Jewish

Eggplant and Vegetable Stew

Cooking alla Giudia: A Celebration of the Jewish Food of Italy by Benedetta Jasmine Guetta

Cooking alla Giudia is the ultimate tribute to the wonderfully rich, yet still largely unknown, culinary heritage of the Jews of Italy. From Roman deep-fried artichokes (carciofi alla giudia) to Venetian sarde in saor (sweet-and-sour sardines), Apulian orecchiette pasta, and Sicilian caponata, some of Italy’s best-known dishes are Jewish in origin. But little is known about the Jewish people in Italy and their culinary traditions.

It was the Jews, for example, who taught Italians to eat the eggplant, and thus helped inspire the classic eggplant parmigiana and many other local specialties. With a collection of kosher recipes from all regions of Italy, including plenty of vegan, vegetarian, and gluten-free options, author Benedetta Jasmine Guetta is on a mission to tell the story of how the Jews changed Italian food, to preserve these recipes, and to share with home cooks the extraordinary dishes prepared in the Jewish communities of Italy.

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The Sun-Dried Tomato and Olive Bagel

The Sun-Dried Tomato and Olive Bagel, Bagels, Schmears, and a Nice Piece of Fish: A Whole Brunch of Recipes to Make at Home Hardcover by Cathy Barrow. Photography by Linda Xiao.

Bagels, Schmears, and a Nice Piece of Fish: A Whole Brunch of Recipes to Make at Home Hardcover by Cathy Barrow

A playful-yet-comprehensive cookbook that lets anyone create bagels, schmears, and other deli favorites at home.

Bagel lovers rejoice! This delightful cookbook makes it easy to bake fresh bagels in your own kitchen with just five base ingredients and simple techniques. With advice on mixing the dough, shaping the bagels, proofing, boiling, baking, slicing, and storing, you will be a master bagel-maker in no time.

Recipes include two dozen variations on the New York bagel, with classic and innovative flavors ranging from Sesame to Blueberry to Hatch Chile Jack. You’ll also find recipes for homemade sweet and savory spreads, schmears, pickles, and other deli mainstays like Home-Cured Lox and Chicken Salad.

With suggested menus for fun brunches and gatherings, photos of finished food and step-by-step techniques, and a charming deli aesthetic, this is both a comprehensive baking resource and a playful guide to making one of America’s best-loved foods.

BAGELS ARE EASY BAKING: This book brings bagels to the home baker with step-by-step recipes for making classic New York bagels, even in the smallest kitchen. And it’s not about the water! It’s about just five ingredients and straightforward technique. (more…)

Roasted Chicken Matzo Ball Soup

Roasted Chicken Matzo Ball Soup, Jew-ish: A Cookbook: Reinvented Recipes from a Modern Mensch by Jake Cohen. Photography by Matt Taylor-Gross.

Jew-ish: A Cookbook: Reinvented Recipes from a Modern Mensch

When you think of Jewish food, a few classics come to mind: chicken soup with matzo balls, challah, maybe a babka if you’re feeling adventurous. But as food writer and nice Jewish boy Jake Cohen demonstrates in this stunning debut cookbook, Jewish food can be so much more.

In Jew-ish, he reinvents the food of his Ashkenazi heritage and draws inspiration from his husband’s Persian-Iraqi traditions to offer recipes that are modern, fresh, and enticing for a whole new generation of readers. Imagine the components of an everything bagel wrapped into a flaky galette latke dyed vibrant yellow with saffron for a Persian spin on the potato pancake, best-ever hybrid desserts like Macaroon Brownies and Pumpkin Spice Babka! Jew-ish features elevated, yet approachable classics along with innovative creations, such as:

Jake’s Perfect Challah
Roasted Tomato Brisket
Short Rib Cholent
Iraqi Beet Kubbeh Soup
Cacio e Pepe Rugelach
Sabich Bagel Sandwiches, and
Matzo Tiramisu.

Jew-ish is a brilliant collection of delicious recipes, but it’s much more than that. As Jake reconciles ancient traditions with our modern times, his recipes become a celebration of a rich and vibrant history, a love story of blending cultures, and an invitation to gather around the table and create new memories with family, friends, and loved ones. (more…)

Challah Grilled Cheese

Challah Grilled Cheese, Eat Something by Evan Bloom & Rachel Levin, Photography by Maren Caruso.

Eat Something by Evan Bloom & Rachel Levin This long-awaited cookbook (the first one for Wise Sons!) is packed with homey recipes and relatable humour; it is as much a delicious, lighthearted, and nostalgic cookbook as it is a lively celebration of Jewish culture.

Stemming from the thesis that Jews eat by occasion (and with enthusiasm), the book is organized into 19 different events and celebrations chronicling a Jewish life in food, from bris to shivah, and all the makeshift and meaningful events in between, including: Shabbat, Passover, the high holidays, first meal home from college, J-dating, wedding, and more.

• Both a Jewish humour book and a cookbook
• Recipes are drawn from the menus of their beloved Bay Area restaurants, as well as all the occasions when Jews gather around the table.
• Includes short essays, illustrations, memorabilia, and stylish plated food photography.

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My Mom’s Sweet-and-Sour Baked Eggplant

Salad for breakfast. Vegetables every which way. Earthy hummus and the primal delight of mopping it up with a torn pita. Soul-satisfying stews and soups. The light-as-a-cloud texture of real couscous. A profound love for chicken. Pilafs, shakshukas, grilled meats, and fish from the glittering sea. The vibrant, utterly delicious (and healthy!) pleasures of eating food alive with spice, bright with lemon and olive oil, and showered with fresh herbs.

These are just some of the reasons why Israeli food is so of the moment—because this is how we want to eat today. And all of it—from the simplest chopped salad to nutty, soft, crumbly Tahini Shortbread Cookies—is found in SHUK: From Market to Table, the Heart of Israeli Home Cooking.

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Jelly Donuts

Sufganiyot (Jelly Donuts), The Jewish Cookbook by Leah Koenig, Photography by Evan Sung

Jewish cuisine exists all over the world. Shaped by the diaspora, Jewish food has inherently adapted and evolved to reflect the changing geographies and ingredients of its cooks, while also maintaining and honouring important customs and narratives.

Featuring over 400 dishes from Jewish communities around the world, The Jewish Cookbook is the most comprehensive collection of contemporary and traditional recipes for home cooks. Presenting food for everyday meals, celebrations, and special holidays, the book includes 11 chapters organized by occasion and dish.

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Chicken Soup (aka Jewish Penicillin)

Chicken Soup, Kosher Style by Amy Rosen, Photography by Ryan Szulc

In the Jewish culture, as in many others, bubbes, saftas and nanas are the matriarchs of the kitchen and thus the rulers of the roost. They are culinary giants in quilted polyester muumuus and silk slippers who know how to make the Semitic linchpins cherished from childhood—the kugel, the gefilte fish, the matzah ball soup and the crispy-skinned roasted chicken. They all have their specialties but, of course, they won’t be around to feed us forever, and that will be a loss indeed. But it will be an even bigger loss if the recipes we grew up on pass away with them, along with those special connections to our past.

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Chocolate Miso Babka

Best-selling fermentation authors Kirsten and Christopher Shockey explore a whole new realm of probiotic superfoods with Miso, Tempeh, Natto & Other Tasty Ferments. This in-depth handbook offers accessible, step-by-step techniques for fermenting beans and grains in the home kitchen. (more…)

Cheesecake with Cherries

Tablet Magazine’s list of the 100 most Jewish foods is not about the most popular Jewish foods, or the tastiest, or even the most enduring. It’s a list of the most significant foods culturally and historically to the Jewish people, explored deeply with essays, recipes, stories, and context. Some of the dishes are no longer cooked at home, and some are not even dishes in the traditional sense (store-bought cereal and Stella D’oro cookies, for example).

The entire list is up for debate, which is what makes this book so much fun. Many of the foods are delicious (such as babka and shakshuka). Others make us wonder how they’ve survived as long as they have (such as unhatched chicken eggs and jellied calves’ feet). (more…)

Yeasted Rugelach

Photography by Michael Persico

For their first major book since the trailblazing Zahav, Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook go straight to the food of the people—the great dishes that are the soul of Israeli cuisine. Usually served from tiny eateries, hole-in-the-wall restaurants, or market stalls, these specialties have passed from father to son or mother to daughter for generations. To find the best versions, the authors scoured bustling cities like Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa, and sleepy towns on mountaintops. They visited bakeries, juice carts, beaches, even weddings. (more…)

Cool Food Dude

Jewish

Eggplant and Vegetable Stew

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The Sun-Dried Tomato and Olive Bagel

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Roasted Chicken Matzo Ball Soup

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Challah Grilled Cheese

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My Mom’s Sweet-and-Sour Baked Eggplant

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Jelly Donuts

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Chicken Soup (aka Jewish Penicillin)

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Chocolate Miso Babka

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Cheesecake with Cherries

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