Book of Our Heritage

Book of Our Heritage - 3 Volume Set
The Laws, Customs, and Reasons for the Jewish Holidays.
Age Level: 12-Adult

Media: Hard Cover

ISBN: 0-87306-763-0


About - Book of Our Heritage - 3 Volume Set

This beloved classic, completely revised and annotated for the contemporary reader, explores the holidays, Festivals and fast days of the Jewish calendar and explains their laws and customs. Midrashic commentaries and insights of great Jewish thinkers and spiritual leaders enhance the heartwarming, inspiring text. Eliyahu Kitov 1,126 pp.

Primo Levi

Primo Levi

No Different than me

The Gefilte Variations

The Gefilte Variations: 200 Inspired Re-creations of Classics from the Jewish Kitchen, with Menus, Stories, and Traditions for the Holidays and Year-Round (Hardcover)

Best Price: Found at MileChai Jewish Books: The Gefilte Variations

The Gefilte Variations: 200 Inspired Re-creations of Classics From the Jewish Kitchen With Menus, Stories, and Traditions for the Holidays and Year-Round.

The Gefilte Variations is a hefty volume, sporting no obvious cookbook filler -- there aren't even any photographs. But the cover's Cubist menorah in blue hues, with its scholarly, tome-like appearance, is misleading, because Cohen's Jewish cookbook gives us atypical interpretations of a very rich tradition.

Jayne Cohen's collection of cultural recipes is a revamping of classic dishes for current tastes, with flourishes expected of cooking today, like Crispy Shallot Latkes With Sugar Dusting. Her innovations are successful; while Cohen won't cloak recipes in ancestral form, she doesn't toy with innovation frivolously. As she says, her improvisations "are firmly rooted in Jewish tradition, and while playful, they remain faithful to its spirit and soul."

But where does one find a tradition's spirit and soul? What, in other words, is the essence of a culinary tradition? There is no easy academic answer, only personal takes on the matter -- call them the Bubby Debates. Essentially, "Jewish" to one grandmother is unlike what the word means to the next. Again, take latkes. One Bubby's family makes hers with potato and onion, frying them in schmaltz, "as in the old days." Another substitutes zucchini or yams for the traditional potato but insists on frying them in oil, like the Chanukah story prescribes. Another cares little for ingredients or method. Instead, she preserves a dish's context, noting the latke's role in holiday ritual. Cohen seems most interested in this last aspect, freely altering the ingredients of traditional dishes, but using them in their established roles. Kugel, for instance, can be made with peaches and plums as long as it preserves the spirit of practicality and abundance required of the Jewish Sabbath and holiday meals.

I don't mind if Jewish cooks borrow ingredients or techniques from other culinary canons, trying to infuse some new flavors into Old Country Cuisine. However, I prefer that this integration is limited to geographic areas of historic influence. Chinese food, for example, is a huge part of contemporary American Jewish culture, particularly on the East Coast, but it is not a major influence on Jewish culture historically. Therefore, it would seem out of place in a book trying to maintain an earnest tie to the past. Cohen, happily, avoids these kinds of superficial associations. In general, she refrains from compiling a worldly potpourri of Jewish cuisine. Her recipes are unusually elegant, but they stay close to the familiar tastes of home and the flavors of the seasons. She writes, "I am not creating silly, culturally perverse combinations here, like ... jalapeño-sundried tomato gefilte fish. ... Rather, my recipes are all integrated interpretations of food I think of as Jewish, and all are kosher." Her pairing of mostly Mediterranean flavors is right on: Apricot Blintzes With Toasted Pistachios and Yogurt Cream, Sorrel Onion Noodle Kugel. She does dabble in adjectival excess, the editorial equivalent of a striptease. But at least tiringly verbose titles like "Salmon Gefilte Fish Poached in Fennel-Wine Broth With Ginger-Beet Horseradish" reveal quite deliciously what the recipe holds in store.

Cohen's book is a testament to how integration -- a risky idea to historically ostracized people -- can have preservative value. Cohen is a wonderful cook, and she has used the fertile ground of classic Jewish cooking to make good food. For that reason, this book is a worthy tribute and contribution to a continually evolving cuisine.

Sample Recipe:

POMEGRANATE-ORANGE SUNSETS

Back to Recipes
PAREVE

Make haste, give me a cup,
Before the dawn starts to rise,
Of spiced pomegranate juice
From the perfumed hand of a girl

-SAMUEL HA-NAGID (993 - 1056), "AN INVITATION"
(TRANSLATED BY DAVID GOLDSTEIN)

Sephardim break the fast with several refreshing beverages: sweet "milks" made from almonds or pumpkin seeds; juices of pomegranates, apricots, watermelon, or apples. American Ashkenazi Jews traditionally drink fresh orange juice, befitting a meal at which they typically serve breakfast foods. This gorgeous juice - a mixture of pomegranate and orange - combines the best of both cultures.

Pour your guests these break-the-fast beverages in fine, clear crystal to capture the swirl of colors. Serve regular sunsets in tall tumblers or water goblets; offer frozen sunsets in stemmed cocktail glasses, like frozen margaritas.

• Chilled orange juice - about 4 ounces for each serving
• Ice cubes
• Fresh or bottled pomegranate juice (See Cook's Note) - 3-4 ounces for each serving
• Mint leaves and/or thin slices of fresh orange, for garnish

1. For regular sunsets. Pour the orange juice into tall glass tumblers or large water goblets filled with ice cubes. Gently pour in the pomegranate juice to taste (I usually combine approximately half and half proportions, but exact amounts will depend on the sweetness of the juices as well as personal preference). Colors should be marbled like a vibrant sunset; if necessary, lightly mix by swirling pomegranate juice through orange juice with a cocktail stirrer or chopstick. Garnish each glass with a mint leaf and/or orange slice. Serve right away.

2. For frozen sunsets. Fill an ice cube tray with pomegranate juice nad freeze until completely solid. Put about 8 frozen pomegranate cubes in a blender. Add 1 cup of orange juice and process until smooth. Divide between two large stemmed glasses, serve with a straw, and garnish with mint leaves and a slice of fresh orange. Serve straightaway. (If the liquid begins to separate from the frozen froth, just stir it up with a cocktail stirrer.)

COOK'S NOTE: To make fresh pomegranate juice, score just the rind of a pomegranate, as you would an orange, in quarters lengthwise. Then peel off the rind in sections carefully - it stains seriously! Scoop out the seeds and juice sacs surrounding them, breaking apart and discarding all the bitter white pith. Put the seeds and the juice sacs through a food mill, or whirl in a blender - not a food processor, which would crush the seeds - for 30 seconds, and then strain. Or rub the seeds and sacs against a strainer or colander. You can also put them through an electric juicer.

Just be sure to remove all of the acrid, mouth-puckering white pith. When I was pregnant with my daughter, the only thing that would settle my stomach was the terrific pomegranate punch served at Brownie's, an old vegetarian restaurant near me (now the site of the Union Square Cafe). One day, my insides in dire turmoil, I attempted to re-create the drink, throwing the entire peeled fruit, pith and all, in my juicer. I could have dyed a rug with it, but I couldn't drink it.
Three medium pomegranates will yield approximately 1-11/2 cups of juice. Fresh juice will keep for about 1 week in the refrigerator, 3 months in the freezer.

Pure, bottled juice is available at Middle Eastern shops and many specialty and health food stores. Don't use pomegranate molasses for this recipe.

Best Price: Found at MileChai Jewish Books: The Gefilte Variations

Coming Home to Jerusalem

An American Jewish woman uproots her family to live in Jerusalem, searching for a new home. For Wendy Orange, a writer in her early forties, what starts as a ten-day conference in Jerusalem stretches into a six-year residence in one of the world's most captivating cities, where she undertakes an illuminating and evocative trip to both banks of this ancient land.

Amid language barriers, household drama, homesickness, and a halting job search, Wendy Orange strives to settle her small family in Israel for the long term. Her sociability and interest in her surroundings fast connect her to a wide assortment of Israel's varied personalities: famous authors, ob-scure artists, politicians, psychologists, journalists, American-Israeli housewives, evangelical Christian teachers. She meets a long-lost family friend who came to Jerusalem in the 1948 war, and she comes to know sabras who are wearying of the life she finds fascinating and compelling. She is introduced to Holocaust survivors who arrived shattered to work the land on farms. She meets therapists who blame her problems on American self-absorption, and rabbis obsessed with the Torah whose lectures she yearns to understand. She goes to a picnic with absolutist West Bank settlers. She falls in love with a Moroccan-Israeli cab driver and receives an education in Israel's class schisms.

When Orange gets a job as the Israel correspondent for an American magazine, she crosses the Green Line that separates Israelis from displaced Palestinians and she begins a journey through another country she comes to love. Crisscrossing from Israel to the territories, Orange confronts views of the world that are completely at odds and she experiences in a profound way the ancient conflicts as she becomes absorbed with people who are at polar extremes: peaceniks and settlers, the political elite and the downtrodden, high-profile intellectuals and young soldiers. She is drawn into subcultures that coexist, if barely, throughout Israel. In Coming Home to Jerusalem, Wendy Orange brings to life the extraordinary and the everyday in a country she tries to make her own.

Synopsis:

In an illuminating and evocative tour through the byways of Israel, an American Jewish woman tells her own story of uprooting her family to live in Jerusalem, searching for a new home.

About the Author

Wendy Orange was a clinical psychologist in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the director of a master's program in psychology in Burlington, Vermont. She made her first visit to Jerusalem, where she became a journalist, in 1991. She currently lives in New York City with her family.