COOKBOOK SHELF
The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York
In Memory's Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezín
BY ROBERT SIETSEMA until recently, Jewish cookbooks tended to be homespun volumes devoted to recipes straight out of mom's kitchen. (Between the lines, you could almost hear the authors urging you to "Eat, eat!") The emphasis has changed in recent years, however. Many more interesting, arcane and specialized volumes are arriving in bookstores, and they are expanding our notions of what Jewish food has been -- and what it can be. Claudia Roden's "The Book of Jewish Food," for example, is much more than a cookbook. Roden, who lives in London and is the author of the seminal "A Book of Middle Eastern Food," begins with a fascinating reminiscence of her girlhood in suburban Cairo, where she was reared in a family of Sephardim -- Jews who were expelled from Spain almost five centuries ago. (The term is now loosely used to describe Jews of Mediterranean, Middle Eastern and Asian origin.) The Sephardim have often been viewed as less sophisticated than the Ashkenazi (European) Jews, but Roden turns this myth on its head. She describes a culture that was remarkably cosmopolitan, in which French, Turkish, Arabic and a Judeo-Spanish patois were routinely spoken, and where Jews occupied an honored place in Egyptian society. The opening sections of "The Book of Jewish Food" also offer a comprehensive (and surprisingly readable) guide to Jewish dietary laws, as well as a catalog of religious holidays and a description of foods eaten in biblical times. Even better, all of this is interspersed with sage observations on the relationship of Jewish culture and food. This book is as close to a page-turner as cookbooks ever get. Predictably, the section devoted to Ashkenazi recipes is small compared to the Sephardic collection. Nevertheless, the former includes dishes from England, France, Denmark, Italy and New York, as well as the expected Eastern European and German standards. Each Jewish community has its own page or two of historic accounts and anecdotal information illustrated with charming photographs. We learn, for example, that the English national dish, fish and chips, was first brought to Britain by Portuguese Jews and was described by the ur-gourmet Alexis Soyer as the Jewish way of cooking fish. The Sephardic section is happily mind-boggling, with recipes from Morocco, Persia, Syria, Yemen, Georgia, India and even China. A fish-and-mango salad from Bombay shares the page with a ceviche from Curaçao, where Sephardim from the Iberian Peninsula settled in the 17th century. And Roden doesn't quail at offering funkier preparations like minima, a Tunisian chicken cake made creamy with calves' brains. Only when it comes to the food of the Falasha, Ethiopian Jews newly arrived in Israel, does she admit defeat, though she does describe one of their meals without giving recipes. There are over 800 recipes in all, and the book is big enough to be a doorjamb. Luckily, this very weightiness causes the book to lie flat when opened, making it easy to cook with. It's a quick trip around the world that (re)awakens your interest in the glories of Jewish food. "In Memory's Kitchen," on the other hand, is not a cookbook, though I suspect many will buy it thinking it is. Rather, it's a collection of 82 recipes written as a sort of diary by a woman named Mina Pächter while she was interned at Terezín, the Czech concentration camp, during World War II. It is uncertain whether her recipes reflect favorite dishes adapted for cooking in the camp, or recipes set down as a kind of fantasy of happier times. (They probably fall into both categories.) Either way, Pächter created them as a legacy for her daughter. The story of this manuscript's eventual transmission to its intended recipient, which spanned 25 years and three continents, is an enthralling one. Unfortunately, it's only offered here in the sketchiest form. The collection is published in the original German and Czech, along with English translations. Presented verbatim, the recipes are bare-bones in the extreme, often lacking fundamental instructions. The book also includes obscure measures like decagrams -- which could easily have been converted to usable form. But the volume's editor suggests that it wouldn't be appropriate to try out the recipes, which include pirogen, stuffed goose neck and the intriguing-sounding waterbed dough. Which makes you wonder, why not? As a legacy of the Holocaust, the volume has immediacy and validity. Unfortunately, reading the smotheringly academic introduction suggests that several much better books could have been based on the same material. For example, there were apparently several recipe manuscripts written by women in concentration camps. A choice selection of these, adapted for contemporary use, would have made a more interesting volume, and a fitter tribute to the victims.
Robert Sietsema, restaurant critic at the Village Voice, is the author of "Good and Cheap Ethnic Eats in New York City," to be published in May by City and Company. P R E V I O U S R E V I E W S The Grapes of Ralph reviewed by Sam Sifton (03/05/97)
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