Tonight marks the beginning of the Jewish new year -- Rosh Hashana -- and with that, a whole new cycle of holidays and special meals to go with it (in case you need another reason to justify that trip to Whole Foods).
This celebration involves quite a few riffs on the ever-popular salty-sweet flavor pairing. The sweetness in honey, apples, pomegranates and dates are added to many Rosh Hashana dishes and is often offset by the rich, savory taste of brisket or chicken.
It's tradition to begin ringing in Rosh Hashana with sliced apples and honey -- like a toast to a sweet new year. No recipe needed here, just hit up your farmer's market for some tart, crisp apples (try Macoun) and local honey.
The Jewish holiday of Shavuot begins tonight at sundown. The two-day celebration commemorates God's gift of the Torah to the Jewish people. Like most Jewish holidays, Shavuot comes with a food tie-in, and this one is dairy desserts, such as the shapely cheese blintz pictured above.
Why dairy desserts? While a dairy farmer may ask "why not?", the answer lies, yet again, in the Torah: its pages contain the Kosher dietary laws, which forbid the mixing of milk and meat. So when the Jews got the Torah, they also got the news that they could no longer cook meat in their pots. Which is, when you think about it, a great excuse to make cheesecake (even if, as one rabbi likes to remind his congregants, "Shavuot is not just about cheesecake!").
Or panna cotta. Or crème brulée. Or ice cream. Or -- well, you get the picture.
'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(1956) is both a very traditional Jewish cookbook (with recipes for knaidlech and kugel) and a fascinating, funny historical document of mid-century attitudes about cooking, ethnicity, and health.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.
For those of you out there who are beginning to think about getting your kitchens and pantries ready for Passover, be forewarned that you're going to have fewer Manischewitz products to choose from than you have in past years. The company has been in the process of putting a new oven in their one and only baking facility in Newark, NJ and, unfortunately, there were some engineering delays that made them miss the Passover baking window.
The company officials debated whether to stop producing some products altogether for the time being or just make less of them. The decided to temporarily stop production on a few of the less popular matzo products, including Passover Thin Tea Matzo, Yolk Free Egg Matzo, White Grape Matzo, Concord Grape Matzo, Spelt Matzo (unfortunate for observant Jews with wheat allergies) and the beloved cracker-sized Tam Tams.
So, for the Pesach-observant Slashfood readers, you might want to scour the shelves for any boxes of Tam Tams. Because when they're gone, there won't be anymore out there until the end of April.
In the news, THomas Keller's temporary Ad Hoc is open, Cindy Pawlcyn does fish at Go Fish, and Gary Danko tops the Zagat survey. Pan-Asian Red Ginger in El Granada and Oakland's country French JoJo both receive two and a half stars (**½). Mescolanza in the Richmond District gets two stars (**).
By now, most Jewish people are deep into their Seder dinners, as the first
night of Passover began at
Sundown today. However, I'm not Jewish so I don't get to enjoy the ceremonial storytelling and delicious Seder
feast tonight.
Much of the story of Passover is about suffering, so I feel sort of sacrilegous in thinking that haroset
is delicious. Haroset has its place on the Seder plate, representing the mortar that the Israelis used for
building when they were kept as slaves in Egypt. Haroset can be made in many different ways, but the most basic recipe
is made from apples, nuts, and sweet wine.
We already know that there are a lot of "commandments"
that govern the Jewish holiday of Passover, which will be starting tomorrow evening. Many of are strict dietary
rules. The first two nights of Passover are the most important because Jews hold a religious service in their
homes with friends and family around the dinner table called the Seder. The Seder is a time when the Passover story is
told from a book called the haggadah, and explains why the holiday even exists.
The word "seder" means "order," indicating that there is an "order" in which 15
things, or steps, take place. If you didn't figure it out by now, the Seder dinner can take a very long time.
There are very detailed steps that include blessings, hand washings, asking of questions and recitals of answers, and
storytelling.
First off, technically, I'm not Jewish. However, you might as well call me Sarah J. Gimstein. I spent
much of my childhood in a suburb that had a fairly big Jewish population, so most of my friends were Jewish. While my
own mother never made matzo ball soup for
me at home, I certainly got my fair share of matzo (oh, how I loved matzo smeared with
butter) and latkes at
friends' houses after school and on the weekends. And holidays? I knew all about the holidays when I would enviously
wonder what my Jewish friends were doing on "their" holidays, absent from school. Lucky!
For those of you out there who are beginning to think about getting your kitchens and pantries ready for Passover, be forewarned that you're going to have fewer Manischewitz products to choose from than you have in past years. The company has been in the process of putting a new oven in their one and only baking facility in Newark, NJ and, unfortunately, there were some engineering delays that made them miss the Passover baking window. 
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