"matzo ball soup" news and stories

Here's everything you need for a Seder dinner that is perfect for the occasion of gathering friends and family, and that's perfectly simple and delicious.

KitchenDaily contributor Ruth Cousineau has come up with a menu that includes charoset of apples, spices, and sweet red wine, light and fluffy matzo-ball soup, gefilte fish loaf, a spice-rubbed brisket with roasted vegetables, a parsley-fennel salad, and meringue nests with rhubarb and strawberry sauce.

Get the World's Easiest Seder Menu.

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(1956) is both a very traditional Jewish cookbook (with recipes for knaidlech and kugel) and a fascinating, funny historical document of mid-century attitudes about cooking, ethnicity, and health.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

Passover starts at sundown tomorrow and we've got you covered over at AOL Food. Check out our Matzo Ball 101 (the secret ingredient, as we reveal, is schmaltz -- more than a sentimental moment, it's literally chicken fat!) and oodles of other recipes including a delectable-lookin' Merlot-drenched beef brisket with prunes. So take a gander before you hustle out the door to do your shopping tonight.

Got a knockout Passover recipe? Share it in the comments!

I realize that we're still more than a month out from Passover, but I've already got matzo ball soup on the brain. As I looked around our Flickr group last night, I came across this image and it said to me, "I am the platonic ideal of a bowl of matzo ball soup. Feature me!" Rachael, the blogger behind the always visually stunning site Coconut and Lime, is the woman behind this picture. If you're so inclined, you can get the recipe on her blog.

Don't forget to head over to the Slashfood Flickr site, join up and add your pictures. We want to see your kitchen creations!

Source

My real Jewish friends are off tonight having a "Break Passover" party, a little "celebration" where they're going to indulge in all those foods they couldn't eat for eight days - yeasted breads, cakes, pretty much anything that contains wheat, all of which were replaced during the Passover holiday with matzo.

Since the holiday is over, there might be a lot of leftover matzo. Sure, eating it at three meals for eight days, one might get sick of the hard, cracker-like flatbread, but no one ever gets sick of matzo ball soup. How could they? Matzo ball soup doesn't cause sickness, it cures it. It's known as Jewish penicillin, great for anytime of the year.