'Love and Knishes: An Irrepressible Guide to Jewish Cooking'
Recipes by Sara Kasdan
Illustrations by Louis Slobodkin
The Vanguard Press, 1956
Buy it at Amazon

Dedicated "To the Wonderful Women Who Never Cooked from a Book," Sara Kasdan's Love and Knishes (1956) is both a very traditional Jewish cookbook (with recipes for knaidlech and kugel) and a fascinating, funny historical document of mid-century attitudes about cooking, ethnicity, and health. Kasdan wrote her book at a time when, as she writes witheringly in a chapter titled You Can Be Normal, Too, Why Not? "Nowadays, everything is psychology...everybody has complexes." Interspersed with her recipes for tzimmes and kasha varnitchkes is a caustic sense of humor that makes the tome compulsively readable. Kasdan's audience is a generation of women whose instincts and traditions were about to get run off the road by everything from Julia Child and processed foods to cookbooks purporting to teach them what they already knew.

Takeaway Tips: Look for the double entendres: Kasdan's one-page chapter about salads is called "Papa Called it Grass." She suffers none of the pretensions or guilt of modern cookbook writer, and the book is a festival of schmaltz, sour cream and refined carbohydrates. A helpful glossary defines foods like lox ("A partner to bagels") and kreplach ("Chinese definition: Won Ton; Italian definition: ravioli.") And all of the chapters come with lengthy anecdotes about everything from picky husbands to Rosh Hashana strudel.

Quality of Illustrations: Crude but hilarious.

Kasdan's Passover chapters shows an angry woman throwing a matzo ball at a statue of the Pharoah, a figure of Jewish oppression and slavery. Her chapter on short cuts pictures an exhausted homemaker holding a gun to her head.

We tested: Farmer's Chop Suey.

Honestly, the name is more interesting than the salad itself - it's just cucumbers, radishes, scallions, cottage cheese, and sour cream. But it's easy and satisfying, and the pint of sour cream will give you flashbacks to a less dietarily fraught time.

Worth the Investment: As Kasdan herself might say, you'd be meshuge not to. Early editions of the book are all but impossible to find and tend to be expensive, but newer editions are available and a must for anyone interested in Jewish home cooking and humor.