"Kosher" news and stories

Photo: arnold | inuyaki, Flickr.

For Southern Jewish cooks, pork is the least of their problems.

Kosher-keeping eaters can easily steer clear of barbecue, bacon and fatback, even in the nation's most southernmost states. But what's to be done about buttermilk-fried chicken, a clear violation of the prohibition on mixing milk and meat, or a jambalaya featuring forbidden shellfish?

Memphis' Margolin Hebrew Academy lays out some answers in its new cookbook, Simply Southern, With a Dash of Kosher Soul, a recipe collection its editors are calling the first comprehensive how-to guide to kosher Southern cuisine.

"There's nothing on the market like it," co-editor Dena Wruble says of the book, which debuts this week.

According to Wruble, the families who've sent their children to the school since 1949 are accustomed to cooking at home. "Here in Memphis, we do not have kosher restaurants, so we entertain a lot," she explains.

Wruble and co-editor Tracy Rapp collected more than 500 recipes for favorite dishes from community members, honing in on those preparations with distinctly Southern elements. "There's not a lot of kugel in the book," Wruble says. But noodles do show up in a recipe for macaroni and cheese.

'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(1956) is both a very traditional Jewish cookbook (with recipes for knaidlech and kugel) and a fascinating, funny historical document of mid-century attitudes about cooking, ethnicity, and health.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.

Despite the economic downturn, the kosher food market is soaring, reports the LA Times. And it's not because the Jewish community is growing, but because non-Jews increasingly view kosher food as a higher-quality product, marketers say. Sales of certified kosher foods have risen 64 percent in the past five years, earning a total of $12.5 billion in 2008. Some 28 percent of new food and dairy products launched in the U.S. last year were certified kosher. Kosher foods must confirm to Jewish laws dictating methods of slaughter and prohibitions against mixing certain foods, like meat and milk, and must be approved by a rabbi. Thus kosher food factories may have more stringent manufacturing regulations than non-kosher factories. "Kosher food has gained the reputation of being more carefully produced and thoroughly inspected than non-kosher food," says Marcia Mogelonsky, an analyst at the market research firm Mintel, which tracks food trends. The kosher meat industry, though, has not been without its share of scandal - Agriprocessors Inc., the country's larget kosher meatpacking company, was exposed last year for having illegal and unsanitary conditions in its Iowa facility.

Do you look for the kosher label when you buy food?

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