Granny cooks her spice-scented lentils or her fried artichokes, the subtle flavors bring back memories of the Morocco of her childhood. But her grandchildren or great-grandchildren have different associations; when they prepare these same dishes, the smells recall memories of afternoon and evening visits to Granny’s apartments in Jerusalem and near Avenue Victor Hugo in Paris. Granny’s recipes can be traced back to 12th-century Spain, when her Abulafia forebears served as traders throughout the Ottoman Empire, traveling from Turkey to Palestine’s Tiberias. The slight variations in recipes, tasted over and over again, create meaningful food memories, so salient for all of us and so entangled in the historical wanderings of Jews.

FRIED ARTICHOKES, JEWISH STYLE
Adapted from Quiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France
12 small artichokes, or 4 10-ounce boxes of frozen artichoke hearts or artichoke quarters
Coarse salt to taste
Olive oil for frying
The juice of 1 lemon
6 cloves of garlic, crushed
3 tablespoons chopped fresh chives
3 tablespoons chopped cilantro
3 tablespoons chopped parsley
Coarsely ground pepper to taste

1. If using fresh artichokes, snap off the outer leaves, leaving only the pale inner leaves. Trim the stems and cut off the thorny tops about ¾ of an inch down. Take a sharp knife and smash the artichokes so that the leaves look as if they are blooming like a flower.

2. Put the trimmed artichokes in a bowl and cover with cold water and the lemon juice (the juice keeps them from turning brown). If using frozen artichokes, defrost them in the refrigerator the night before. The next morning, sprinkle with salt and let sit for an hour or so.

3. Line 2 cookie sheets with parchment paper. Heat the olive oil in a deep fryer, heavy pan, or a wok until it reaches 375 degrees. Pat the artichokes dry and lower a few at a time into the hot oil. Fry until golden brown, crispy, and puffed up.

4. Using a wire strainer, transfer the artichokes to the paper towel or parchment-lined pans to soak up all the excess oil. Gently press out any excess oil, but don’t crush the artichokes! Continue frying the rest of the artichokes in batches.

5. Toss while still warm with lemon juice, crushed garlic, and fresh chives, cilantro, and parsley. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve at room temperature.
Yield: About 8 servings

GÂTEAU A L’ORANGE
Adapted from The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey From Samarkand to New York, by Claudia Roden

2 oranges
6 eggs
1 ¼ cups sugar
2 tablespoons orange-blossom water
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 ½ cups blanched almonds, coarsely ground

1. Wash the oranges and boil them whole for 1 ½ hours, or until they are very soft.

2. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Oil a 9-inch cake pan, preferably nonstick and with a removable base, and dust with matzo meal or flour.

3. Beat the eggs with the sugar. Add the orange-blossom water, baking powder and almonds and mix well. Cut open the oranges, remove the seeds, and puree in a food processor. Mix thoroughly with the egg-and-almond mixture and pour into cake pan. Bake for one hour. Let cake cool before turning out.

Joan Nathan’s new book, Quiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France, will be published next month.

Click here to view all articles in this series.

Learning about food traditions is a major challenge in every mixed marriage, but perhaps more so when one partner is Jewish and the other must learn from scratch how to navigate both kashrut and the culinary customs that characterize the cycle of holidays that kicks off anew next week, with Rosh Hashanah.

“When you grow up outside the tradition you don’t know the holidays,” said Colleen Fain, 63, a community volunteer in Coral Gables, Florida, who converted to Judaism when she got married more than 40 years ago. “You have to learn the rituals, and it’s hard to pass that down when you are not familiar or comfortable with them. The convert has to work really hard to understand the customs so they unify the family.”

For Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks, 54, who converted when she married writer Tony Horwitz, Judaism was a natural progression. “I didn’t know any Jews growing up,” Brooks said over a glass of wine on the porch of her Victorian home on Martha’s Vineyard, far from Australia, where she was born and raised. “For some reason my father was a lefty Zionist Socialist who got caught up with the Zionist movement, even though we were not Jewish. It rubbed off on me.” As a teenager, Brooks started wearing a star of David because “of my rabid history reading, especially about the Shoah to express identification with the Jewish people.” Conversion seemed “like the natural thing to do,” she said. It was a move “much more about history than faith, I wasn’t going to be the end of the line of a faith that survived so many years.”

Brooks knew Jewish deli food in New York and Ashkenazic cooking from Tony’s family, but she likes the Middle Eastern cuisine of Israel best. “When I lived in Cairo as a writer, I kept visiting Israel and loved the Levantine-inspired food,” she said. For breaking the fast after Yom Kippur, she goes Sephardic, sometimes serving Poopa Dweck’s Syrian brisket with fruit from her cookbook Aromas of Aleppo and other times harira, a rich Moroccan lamb-based vegetable soup often used to break the fast during Ramadan, which she first tasted when she was in Morocco in the late 1980s. “It was the only thing that got me up in the morning,” she said. “You feel like you have been fed with that.”

Brooks speaks passionately about cooking. When she doesn’t get challah from her son’s class at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center, where the students make it, she bakes it herself. “I like to get my hands in the dough, and I get some of my best novelistic ideas when making challah,” she said. “I chew over the issues from my morning’s writing and sometimes gnarly plot points resolve themselves. Turning the compost works well too.”

Tom Ashe similarly follows the Jewish rituals of his spouse, Joanne. The son of a police officer from Queens, Ashe converted when he married Joanne 33 years ago. The couple cooks together (during the holidays he plays the role of assistant; the rest of the time he’s in charge) and rarely host fewer than 10 family members on weekends in their home in Placitas, New Mexico. “Since I am a convert, each holiday brings back memories of when I was in my mid-20s and chose Judaism,” said Ashe, 58, a real estate developer. “They are definitely my holidays too, and I look forward to the foods, the smells, and the traditions. The Jewish palate is more eclectic than what I grew up with as a young Protestant boy in Queens. Jews have the whole world, from Middle Eastern to Asian foods.”

Although the Ashes still pull out Joanne’s mother’s recipes for the holidays, they occasionally tweak dishes, as in a delicious smoked brisket holiday recipe more reminiscent of the far West than Eastern Europe.

Veronica Goode knew nothing about Jewish customs growing up in Venezuela and had to learn everything—from Shabbat candle-lighting rules to what ingredients to include in a holiday meal. “Cooking Jewish is a real shock,” said Goode, 36, a social work student in Washington, D.C. “When I got married, I didn’t know how to cook anything Jewish, even brisket, so I called my step mother-in-law.” Veronica now makes her recipes with lots of onions, tomato paste, and long cooking. Her one complaint: “I haven’t learned to make matzoh balls yet.”

Goode underlined a lament I have heard from many converts I meet at book signings and other events. Judaism is intimidating, and they need a gentle soul to mentor them through the traditions.

“The best thing to do is to ask friends and relatives for recipes and don’t be afraid to try them,” said Fain. When she first wanted to make kugel, for example, she asked her sister-in-law, Sally Ann Epstein, who had a family recipe from a cousin for help. Fain was not afraid to ask, Epstein was flattered, and now making that kugel—a dairy version more appropriate for a break-fast—is a family tradition. “If I had married someone else, I wouldn’t know how to make kugel or brisket,” she said.

Imagine life without that!

HARIRA (MOROCCAN VEGETABLE SOUP)
Adapted from Geraldine Brooks

2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 large onions, diced (about 4 cups)
3 cloves garlic, crushed
2-inch knob of ginger, peeled and grated
3 celery stalks, diced
3 medium carrots, peeled and cut in rounds
2 zucchini, diced
8 cups good lamb, beef, or vegetable stock
12-ounce can crushed tomatoes
1 19-ounce can chick peas,
1 cup barley
1 cup chopped fresh mint
2 cups chopped fresh cilantro
1 teaspoon cardamom or to taste
1 teaspoon cumin or to taste
Pinch of saffron
Salt to taste
¼ teaspoon white pepper or to taste
1 teaspoon hot red pepper or to taste
1/2 teaspoon black pepper or to taste
½ cup vermicelli noodles, broken up

1. Heat the oil in a heavy-bottomed soup pot and sauté the onions, garlic, ginger, celery, carrots, and zucchini for a few minutes.

2. Add the broth and the tomatoes and bring to a boil. Then continue to simmer for another 20 minutes.

3. Add the chick peas and the barley, half the mint and half the cilantro, the cardamom, cumin, saffron, salt, and the three kinds of pepper. Continue to simmer, uncovered, for 20 minutes, adding 1 to 2 cups water or as needed.

4. Add the vermicelli and continue simmering about 5 minutes or until the pasta is cooked. Stir in the remaining mint and cilantro. Adjust the seasonings to taste and serve.

Yield: 10 to 12 Servings

BARBECUED SMOKED BRISKET
Adapted from Tom and Joanne Ashe

5- to 6-pound Grade-A choice brisket
6 sliced garlic cloves
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
3 sliced onions
¼ cup liquid smoke
1 bottle Heinz Chili Sauce
1 16-ounce can tomatoes
1 8-ounce can tomato sauce
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 cup of wine or enough to nearly cover the brisket

1. Wash and dry the brisket and preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. Pierce holes in the brisket and insert the garlic cloves. Sprinkle with salt and freshly ground pepper to taste. Heat the oil and sear on both sides.

3. Put the onions on the bottom of a heavy casserole, just large enough to hold the brisket. Put the brisket on top and then add the liquid smoke, chili sauce, tomatoes, and tomato sauce and pour over the brisket. Cover with the red wine.

4. Cover with tin foil or a top and bake in the oven for 4 hours.

5. Chill overnight, remove fat that has accumulated, slice, reheat and serve.

Yield: about 10 servings

Fain family noodle kugel, as prepared by Joan Nathan.
Gabriela Herman

FAIN FAMILY NOODLE KUGEL
Adapted from Colleen Fain, Sally Ann Epstein, and Bobbi Mayer Joslin

8 ounces broad, flat, egg noodles
½ cup sugar
12 ounces whole milk cottage cheese
1/2 cup milk or a little more
1/2 cup salted butter, melted, but not hot
1/2 cup golden raisins
2 large eggs, slightly beaten 1 cup sour cream
½ teaspoon cinnamon or to taste

1. Preheat the oven to 350-degrees and grease an 8-cup casserole.

2. Cook the noodles in a large pot of salted water and drain, then rinse to cool down a little.

3. Mix the sugar, cottage cheese, milk, melted butter, raisins, eggs, and sour cream in a large bowl. Stir in the noodles, transfer to casserole dish and liberally sprinkle the cinnamon on top.

4. Bake for 40 minutes until browned on top. If you use a flat casserole you will need slightly less time for cooking.

Yield: about 8 servings

Joan Nathan’s forthcoming book, Quiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France, is due out this fall.

With such a captivating flavor it seems unbelievable that after Cortéz brought tomatoes to Europe from Peru, Ecuador, and Mexico in the 16th century it took an additional 300 years for them to become popular, while other non-native foods like potatoes and peppers brought to Europe by Sephardic merchants traveling in the Americas caught on much faster.

In his excellent new book Pomodoro!: A History of the Tomato in Italy, David Gentilcore explains that it was only in the late 1800s that people began eating tomato sauce with spaghetti. Until then, if Italians ate tomatoes, they ate them three ways: cooked in a stew with other vegetables, similar to ratatouille or caponata; as a sauce like shakshuka, or concentrate; or, as an added ingredient to meat stews. Rarely, if ever, did people eat tomatoes raw.

The reasons for this delayed popularity are wide ranging. This member of the nightshade family was once considered poisonous. When the acid of the tomato hit the pewter flatware and plates used by the well-to-do, it reacted with the lead in such kitchenware, sickening people. Tomatoes were thought to contain toxins and/or hallucinogenic compounds. They were called “wolf peaches” in Germany, where folklore held that witches used the tomato’s juices to lure werewolves. The British employed tomatoes as ornamental plants, not as food. Jews in Eastern Europe associated tomatoes with blood because of their color. Since blood is taboo in Jewish cooking, Jews either avoided eating tomatoes, called the pomme d’amour, or love apple, by the French, or cooked them to death, as they did meat. My mother-in-law, who came from the town of Zamosc in Poland, refused to eat tomatoes until she immigrated to the United States after World War II and was convinced by their popularity here to give them a second chance .

Thomas Jefferson, an avid gardener at his home at Monticello, credited Dr. John de Sequeyra (pronounced “Siccary”), a Sephardic doctor in Colonial Williamsburg, as the first person to introduce the tomato as a plant in Virginia. The doctor believed that daily consumption of the tomato not only maintained good health but prolonged life. At the time, he was taking care of Jefferson’s father. According to an account by Robert Shosteck in the American Jewish Archives, Jefferson created some commotion in the late 1700s when he made a display of eating a tomato in public in Lynchburg. The crowd held their breath to see what effect the food would have. Jefferson lived, and soon thereafter, with de Sequeyra’s blessing, and that of other doctors who had been testing the tomato, people in the United States began to embrace and incorporate tomatoes into their cooking.

The Israeli author Shmuel Yosef Agnon came to Palestine from Galicia in 1908. In his slightly autobiographic novel, T’Mol Shilshom (Only Yesterday), set in Palestine, the main character, Itzhak, experiences culinary culture shock. As part of his adjustment to a new country, Itzhak must learn to eat its staples—olives and tomatoes.

“Itzhak did not know tomatoes are a food for humans, for in his town [in Galicia] people used to call tomatoes ‘foolish apple’ and clever people would avoid them,” Agnon wrote. “All of a sudden, hunger came and told him—eat! He took a piece of bread and a few olives, one of the seven species with which the land of Israel is blessed, but could not touch a tomato. When he tasted the olives, he distorted his face in dislike. When his host saw him he smiled and said ‘Just as you distorted your face from them today, so you will be happy for them tomorrow because you will be so hungry … there is nothing else to eat. Take a tomato and eat.’ After Itzhak ate a slice of tomato, he could not continue. He thought, ‘I will have none of your sweet and none of your sour acid.’ His friend responded, ‘If you want to be a son of the land of Israel, you must eat whatever you find.’ ” And so Itzhak, and immigrants like Agnon, became accustomed to the tomato, often cooked with fried eggplant or with olives.

Today, only a century later, we no longer hold any fears of this refreshing fruit. We recognize several kinds of heirlooms, those in existence for 50 years or more, and often disdain hothouse tomatoes or impure hybrids. In another new book on the subject, Ripe: The Search for the Perfect Tomato, Arthur Allen explains what heritage tomatoes, or heirlooms, are and introduces the reader to people like Sandra Bellin and Larry Jacobs, former Peace Corps volunteers, who grow extraordinary organic tomatoes at their Del Cabo Farms in Baja, Mexico. “First impressions are as important in taste as they are in love,” Allen wrote after biting into one of their Golden Honeybunch. “Tomato flavor is complex, fleeting, impossible to describe. For all that, I’ll be damned if those weren’t the best tomatoes I’ve ever tasted.” But Allen and others wrestle with a bigger problem. If they are so delicious, how can we get them to consumers hundreds of miles away without leaving a huge carbon footprint? That is the question and the ultimate problem of finding the perfect tomato in America, four centuries after they were first discovered.

HERBERT SAMUEL’S TOMATO SALAD
Adapted from Chef Jonathan Roshfeld

6 medium tomatoes, cut in quarters
1 pint mixed red and yellow cherry tomatoes, halved
2 mini tiger heritage tomatoes, halved
20 black olives, pitted and halved
6 radishes, thinly sliced
½ chili pepper, thinly sliced
½ red onion, thinly sliced
6 teaspoons scallions, diced
10 basil leaves, cut in chiffonade
2 teaspoons oregano leaves
3 teaspoons of fresh thyme leaves
1 cup pea shoots or other greens
3 egg yolks, cooked and crushed
4 ounces feta or goat cheese
Juice of 1 lemon, or to taste
4 tablespoons olive oil
Sea salt to taste

1. Place the quartered tomatoes over the gas burner or the grill to slightly char the outside. After charred and cooled, cut them into pie-shaped pieces.

2. Put these with the remaining cut tomatoes in a large bowl. Add the olives, radishes, chili pepper, red onion, scallions, basil, oregano, thyme, pea shoot or other greens, the egg yolks, and the goat cheese.

3. Drizzle the lemon juice over all ingredients and then sprinkle with the olive oil. Add salt to taste and gently toss. Serve on individual plates for a refreshing and delicious first course.

Yield: 6 to 8 servings

RATATOUILLE OF ZUCCHINI, TOMATOES, EGGPLANT, AND PEPPERS
Adapted from the forthcoming Quiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France by Joan Nathan

¼ cup olive oil
5 medium yellow onions, cut into ½ inch pieces
5 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
2 teaspoons salt
4 small zucchini, cut into ½-inch pieces (about 2 pounds)
Freshly ground pepper to taste
1 red bell pepper, cut into ½-inch pieces
1 green bell pepper, cut into ½-inch pieces
2 pounds eggplant, preferably small ones, cut into ½-inch pieces
2 pounds tomatoes, cut into ½-inch pieces
4 teaspoons sugar
1 teaspoon piment d’Espelette, hot paprika, or New Mexican ground red chili

1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.

2. Heat the olive oil in a large skillet. Add the onions, the garlic, and the salt, and cook over medium-high heat until the onions are just translucent, about five to seven minutes. Remove three quarters of the onions to a bowl. Add the zucchini to the pan with the remaining quarter of the onions, season with a little salt and freshly ground pepper to taste, and cook for a few minutes until the zucchini begin to brown. Transfer the zucchini and onion mixture to an 8-inch square or circular baking pan.

3. Sauté the green and red peppers separately just until they begin to brown, with a third of the remaining onions, then the eggplant with another third of the onions, and then the tomatoes with the remaining onions. Transfer each vegetable to its own baking pan.

4. Cover the four pans with aluminum foil, and bake in the preheated oven for 1 hour. Uncover the pans, sprinkle each with a teaspoon of the sugar and hot pepper, and stir. Cook for an additional hour uncovered. If there is any liquid in the pans after the second hour, drain the vegetables and reserve that liquid. Gently toss the vegetables together.

5. Place the reserved liquid in a small saucepan, bring to a boil, and reduce until it is thick and can coat the back of a wooden spoon. Stir this reduction into the ratatouille. Taste and adjust the seasoning if necessary. Serve at room temperature.

Yield: 8 to 10 servings

So it goes. The first time I visited the White House was as a tourist in 1977 when I had just moved to Washington. Years later, I attended a reception there during the Reagan Administration with my husband, who was a political appointee in the Justice Department. While I sadly have no recollection of the food, I do remember two things vividly. First, my sense that the size of the White House was a populist reaction to the end of the French monarchy. This people’s house—“President’s House,” as the executive mansion was first called—had none of the regal proportions of the palaces of the Louvre or Versailles. The other thing I recall is meeting President Ronald Reagan.

I had recently read an article in which Reagan’s brother had described a peculiar and endearing habit the president had as a child—a habit he shared with my then-4-year-old daughter, Daniela. Reagan rubbed earlobes, both his own and those of other people. This was something my little Daniela did whenever there were grown-ups visiting our home. I mentioned this shared habit to him just before it was our turn to shake the president’s hand for the requisite photo. His reaction of absolute surprise, and that of his wife, Nancy, was immortalized in a photo now in my study.

Awareness of dietary restrictions has been around for some time in this country. When Franklin Roosevelt was governor of New York, he had two regular guests, Jewish men, to lunch at the executive mansion in Albany. When it came to the attention of the governor and his wife, Eleanor, that these men abstained from everything offered them except for fruit, dessert, and coffee, Mrs. Roosevelt realized she should serve dairy and vegetables in a new set of dishes especially reserved for these occasions.

Some decades later, in the 1960s and ‘70s, as Jewish pride grew and people in general became less afraid to indicate their dietary preferences, the White House began ordering special kosher meals for kashrut-observing guests. Kosher state dinners got underway at the end of that period, during the Carter Administration. Henry Haller was the White House chef in 1978, when 1,300 guests were invited for the Camp David Peace Treaty dinner. Of those meals, 50 were kosher, ordered from a local caterer.

Two years later, in 1980, the White House held its first entirely kosher state dinner; it was in honor of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin with 180 guests. The menu included cold Columbia River salmon with sauce verte and golden twists, roast duckling with glazed peaches, wild rice, fresh asparagus, and mixed green salad. The wines came from California and were kosher—Kedem, Seyval Blanc, Chaumac, and sparkling white. In those days, White House pastry chefs usually served butter-rich petit fours; at Begin’s dinner, they prepared a non-dairy frozen orange sherbet cake with Grand Marnier sauce along with pareve pastries.

Ann Amernick, the assistant pastry chef under Haller and later the first female pastry chef at the White House, remembers how the White House kitchen was made kosher. “The mashgiachs came with blowtorches as big as they were,” says Amernick, who’s the author of The Art of the Dessert. “They spent all day burning and covering surfaces with aluminum foil. The kitchen was unbearably hot. I felt it was a historical moment and at the same time it was comical. Roland Mesnier, the pastry chef, was desperately trying to get the sorbets made and one of the mashgiachs was following him around with the blowtorch. Every time Roland turned around the mashgiach was there. While some of the cooks had a partial understanding of kashrut from past experience in hotels and lessons in cooking school, the reality in the White House was another story.”

Awareness of religious and ethnic diversity is part of life today in the White House. During the administration of George W. Bush, the first couple hosted a Hanukkah party with 400 kosher latkes. The Obamas, whose personal chef, Sam Kass, is Jewish, have now held two Passover seders; kitchen staff have prepared recipes culled from the mothers of Jewish White House employees.

In addition to thinking about ethnic cuisine, the White House is now concentrating more on fresh foods and foods from the garden, a practice initiated by the earliest presidents. Not only was there a White House garden during the time of the founding fathers, but Thomas Jefferson, while president, marketed with his French chef in Georgetown, selecting foods suited to his mostly French, English, Dutch, and Italian menus. When time permitted, he also helped prepare the dishes and select the wines.

My favorite visit to the White House was with a group of visiting chefs for a behind-the-scenes tour of the kitchen and the garden. It was organized in September by Bill Yosses, the current pastry chef and a dear friend. In the vegetable garden, eggplant bushes grew as tall as I am. Kale was everywhere. And the ripe tomatoes showed no signs of the blight that had hit the rest of the Middle Atlantic crop. Nearby we saw the honeybee combs, tended by a White House employee who is also a bee keeper. White House honey, in tiny jars, is given away to guests at state dinners.

Later, over coffee, I tasted Bill’s freshly made lemon pound cake. It used nine lemons fresh from the White House garden, and it was delicious.

LEMON POUND CAKE SUPREME
Adapted from The Perfect Finish by Bill Yosses and Melissa Clark

11 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted, plus additional for the bottom and sides of the pan and the parchment paper
9 lemons
2 3/4 cups all purpose flour
1½ cups superfine sugar
1½ teaspoons baking powder
Dash of salt
3/4 cup crème fraiche or heavy cream
6 large eggs, at room temperature
1½ cups granulated sugar
½ cup confectioners’ sugar

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees, putting a rack in the center. Use butter to grease the bottom and sides of a 9-by-5-inch loaf pan, line the bottom with parchment paper or waxed paper, then grease the paper.

2. Set 2 of the lemons aside. Grate the zest of 4 lemons, and set those lemons and their zest aside also. Slice off the tops and bottoms of 3 unzested lemons. Stand each lemon on end on a cutting board and use a small knife to slice away the skin and white pith, leaving the flesh exposed. Working over a bowl, cut the segments away from the membranes and let the fruit and juice fall into the bowl (remove any seeds). Using a fork, break the segments into 1-inch pieces.

3. Sift the flour, superfine sugar, baking powder, and salt into the bowl of an electric mixer. Begin mixing on low speed, then add the crème fraiche or cream. Increase the speed to medium and beat in the eggs one at a time, the butter, and 3 tablespoons of the lemon zest. Gently fold the lemon segments and juices into the batter. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and bake on the center rack for 15 minutes. Use a sharp knife to cut an incision lengthwise down the middle of the cake. This will prevent the cake from splitting on the side. Bake for 30 minutes longer. Lower the oven to 325 degrees, and bake for 40 to 45 minutes longer, until a cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean.

4. Meanwhile, juice the 6 lemons you set aside in step 1 and strain the juice. Put the granulated sugar and the confectioners’ sugar in a pot over high heat and add 1½ cups water. Bring to a simmer and cook, stirring, until the sugar is dissolved. Stir in the lemon juice and remaining zest and let cool.

5. When the cake is done, transfer it to a wire rack to cool in the pan for 30 minutes. Raise the oven temperature to 350 degrees. Slide a thin knife or offset spatula around the sides of the pan and turn it over to unmold the cake onto a sheet pan, and carefully peel the parchment or waxed paper from the bottom of the cake. Pour the lemon syrup over the cake and very gently squeeze the cake to help it absorb the syrup. Carefully turn the cake over and squeeze a bit more until all the syrup is absorbed. It makes for messy hands, but it is worth the effort. Transfer the cake to a clean cookie sheet and return it to the oven for 10 minutes to set the glaze. Cool on a rack.

Yield: 1 (9-inch) loaf to serve 8

EGGPLANT SALAD
Adapted from Dahan Catering

½ cup olive oil
2 eggplants, cut into ½-inch dice (about 2 pounds)
8 plum tomatoes, seeded and skinned, fresh or canned
4 shallots, finely diced
½ bunch of Italian flat leaf parsley (1 cup)
The grated zest of 1 lemon
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

1. Heat the oil in a large nonstick frying pan over high. Sauté the diced eggplant until browned and soft, but not mushy, stirring occasionally. It should take about 5–7 minutes. Remove the eggplant from the pan with a slotted spoon so that any remaining oil will stay in the pan and drain the eggplant on a paper towel.
2. If using fresh tomatoes, score the bottoms. In a large pot bring to boil 5 cups of water. Once the water has come to a strong boil, put tomatoes in for 15 seconds. Remove the tomatoes and put immediately into an ice bath. Once the tomatoes are cool enough to handle, gently peel back the skin, trying not remove too much flesh. Then, slice tomatoes in half to remove the seeds and cut into ¼-inch dice.
3. Reheat the sauté pan on medium heat, and sauté the shallots until translucent. Then add the tomatoes and half the parsley and cook on medium heat until most of the excess liquid from the tomatoes has evaporated. Sprinkle on the lemon zest and season to taste with salt and pepper. Let cool and refrigerate for later use or serve immediately, sprinkled with the remaining parsley.

Yield: About 6 servings

Shavuot, known as the Festival of Weeks, Festival of the First Fruits, and the Festival of the Giving of the Torah, is the best example of a holiday in sync with the season. Originally a harvest holiday celebrating the barley crop, Shavuot arrives exactly seven weeks after Passover and in time came to be closely associated with dairy, not wheat.

A period of rebirth, spring, when Shavuot falls, is both when lambs and goats are born and when new barley is planted. During the spring months, the earth is green, even in the desert, and the animals feed on wheat, grass, and weeds, which are key to their producing milk, later used to make butter and cheese. For that reason, butter churning and cheese making have become common elements at spring harvest festivals the world over.

Of course, in ancient Israel and in Bedouin tribes and many Arab villages today, cheese is made from sour milk. It’s put through cheesecloth, the whey molded into balls, and preserved for the winter by salting and drying in the sun for future rehydration when needed. The invention and adoption of refrigeration has rendered this traditional method of making cheese obsolete.

Beyond its pastoral ties, Shavuot also has a religious anchor. We know it as a commemoration of the giving of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. In modern America, it became known too as the time at which Conservative and Reform synagogues held Confirmation ceremonies for teenagers who continued and then concluded their religious education after their bar and bat mitzvahs.

As for Mount Sinai, it’s known by other names: Mountain of God, mountain of Bashan, and mountain of peaks (Har Gavnunim) all mentioned in the 68th psalm. Gavnunim means “gibbous, many-peaked,” but the word has the same root as g’vinah, meaning cheese. Accordingly, cheese consumption at this time of year is a reminder of the giving of the Law. And, throughout the Bible, Israel is repeatedly referred to as the land of milk and honey.

In recent years, Americans have discovered artisanal cheeses in a big way. At least 300 boutique cheese makers are currently at work in North America. In December, I spoke at a conference sponsored by the Jewish environmental group Hazon in Monterey, California. There I met Abbe Turner, a boutique cheese maker from Kent, Ohio, an hour from Cleveland. To make one batch of kosher feta a week for her Lucky Penny Creamery, Turner orders her kosher vegetable rennet from Danisco in France. “The kosher market is underserved,” she told me. “Everybody has the right to kosher cheese. In the spring there is a lot more milk because of kidding. Following the tenets of Judaism and farming, we farm in a way to keep the soil and water healthy. If I stick to that tenet I am doing what I should be doing.”

Turner is one of a handful of Jewish cheese makers in the United States. Alan Glustoff, a food chemist, produces 5 Spoke Creamery cows milk cheese in Rye Brook, New York. The creamery is especially known for its Tumblewood cheese, a creamy cross between a cantal and a cheddar. Like Turner, Glustoff has a run of kosher packaged cheeses. “Shavuot and the holidays come to mind for me,” he says, explaining that the holiday’s link to dairy is one of the reasons he makes cheese. “Spring is a time of rebirth for me personally. At that time the pasturelands are green enough for cows to graze on, the milk is sweeter and there is more of it. Holidays like Shavuot really define what’s going on, with the counting of the omer getting to a higher stage. How much of a Jewish ethic all this is—looking at changes in temperature, changes in growth, which we can see on a daily basis. I appreciate that wonder.”

You don’t have to be a cheese maker to recognize the connection between cheese and spring. Nigel Savage, Hazon’s founder, ponders the cycle of the Jewish year symbolically. “This new generation of Jewish farmers is helping us to reconnect to the traditions in new ways,” he told me over coffee at Aroma Café in New York. “The world is a commentary on the Torah. Shavuot is an opportunity to think about our milk products in a new way. ”

Israeli Cheesecake.
CREDIT: Kristian Whipple

Israeli Cheesecake
Adapted from Vered Guttman

Crust:
2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
Pinch of salt
15 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 large egg
Zest of 1 lemon

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and grease a 10-inch spring form pan. Put the flour, baking powder, pinch of salt, butter, and sugar in a standing mixer equipped with paddle. Add the egg and lemon zest and mix on low speed until crumbs form.

Pat 3/4 of the dough into the prepared spring form pan and flatten the rest onto a baking sheet. Bake both for about 20 minutes or until fully cooked and golden around the edges. Let cool completely.

Cheese filling:
2 cups heavy cream
7 tablespoons sugar
1/2 (5.1 ounce) packet instant vanilla pudding
1/4 cup milk
1 pound Israeli soft white cheese (can be purchased at kosher markets and many grocery stores under the Norman label), crème fraîche, or half sour cream and half cream cheese
1 pint fresh strawberries

Using a standing mixer equipped with the beater, whip the cream and sugar. In a separate bowl, sprinkle the pudding packet into the milk and mix. Add this mixture to the whipped cream. Then blend in the cheese. Fill the spring form pan with the contents of the bowl.

Crumble the baked dough from the baking sheet on top of the filling. Refrigerate 24 hours and serve garnished with strawberries.

Yield : About 10 servings.

French Cold Beet Soup (aka Borscht).
CREDIT: Kristian Whipple

French Cold Beet Soup (aka Borscht)
Adapted from the forthcoming Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France by Joan Nathan (Knopf, November 2, 2010)

2 pounds raw beets (about 4)
1 pound onions (2 medium)
2 cloves garlic, peeled and left whole
1 tablespoon sugar
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
½ cup sour cream, crème fraîche, or good yogurt
4 tablespoons fresh dill, chervil, or mint cut in chiffonade

Peel the beets and the onions. Cut them in chunks and toss them together in a large soup pot. Pour in about 2 quarts of water or enough to cover the vegetables by an inch or so.

Add the garlic, sugar, salt, and freshly ground pepper to taste. Bring to a boil, skimming the surface of any impurities that rise. Lower the heat, cover, and simmer for about an hour or until the beets are cooked.

When the soup cools, ladle the vegetables and some of their broth with the vinegar into a blender and purée until the consistency of a thick soup. Adjust the thickness and seasoning of the soup to your taste, adding the reserved beet broth if you want a thinner soup.

Serve cold in soup bowls with a dollop of the sour cream, crème fraîche, or yogurt and a sprinkle of the dill, chervil, or mint.

Yield: 6 to 8 servings

Israel’s restaurant scene has changed dramatically in the past 20 years, as is evidenced by the large number of high-caliber eateries run by thirtysomething chefs. When I lived in Israel in the 1970s, it was almost blasphemous to think about food as a pleasure; it was merely sustenance, and the only kinds of restaurants anyone but tourists could afford were cafés and falafel and hummus joints. “Years ago, it was kind of a shame to eat good food in Israel,” said Israel Aharoni, 59, a chef with a single black braid down his back and an eponymous popular television show. “Immigrants had just come here with hardly anything on and were struggling for their survival,” he continued. “When my generation started traveling after military service, we saw the rest of the world was having fun. We saw that food was not just for fueling your body. Revolutions come from young people. Slowly, slowly it happened in Israel.”

Our group started in Tel Aviv, a city fueled by creativity in high tech and the arts, and lately, in cuisine. Our first stop was at Cordelia’s (Yefet 30, Jaffa, 03-5184668) nestled down an arched alley near the clock tower in Jaffa. Run by chef-owner Nir Zook, 33, this restaurant sits in a 1,000-year-old stone crusader house and has an artsy atmosphere thanks to mismatched candelabras and chandeliers, which reflected light down the long table at which we ate a Sabbath dinner. With goat cheese fresh from Zook’s brothers’ farm in Emek Ha-Ela, the valley where David slew Goliath, and wine from Tzora and other local vintners, the unusual meal combined recipes for gefilte fish and chicken soup with matzo balls that Zook gleaned from his mother with his own specialty of a grape-leaf-and-garlic dip, made with newly plucked leaves, that resulted in a fabulous Middle Eastern spicy pesto.

The next evening, I wanted to find a shipudia, a simple grilled skewered meat place. Our cab driver suggested we go to Haj Kahil (Yefet 93, Jaffa, 03-6581211), an Israeli-Arab restaurant in Jaffa. As we approached the entrance, with a sign in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, we saw groups of Jews and Arabs sitting outside on the patio. I asked the Arab manager about the mezuzah on the door. It was there for Jewish customers who touch it for good luck, he told me. We ordered a colorful array of mezze—one I especially liked was boiled and grilled cauliflower covered by a tahina sauce. As good as it was, the prize there was the laffa, the thin flat bread slapped to the sides of the taboon (a clay, cone-shaped, wood-burning oven) as well as the grilled pieces of fresh foie gras, somewhat unusual in a spot better known for its lamb skewers. The foie gras we ate that night came from Hungary, as Israel, once the world’s fourth-largest foie gras producer, banned its production in 2003.

An array of salads at Haj Khalil in Jaffa.

We continued the next day at Catit (Hayachol Hatalmud 4, Tel Aviv, 03-5107001), where Meir Adoni, 38, a young man of Moroccan descent, runs the kitchen. We ate a tasting menu including an over-the-top decomposed Caesar salad and sweetbreads with honey, garlic, vichyssoise, asparagus, and parsley foam. Located in a house built in 1911 in a fine residential neighborhood with a beautiful terrace in the back, the restaurant’s minimal décor is all white. I had brought Adoni to Worlds of Flavors festival in Napa Valley two years ago, where I saw his great potential as a cook. He told me then that his restaurant started out in his moshav, or cooperative village. As he traveled around the world, soaking in the techniques of other chefs, his reputation grew, and he eventually moved his restaurant to Tel Aviv, where he creatively infuses his food with flavor and exotic touches. Yet for a jaded journalist like me, the simplest food, like a slivered green almond placed in a grilled eggplant salad, appealed the most.

In contrast to the formality at Catit, our next meal was a casual one of tapas at Herbert Samuel (Koifman 6, Tel Aviv, 03-516 6516), just a short walk from the seashore. Although I have never met Jonathan Roshfeld, the talented chef of this restaurant, I adore his food. It has a fresh, slightly wild Israeli feel to it, evident in the way he presents his sauces with a brush of the spatula and the way he arranges the local sun-soaked vegetables. The salads were especially mouth-watering and full of colorful, plump, sweet, fresh-from-the-market ingredients plated with a broad swath of sauce. One in particular—a tomato salad with hard-boiled eggs, micro-greens, and olives—was the best I have ever tasted. Israeli engineering and the hot sun on the tomato plant paid off.

Later we hit Raphaël (Hayarkon 87, 03-5226464), adjacent to the Dan Hotel. I have been following its chef, Rafi Cohen, since I met him 10 years ago when, at 24, he worked at La Regence Restaurant in Jerusalem’s King David Hotel. He started there as an apprentice, at 13, having quit school. Now 34, Cohen has hit his stride, offering high-end continental cuisine with a Mediterranean twist and further embellishing his Moroccan dishes, like couscous and brik, a crisp pastry used in thin cigar-like appetizers filled with simple meat and onions, tomatoes, peppers, or whatever is in season. He comes by the North African inflection honestly; his family is from Morocco, and his uncle, who travels every day to Tel Aviv from Jerusalem, prepares the couscous and brik for the restaurant using the same techniques Cohen’s grandmother used. This restaurant shows what I saw all over Israel—that young chefs are both enhancing their family recipes and fusing local foods with ingredients and ideas from all over the world.

***

Laffa bakes in a taboon in a grilled meat restaurant in the coastal town of Jaffa.

Our next stop was a Bedouin home outside Nazareth. I have been to many ethnic home restaurants throughout Israel—you eat a meal with a Kurdish, Syrian, or any other type of family and have the opportunity to learn about traditional food. This meal was a sumptuous array of eggplant, zucchini, and tabouleh salads, followed by a roasted lamb so tender you wanted to pick it apart with your fingers. and frika, the green wheat, or spelt, mentioned in the Bible and charred by Ruth. I found it as a smoky treat on menus throughout Israel.

In the village of Matat, in the Upper Galilee, we visited Erez Komorovsky, 47, who runs a cooking school out of his home near the Lebanese border. After years of working in bakeries all over the United States and France, Komorovsky returned to Israel and started the successful bakery Lehem Erez, which has branches all over the country. A few years ago he sold the business and now works as a consultant and teacher. We watched as he gathered wild asparagus and picked Jerusalem sage, vine leaves, and cyclamen for stuffing with rice and meat. Ever the locavore, he also cooked frika instead of bulgur. “Israeli cuisine is intuitive, it comes from the belly,” he said, as he cooked the frika with scallions and parsley. “It is faster cuisine and represents the national character and is a little arrogant, as we are.” Komorovsky crushed fresh coriander seeds with a mortar and pestle to add to the dish and mixed the mash with Syrian olive oil. A carpaccio of goat, sliced ever so thinly, was served with grilled eggplant, both simple and fresh, as was a seared piece of goat first coated with an herb mixture served with a hummus made out of lima beans.

***

Makluba, a chicken and rice dish prepared by Eucalyptus chef Moshe Basson in Jerusalem.

Jerusalem was saved for last. On our first morning there we scavenged for food with chef Moshe Basson, picking sage and other native herbs near the Old City. At one point, Basson pulled out a bottle of champagne and some Iraqi turnovers filled with wild spinach prepared by his mother. That night at Eucalyptus (Artist Colony of Hutzot Hayotzer, Jerusalem, 02-6244331), just outside the Old City, we started our meal with a cocktail of arrack and grapefruit juice. Then Basson prepared the herbs in what he calls Canaanite cuisine, the cuisine of early Israel. He made favorites like his signature Jerusalem artichoke soup and stuffed figs with chicken. Then, with fanfare, he tapped and flipped the bottom of a pan to reveal makluba, a rice and chicken dish that he learned from Palestinian chefs, who partner with him in the nonprofit organization Chefs for Peace.

In the Old City, we sampled a delicate pastry filled with sheep’s cheese at Zalatimo’s, a bakery near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The present owner and member of the Zalatimo family prepares this confection as his family has for more than a century, twisting the dough, filling it with the cheese, baking it, and then coating it with a sugar syrup. After that we walked to Lina’s (Shchunat Hanotzrim, just inside Damascus Gate, Jerusalem, 02-6277230), one of the ubiquitous hummus places in the Old and New City. Purist hummus—lacking any traces of cumin or garlic—it was just warm pureed chickpeas with toppings including pine nuts and fava beans.

We strolled through Mahane Yehudah, the Jewish shuk, sampling falafel, and then we ate at Morduch (Agripas 70, Jerusalem, 02-6245169), a tiny Kurdish restaurant where customers point at the dishes they want. I was so happy that it was as I remembered, offering seasonal vegetables stuffed with meat and rice, fried kubbe made with bulgur and meat, and the Sabbath kubbe soup. It has a chicken broth with lemon, dried limes, herbs, and celery—a recipe so old it is considered Aramaen. Plump dumplings made out of semolina dough and bulgur and filled with meat and pine nuts float in the broth.

Our last stop was at Mahane Yuda (10 Bet Yaakov, Jerusalem, 02-5333442), also in the shuk, a trendy spot owned by three friends and filled with chairs and tables scavenged from their families. Thirteen chefs work in the kitchen, which is run like a kibbutz. I was blown away by the inventiveness there: oxtail soup over cracked wheat with dried wild berries and walnuts, black risotto with mussels and shrimp, meatballs, beef spareribs marinated in balsamic vinegar served with polenta. The private-labeled Berta wine was named after one of the owner’s grandmother. This restaurant has captured the hearts of the next generation of Israelis who want to dine with lots of noise. Hopefully it’s a hint of where Israeli food is going.

Eggplant With Tahina and Yogurt
Adapted from Erez Komarovsky

2 or 3 bulbous eggplants (about 3 pounds)
5 tablespoons tahina
½ cup yogurt
Juice of 1 lemon or to taste
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
5 cloves garlic
2 tablespoons olive oil

Grill the whole eggplant over a charcoal or gas burner, turning carefully with tongs for several minutes as the eggplant softens. Continue grilling until soft. If you want to skip the grilling (which can get messy), you can also prick the skin with a fork and bake the eggplant in a 450-degree oven for about 30 minutes or until it is soft. Using this method, however, will not obtain the same smoky flavor as grilling. Cool and peel the eggplant, being sure to retain some of the charred eggplant skin.

Pour the tahina, yogurt, lemon juice, salt, pepper, garlic and olive oil into the bowl of a food processor. Purée and add a little water if it seems too thick.

Pulse the eggplant into the sauce, stopping before it becomes a purée, maintaining a chunky consistency.

Serve with pita or pita chips.

Yield: About 4 cups

Grape Leaf Zhug
Adapted from Nir Zook

1 16-ounce jar grape leaves
5 cloves garlic
1 1/2 teaspoons cumin, or to taste
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
1 jalapeno chili or other hot chili pepper
2 bunches cilantro, about 2 cups
Splash of lemon juice
1 cup extra virgin olive oil

Wash the grape leaves and cut in a chiffonade, You must do this step. Otherwise, the grape leaves will be too tough.

Using a food processor, blend the grape leaves with the garlic, cumin, salt, pepper, chili, cilantro, and a splash of lemon juice. Slowly add the olive oil. Let sit for at least one hour before serving.
Serve as an appetizer dip for vegetables or pita.

Yield: 2 ½ cups

Susan Weingarten, a senior researcher in Jewish history at Tel Aviv University, has charted charoset’s course over the centuries and collected more than 60 different recipes for it. According to Weingarten, charoset appears first in the Mishnah tractate of Pesachim. “But it only describes charoset in terms of its function and symbolism, not its ingredients or taste,” she told me over lunch recently at the Diaspora Museum café in Tel Aviv. She showed me the citation: “They bring before [the leader of the Seder] unleavened bread [matzoh] and lettuce and the charoset.”

The only Passover foods mentioned in the Book of Exodus are pascal lamb, bitter herbs, and the matzoh. Most likely charoset became integral to the seder meal during the Greco-Roman period, when a fruited condiment was part of a feast with meat. Two Song of Songs verses, which were closely linked with spring and came to be read during the morning service on Passover, explain the charoset’s seasonal ingredients: “Under the apple-tree I awakened thee,” and “I went down into the garden of nuts.” Several of the shivat haminim, or seven species that are said to symbolize the close relationship between the Jewish people and the land of Israel, are frequent additions to charoset, including dates, grapes, figs, and pomegranates.

At Qumran, close to the Dead Sea earlier this month, I saw a 2,000-year-old stone press in which dates were once heated and stomped on to extract honey, making a liquid charoset said to resemble the blood of the Egyptians. Often topped with crushed walnuts, this syrupy jam traveled to Babylonia and is made by Jews from Iraq to this day. “The Jerusalem Talmud in the fourth or fifth century has a discussion as to whether it should be thick like the clay for the bricks or runny like blood,” said Ms. Weingarten. “The Babylonian rabbis thought it should be date-based and thick.”

Years ago I learned to make date honey from the late David Sofaer, a Burma-born friend who lived in California. He showed me how to simmer dates in a heavy pot over a stove for hours and then put the mixture through a sieve. Today you can buy the result, called halek, at Middle Eastern grocery stores. Since biblical times, throughout the Mediterranean a portion of summer fruits like figs, raisins, and dates has always been set aside at harvest and dried on strings to be used for charoset. These fruits were pounded with a mortar and pestle or a manual chopper, often combined with spices like cinnamon, cardamom, or ginger, and some sweet wine or even vinegar.

In France from the 11th to 13th centuries, which coincided with the lifetime of Rashi, who said “that charoset should be sour for the suffering of the Jews and suggested using wine vinegar in the mix,” a geographical charoset divide developed, Weingarten told me. In the northern part of the country, leftover apples from the summer were the only fruits available. Thus, the Northern Ashkenazic charoset developed with apples, walnuts or almonds, and sweet wine, while in the south of France, Italy, and Spain recipes for charoset included more tropical fruits, like pomegranates, when they were available, as well as dates and fresh nuts, including chestnuts and pine nuts. It’s a split that has endured.

The process of making charoset also varies between regions and cultures. I have watched a Yemenite charoset being made at an absorption center outside Tel Aviv where the women, sitting outside on the courtyard floor, pounded their spices and nuts in a large brass mortar and pestle into a peppery mix with cloves. It was far removed from my mother’s charoset, made with cinnamon, apples, nuts, and sweet wine blended into a paste with the flick of a food processor button.

Moroccan charoset balls with dates, raisins, and nuts
CREDIT: Susan Fou/ThisIsGonnaBeGood.com

In Tel Aviv and even in Paris, I have found packaged versions of Moroccan charoset, with dates and nuts, sometimes rolled into sticky truffles served almost as a dessert, as they were at a Moroccan seder I attended in Washington, D.C. This version originally came from Spain and Portugal and traveled to North Africa with Jews who fled the Iberian Peninsula in 1492 and then, years later, with future generations who made their way to the United States and elsewhere.

At my seder next week I will include a charoset from the 13th century, a taste of the past, that I found with chestnuts, apples, and nuts. For most, I, like everybody else, will use the food processor. But, for the apple and nut charoset, which is always the most popular in my family, my son David, in his twenties, will chop the fruit in a beat-up wooden bowl as he has done every year since he was old enough to help. And that is the way we Jews carry on our traditions.

Moroccan Charoset Balls with Dates, Raisins, and Nuts
Adapted from Jewish Cooking in America by Joan Nathan

2 cups pitted dates
1/2 cup golden raisins
1/2 cup dark raisins
1/2 cup walnuts
1-2 tablespoons sweet red Passover wine

Process the dates, raisins, and walnuts in a food processor until the mixture is finely chopped and begins to stick together. Add enough wine to make a sticky mass. Line a baking sheet with wax paper. Drop slightly rounded measuring teaspoonfuls of the mixture onto the lined sheet. Roll each mound with moistened palms into hazelnut-size balls. Refrigerate for at least 3 hours or until firm.

Yield: approximately 60 balls or 3 1/2 cups

Luzzatto family Venetian charoset
CREDIT: Susan Fou/ThisIsGonnaBeGood.com

Luzzatto Family Venetian Charoset
Adapted from Joan Nathan’s Jewish Holiday Kitchen

1 1/2 cups chestnut paste
10 ounces dates, chopped
12 ounces figs, chopped
2 tablespoons poppy seeds
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
1/2 cup chopped almonds
1/2 cup pine nuts
Grated rind of 1 orange
1/2 cup golden raisins
1/2 cup chopped dried apricots
1/2 cup brandy
honey, to bind

Combine all ingredients, using just enough honey and brandy to make everything bind together.

Yield: 4 cups

Israeli Revisionist Charoset
Adapted from The Foods of Israel by Joan Nathan

2 cups raisins
1 cup pecans, toasted
1 cup blanched almonds, toasted
1 cup date paste (or 1 cup dried dates, chopped)
3 Granny Smith apples, cut into chunks
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/4 cup sweet red wine, or to taste
1 – 2 tablespoons lemon juice

Using a food processor fitted with a steel blade, coarsely grind together the raisins and nuts, pulsing so as not to overprocess. Add the date paste, the apples, and the cinnamon and mix well. Add sweet wine and lemon juice to taste.

Yield: about 4 cups

The legendary chef-owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, a longtime friend, was in town to work with me on a fundraiser for Martha’s Table and DC Central Kitchen, two organizations that feed the less fortunate in Washington, D.C., where I live. It seemed only natural to invite Alice and the other visiting chefs to my home for a Shabbat dinner—a meal I’ve prepared my whole adult life. It’s an invaluable opportunity to open my home for people to enjoy hearty food, good conversation, and a connection to Judaism. It’s also a chance to include non-Jewish friends in the experience, so filled with the universal themes of shared sustenance and faith, and it’s a moment to unplug from our otherwise wired existence and, for a few hours at least, to appreciate the occasions where time does not seem to matter.

The real question was what to serve Alice, the queen of American cooking. Keep it simple has always been my motto. I did that when I hosted a small dinner for Julia Child’s 90th birthday, and it was a big success. So, I decided to do the same this time.

You should realize that the charity event consisted of a series of 14 dinners for 20 people each, all to be held the following Sunday. My house was the event’s headquarters, and I had a garage bursting with produce, gifts, and wine, and a kitchen and family room dotted with volunteers glued to their laptops and cell phones, while an endless flow of people filed in and out of the house. Simple, amid all that, made a lot of sense.

But beyond keeping it simple, I also knew that Alice would want a seasonal and sustainable meal. I went to our local New Morning Farms truck early in the week and gathered greens and beets and hearty winter produce. On Thursday I assembled some of the young volunteers, and we made succulent roasted beets and squash for one salad and lathered kale with olive oil for another, prepping blood oranges and yellow grapefruit that would be added at the last minute. I asked a pastry-chef friend if he would bake some cookies, and he happily obliged.

But what would be the main course? I only had to think for an instant: Mousakhan, my favorite chicken recipe, of course. It’s a delectable Palestinian dish—chicken, topped with slowly cooked sautéed onions, golden-brown pine nuts, and a mixture of cloves, allspice, and sumac (the tart desert herb found throughout the Middle East), all of which is placed on a large pita and baked in the oven. I’d learned of it many years ago, in Israel, when I was a foreign press attaché for the late Teddy Kollek, then mayor of Jerusalem. I confess that I was more interested, even then, in peering into pots than into politics.

When I lived in Israel in the early 1970s, I ate mousakhan whenever I could, although I only found a recipe for it a few years later when I was in a small seminar on ethnicity at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where I was studying for a master’s degree in public administration. Adnan Abu-Odeh, then Jordan’s minister of information, was a fellow student in the class, and I approached him with trepidation to ask for the recipe—after all, he was a government official and I a young woman. “Invite me to your home and I’ll show you how to make it,” he instantly responded. I promptly did. Not only did we make this celebrated dish from Adnan’s native Nablus, but we began a lifelong friendship. I knew that Alice would love this recipe as well as the story behind it—a great example of the power of food.

While the aroma from the baking chicken filled my kitchen on Friday afternoon, some of the volunteers helped make a Moroccan challah, a new recipe from Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France, my forthcoming book. Together we mixed the yeast, anise, water, eggs, vegetable oil, and flour. Letting the dough rise only a few minutes, we punched it down, molded it into two long cylinders that we twisted together and then formed into a circle and baked.

When the guests arrived, about 30 of them, everything was ready. We gathered while I recited the Sabbath prayer over lighting the candles. Then my husband, Allan, blessed the wine, which in this august setting of the food world really meant something. As I translated the prayers from Hebrew, I explained that in ancient times wine symbolized all drinks extracted from fruits that grow on vines and trees.

Then it was time for the blessing over the bread. At that moment, everyone in the room was connected, either placing their hand on one of the two challahs (signifying the double portion of manna in the desert) or placing their hand on someone who was touching a challah. As I explained the 10 transformations wheat undergoes to make a beautifully browned challah, Alice listened intently. I described the steps we often take for granted: planting seeds, growing wheat, threshing, removing the chaff, grinding the wheat into flour, mixing flour with water and yeast, letting it rise, forming it into a braided loaf, letting it rise again, and then baking it off.

I often recite these 10 steps that I learned many years ago as a scholar-in-residence at Congregation Etz Chaim in Chicago, and every time I find it is a powerful gesture. It was even more so on this particular night, surrounded by so many people dedicated to food and charity.

Gathered around the table, we sensed that bread is everything for civilization. In Egypt bread is called aish, which comes from aisha, meaning “life.” The Hebrew word for bread, lechem, at least to the English ear, is akin to chaim, meaning life.

“I am so touched by the challah ceremony,” Alice said to me, as we all shared the Israeli and Arab food, a dinner full of symbolism. “It is so beautiful to see this ancient tradition kept alive, with the simple, historic staple of bread as the focus.” After tasting the chicken, she added, “It is amazing. I could eat this kind of food every day.”

MOUSAKHAN

Adapted from Joan Nathan’s The Foods of Israel Today (Knopf), 2001

½ cup extra virgin olive oil
5 large onions (about 10 cups), coarsely chopped
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
4 chicken breast halves
4 chicken legs with thighs
1 cup pine nuts
4 tablespoons ground sumac
1 teaspoon ground allspice
½ teaspoon ground cloves
8 small pita breads, 4 large pita breads cut in half, or 1 oversized pita

1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.

2. Heat 1/4 cup of the oil in a large skillet over a low flame. Add the onions and sauté for 20 minutes or until golden, stirring occasionally. After 5 minutes, sprinkle on salt to taste.

3. Season the chicken pieces with salt and pepper, rubbing well into the skin.

4. Transfer the onions to a 9- by 12-inch baking dish and place the chicken on top.

5. Bake, uncovered, for 5 minutes. Reduce the heat to 375 degrees and bake for 15 minutes more.

6. Drizzle a tablespoon or so of the remaining olive oil into a frying pan. Heat the oil, then add the pine nuts. Fry over a very low heat, stirring occasionally, until the pine nuts are browned.

7. Put the sumac, allspice, cloves, and pine nuts in a small bowl and mix.

8. Remove the chicken from the oven and sprinkle on the sumac-pine nut mixture. Drizzle the remaining olive oil over the top and return the dish to the oven. Continue baking for 20-25 more minutes, or until the chicken is cooked. Remove the chicken from the oven.

9. Preheat the broiler. Transfer each chicken piece to a round of pita bread, or place all the chicken pieces over the oversized pita. Sprinkle the onions, with a small amount of the cooking liquid, on top and around the chicken. Place on the middle shelf of the oven and broil for 5 minutes, watching closely to prevent burning.

Yield: 8 servings