Jewish Cooking

Mother & Daughter Jewish Cooking
Two generations of Jewish recipes

Those of us who learned to cook from our mothers never get over it. No matter what esoteric skills we acquire after we leave her kitchen, when we learn from other cooks how to fold sheets of pastry or sauté loins of rabbit, our gestures when we cook remain those we learned when we saw Mom mix cookie dough or poke a steak to see if it was done.

Mother and Daughter Jewish Cooking is about just that kind of communion. Mother Evelyn Rose, an English food writer and editor, gives her recipes for traditional Jewish dishes, and then her grown daughter Judi Rose gives her up-to-date variations. So Mama's noodle pudding becomes daughter's bowties with mascarpone; Mama's kissel (a cornstarch-thickened berry compote) becomes daughter's berries and cherries in wine.

All the recipes are for kosher, or at least kosher-style, dishes, but they may surprise you. The "traditional" recipes, ones we supposedly know so well that we need to vary them, are different because they're English. That means the matzoh balls have a bite of ginger; the gefilte fish is really fried chopped-fish cakes; shepherd's pie is made with fish instead of meat, and ginger marmalade spices up a honey cake. To me, these are the most interesting recipes in the book, because they prove that Jewish cooking is in fact the world's predominant fusion cuisine.

Not only are the recipes varied and creative, they're solid choices, all accessible and many new to me. If only the prose style wasn't quite so overheated. I got tired of reading that a dish was "wonderful" or "perfect" or "marvelous," and my copy-editing fingers itched to pick up a blue pencil and slash the adjectives. On the other hand, those are just the way a mother and daughter would talk when conferring about dinner. "Try this recipe, darling: it's just wonderful."

— Reviewed and tested by Irene Sax, April 14, 2000