Jewish Cookbooks

Mother & Daughter Jewish Cooking

Does Grilled Butterflied Chicken with Provençal Herbs sound quintessentially Jewish to you? What about Slow-Cooked Chicken on a Bed of Potatoes? The mother-daughter team of Mother and Daughter Jewish Cooking list the first recipe as "contemporary" and the second recipe as "traditional." Such is the organizing principle on which the entire book is based: we are Jewish women cooking, therefore this is Jewish cooking. The premise doesn't quite hold together at the seams. The book is divided by soups, appetizers, dairy dishes, eggs, tarts, pasta, fish, poultry, beef and lamb, vegetables, salads, rice and grains, desserts, and menus. There's even a glossary of Yiddish and Hebrew terms. You will find both chicken and matzo ball soup. But you will also find a tasty-sounding Oriental Chicken Soup as well as Sephardi Cheese Puffs, Turkish Mushrooms, Aunty Mary's Savory Noodles, Moroccan Beef Casserole, Greek-Jewish Red Wine Beef Casserole, Viennese Red Cabbage, Doris's German Cucumber Salad, and Healthy Somerset Apple Coffee Cake.

"This book," Evelyn Rose says, "is an attempt to preserve the food legacy handed down by all our mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers, but to modify it to suit the lives we live now, and to introduce other dishes that are imbued with the same spirit yet are looking toward the future." So Mother and Daughter Jewish Cooking is more like two generations of women (Judy is the daughter) sharing traditional and contemporary recipes, in a kind of a mother-daughter coffee klatsch. Rose, who lives in Manchester, England, and broadcasts on the BBC, is a world authority on Jewish food. Her classic The New Complete International Jewish Cookbook is like The Joy of Cooking for the Anglo-Jewish home. That's a lot of muscle. Not enough of it is flexed in this collection. --Schuyler Ingle From Publishers Weekly

Food editor of the Jewish Chronicle and author of the classic The New Complete International Jewish Cookbook, Evelyn Rose is a well-known authority on Jewish cuisine. Now with her daughter, Judi, a writer and producer for BBC Television, Evelyn brings "together many of the most enduring dishes from Jewish communities around the world" and imbues others with a contemporary flair. A chapter on soups, for example, includes both Heimishe Winter Soup with Lentils, Barley, and Beans and an up-to-date Cream of Watercress Soup with a Toasted Walnut Garnish; a Viennese Spiced Melon Cocktail is renovated with a dressing of currant jelly, Dijon mustard and chutney. Exotic treats (South African Curried Beef Gratin) complement basics (Slow-Cooked Chicken on a Bed of Potatoes). In the spirit of passing knowledge from one generation to the next, this book contains large doses of Jewish folklore, cooking tips and family stories. (One recipe, Grandpa Rose's Pickles, was handed down through the men in the Rose family, and it took Evelyn 10 years to extricate it from her husband.) Desserts, such as Viennese Apple Squares with Cinnamon-Scented Cream and Wine and Chocolate G?teau with Cappuccino Frosting, are both sophisticated and homey. Finally, a brief series of menus for various Jewish holidays helps readers incorporate the Roses' recipes into their own traditions, making this a worthwhile addition to an increasingly crowded category. 8-page color photo insert.

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