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(1956) is both a very traditional Jewish cookbook (with recipes for knaidlech and kugel) and a fascinating, funny historical document of mid-century attitudes about cooking, ethnicity, and health.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

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.

Delis will always have something for everyone. For some reason, their menus are the biggest you are likely to see in the restaurant industry. One deli that comes to mind (unnamed because their food is definitely not so hot) has over 600 items on the menu, for example. But it can be hard to get everything right when your kitchen is producing everything from Reubens to fettuccini alfredo to teriyaki stir fry, though when at least half of the menu is excellent, patrons don’t mind an omelet that is simply acceptable when their dining partner can get pizza and potato latkes at the same meal. A good deli is a great thing, though. And Brent’s is just about the best in LA, according to the huge crowds that gather in front of it every day.

Brent’s Deli has been around since 1967 and has won too many awards to count. Not only do they have a great neighborhood feel, they are widely regarded as the best deli in Los Angeles and Zagat called them the “Best outside New York.” Their goal is “to be the best family owned & operated delicatessens & restaurants in the country”, and if you’ve ever eaten there, you’ll know that they’re not far off that mark. Everything is always fresh, helped in no small part because thee restaurant is always packed. The only thing that takes longer than getting a table is trying to find a parking spot in their lot around lunchtime. Park across the street, if you can help it.