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April 22, 2005
Seder at your fingertips
New cookbooks for Pesach provide a wealth of ideas.
RAHEL MUSLEAH
The culinary challenges of the "feast of freedom" make
it a time when we look for any help to avoid being slaves in our
own kitchens. No matter how tired I get of cooking, I never tire
of reading cookbooks. A new batch of kosher cookbooks won't clean
the house for you, but they could reinvigorate your festive meals.
None is limited just to Passover; instead, they offer menu ideas
that span the calendar.
Take a culinary tour around the world with Matthew Goodman's Jewish
Food: The World at Table (HarperCollins). This is not a pictoral
journey but an informative and undoubtedly delicious one. Goodman,
who writes a food column for the Forward, offers brief essays about
communities, ingredients and dishes. A section on charoset features
recipes from eastern Europe, Italy and Yemen; another, on matzah,
offers matzah brie with asparagus and caramelized onions, and matzah
meal pancakes with strawberry compote. Try Moldavian zucchini caviar,
Alsatian matzah balls with parsley and ginger, Mexican fried fish
balls in spicy tomato sauce, fish with matzah meal and chips from
London, Moroccan roast chicken with dried fruits and nuts, Greek
lemon chicken, onion-smothered brisket with allspice from the Catskills,
Calcutta fried potatoes, orange-glazed sponge layer cake and Hungarian
chocolate almond torte.
Veteran cookbook author Gil Marks provides another delectable excursion
- this time vegetarian – in Olive Trees and Honey: A Treasury
of Vegetarian Recipes from Jewish Communities Around the World
(Wiley). The title itself is enough to make your mouth water. A
holiday section suggests popular Passover foods like Ukrainian beet
soup (otherwise known as borscht), Italian fried artichokes, Sephardi
sweet-and-sour celery for karpas, Moroccan mashed potatoes and Calcutta
curried vegetables. A Sephardi Passover pie made with matzah is
filled with eggplant and cheese, or potato and onions for a pareve
version. Choose any of a variety of Passover-compatible patties,
made with leeks, cauliflower or spinach and thickened with matzah
meal.
How about a whole book just dedicated to soups? Soup: A Kosher
Collection (Evans) by Pam Reiss has recipes for pareve/vegetarian,
dairy, fish, meat and dessert soups. While you're cleaning out your
refrigerator, prepare everything-but- the-kitchen-sink soup, replete
with veggies, barley, lentils, rice and corn. Scan the rest of the
book for seder possibilities: root soup, sweet potato and apple
soup, fresh asparagus soup, carrot dill soup, eight-mushroom soup
and roasted rosemary chicken soup. If you're not grape-averse after
four cups of wine, finish off the meal with red or green grape soup!
Crowning Elegance: A Kosher Culinary Experience from the Arie
Crown Hebrew Day School in Skokie, Illinois, edited by Valerie
Kanter, is a far cry from the loosely bound sisterhood or school
recipe collection. Hardcover, with glossy photos and an appealing
layout, the book lives up to its title. For Passover, consider the
Persian meatball soup (leave out the rice if you are Ashkenazi);
roasted red or yellow pepper soup; mango, papaya and avocado salad;
cold honeydew and mint purée in cantaloupe; horseradish-crusted
prime rib, with 30 garlic cloves cooked in a crock; veal in wine;
vegetable-stuffed zucchini; and raspberry-meringue gateau for the
final flourish. It's also available on CD.
Kosher by Design Entertains: Fabulous Recipes for Parties and
Everyday (Mesorah) by Susie Fishbein is a similarly stylish
collection of more than 250 recipes that follows on the success
of Fishbein's Kosher by Design. Despite its focus on celebrations
from cocktail parties to buffets and picnics, many recipes can be
made for seder meals. Matzah balls colored green with puréed
baby spinach, golden with turmeric or rosy with tomato paste (imagine
their faces!) debuted on the Today Show. Prepare a Mizuna
lettuce, fig and honey salad; ratatouille chicken stew; orange chicken
over whipped carrots; balsamic braised brisket with shallots and
potatoes; and roasted cauliflower "popcorn." For dessert,
fashion a chocolate berry tart or clever low-fat fresh fruit lollipops.
Marlene Spieler's richly photographed Kosher Cooking (Southwater/Anness)
begins with an historical overview. It details the laws of kashrut
and the variety of ingredients and dishes that encompass Jewish
food. Cook up a sweet and sour cabbage, beetroot and tomato borscht,
Israeli barbecued chicken, British fried fish patties or a vegetable
kugel savory with zucchini, carrots and potatoes.
Who would have thought you could find a Passover recipe in Maggie
Glezer's A Blessing of Bread: Recipes and Rituals, Memories and
Mitzvahs (Artisan)? For the adventurous cook who has access
to Passover flour and a high-temperature (bread) oven, don't pass
over cracklin' thin Iraqi whole wheat matzot. If you don't have
those two requirements, it's still fun to read about, or to make
during the year. To end Passover, try rolls studded with walnuts
and dried currants, popular in Greek communities.
If only Trudy Garfunkel's Kosher for Everybody: The Complete
Guide to Understanding, Shopping, Cooking and Eating the Kosher
Way (Jossey-Bass) could clean for you, too. Garfunkel explains
the history of kosher food in America, describes kosher symbols
and certification, and features sections on kosher wine and spirits,
health benefits, kosher for vegetarians and for the lactose-intolerant
and sources of kosher food – from hotels, camps, mail-order,
restaurants, caterers and butchers to candy and chocolates. Fifty-five
recipes represent Garfunkel's family favorites, ranging from chicken
soup and "heavenly light" matzah balls to vegetarian cutlets,
spinach pie, kufteles (fried ground meat patties), pot roast with
lemon and orange, Portuguese fish bundles, meringues and toffee
squares.
Take a break from cooking to ogle Passover Splendor: Cherished
Objects for the Seder Table (Stewart, Tabori & Chang), a
feast for the eyes collected by Barbara Rush. Revel in Haggadot
from Barcelona circa 1320 to Berlin circa 1928, seder plates created
in Vienna and Baghdad, wine goblets crafted in glass in the Netherlands
and in Bitumen stone in Israel, an afikoman bag sewn in China and
matzah covers from Poland, Hungary and the United States. Extend
the break by reading Joel Wolowelsky's commentary in Women at
the Seder: A Passover Haggadah (Ktav).
Put everything in perspective by perusing the reissued editions
of the first Jewish American cookbook, published in Philadelphia
in 1871 (in hardcover from Applewood; softcover from Dover). Esther
Levy's Jewish Cookery Book instructs cooks on "principles
of economy adapted for the Jewish housekeeper, with the addition
of many useful medicinal recipes and other valuable information
relative to housekeeping and domestic management." In addition
to recipes for stewing veal, boiling a calf's head, drying cherries
and making orange chips, you can learn how to give a gloss to shirt
bosoms, make shoe blacking, take stains out of marble, clean an
old silk dress, keep away house vermin, cure corns and bunions,
relieve chapped hands and frozen feet, and prevent onion breath
(eat parsley dipped in vinegar beforehand).
Here are Levy's inspiring words on Passover preparations: "With
what pleasurable emotions a Jewish woman must anticipate the time
when she will see everything looking so brilliantly clean, and mostly
new.
Indeed, we should all be delighted when we reflect that so much
cleanliness is a preparation for becomingly celebrating our wonderful
deliverance from bondage."
Amen.
Rahel Musleah is the author of Why on This Night?
A Passover Haggadah for Family Celebration (Simon & Schuster).
She presents programs on the Jewish communities of India, where
she was born. You can visit her website, www.rahelsjewishindia.com.
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