Joan Nathan's Jewish Holiday Cookbook

by Joan Nathan

Overview

Jewish holidays are defined by food. Yet Jewish cooking is always changing, encompassing the flavors of the world, embracing local culinary traditions of every place in which Jews have lived and adapting them to Jewish observance. This collection, the culmination of Joan Nathan’s decades of gathering Jewish recipes from around the world, is a tour through the Jewish holidays as told in food. For each holiday, Nathan presents menus from different cuisines—Moroccan, Russian, German, and contemporary American are just a few—that show how the traditions of Jewish food have taken on new forms around the world. There are dishes that you will remember from your mother’s table and dishes that go back to the Second Temple, family recipes that you thought were lost and other families’ recipes that you have yet to discover. Explaining their origins and the holidays that have shaped them, Nathan spices these delicious recipes with delightful stories about the people who have kept these traditions alive.

Try something exotic—Algerian Chicken Tagine with Quinces or Seven-Fruit Haroset from Surinam—or rediscover an American favorite like Pineapple Noodle Kugel or Charlestonian Broth with “Soup Bunch” and Matzah Balls. No matter what you select, this essential book, which combines and updates Nathan’s classic cookbooks The Jewish Holiday Baker and The Jewish Holiday Kitchen with a new generation of recipes, will bring the rich variety and heritage of Jewish cooking to your table on the holidays and throughout the year.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780805242171
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/17/2004
Edition description:	REV
Pages:	544
Sales rank:	348,502
Product dimensions:	7.67(w) x 9.48(h) x 1.66(d)

About the Author

Joan Nathan is the author of eight books, including Jewish Cooking in America, which won the coveted IACP Julia Child Award as Best Cookbook of the Year and also the James Beard Award for Best American Cookbook. She appears on television cooking programs, including her own PBS series based on Jewish Cooking in America, and lectures around the country. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and also writes for such publications as Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, Cooking Light, and Hadassah magazine.

Nathan grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, and was educated at the University of Michigan and Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. She worked in Jerusalem in the early 1970s as foreign press officer for then-mayor Teddy Kollek and was among the founders of New York’s Ninth Avenue Food Festival under then-mayor Abraham Beame. Nathan lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, attorney Allan Gerson, and their three children.

Read an Excerpt

Ashkenazic Apple-Nut Haroset
Makes 3 cups

6 McIntosh or Gala apples (2 pounds), peeled, cored, seeded, and coarsely chopped
2/3 cup chopped almonds
3 tablespoons sugar, or to taste
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
Grated zest of 1 lemon
4 tablespoons sweet red wine



1. Combine all the ingredients, mixing together thoroughly. Add a little more wine as needed.

2. Blend (you can use a food processor) until it reaches the desired consistency. (I like my haroset in large pieces, with a crunchy texture, but my husband's Polish family prefers theirs ground to a paste.) Chill.


Passover Roast Lamb
Serves 6-8

One 7-pound shoulder of lamb (see note below) Salt and pepper
1 clove garlic, cut in slivers
1/2 cup shredded celery leaves
1/3 cubed green pepper
2 tablespoons tomato sauce, or to taste


1. Preheat the over to 325 degrees.

2. Rub the met all over with salt and pepper. Place slivers of garlic in between the bone and the flesh. Place the meat on a rack in a roasting pan, surrounded by celery leaves and green pepper.

3. Allowing 20 minutes per pound, roast in the over. About 1 hour before it is done, smooth tomato sauce over the top of the lamb. This will make a crusty skin and all to the flavor of the gravy.

4. To make the gravy, first remove the lamb to a warm place and drain off all of the fat. Add a little water to the juices in the pan, leaving in the celery leaves and green pepper, and boil down on top of the stove. Serve with asparagus, roasted new potatoes, and mint jelly.
NOTE: A leg of lamb is basically a kosher cut of meat, but it would be extremely laborious and costly for a butcher to cut the many veins in the hind legs of the animal for the blood to run out. For this reason, kosher butchers prefer to sell the shoulder cut.

Editorial Reviews

Not merely a revision of The Jewish Holiday Kitchen, first published 25 years ago, Nathan's big new book also includes recipes and material from The Jewish Holiday Baker and her numerous articles for the New York Times. The hundreds of recipes, representing both the Ashkenazic and the Sephardic traditions, come from Jewish communities all over the world: Moroccan Challah, Greek Leek Patties, Mexican Banana Cake, and Haroset from Surinam. There are regional and cultural variations of many recipes--for example, in addition to the one from Surinam, there are also Egyptian, Venetian, Persian, and Yemenite harosets. Recipes are organized by holiday, from Rosh Hashanah to Shavuoth, with separate chapters on the Sabbath and "The Life Cycle," a selection of traditional dishes for events such as bar mitzvahs and weddings. Detailed, thoroughly researched head notes provide historical and religious context, and numerous boxes cover a wide variety of topics. Highly recommended. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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