East/West: Home Cooking is Best - The Bialy Eaters: The Story of a Bread and a Lost World; Cucina Ebraica; Sephardic Flavors; The Foods of Israel Today; The Foods of Israel Today - Review

The Bialy Eaters: The Story of a Bread and a Lost World. By MIMI SHERATON. New York: Broadway Books, 2000.

Passover Cookery in the Kitchen. By JOAN KEKST. Chandler, AZ: Five Star Publications, 2001.

Cucina Ebraica. BY JOYCE GOLDSTEIN. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1998.

Sephardic Flavors. By JOYCE GOLDSTEIN. San Francisco Chronicle Books.

The Foods of Israel Today. BY JOAN NATHAN. New York. Alfred Knopf, 2001.

When my daughter called me and asked me to e-mail her our family latke (potato pancakes) recipe at Chanuka time, I realized a new era in Jewish cooking had begun. Cooking, the world around, has been primarily learned as oral tradition; not just eating but talking and demonstrating the art(s) of planting, harvesting, or shopping, cleaning, and preparing food. One of my old Jewish cook books assumes the "tam" (taste) of most food preferences were inherited from "bubba" (grandmother). It also assumes that most bubbas came from Eastern Europe and that Jewish cooking consists of gefilte fish, chicken soup, challah, cholent, kugel, brisket, and fruit compote. As we say in Brooklyn, "them days is over." Jewish cooking has become, has always been international.

The review which follows deals with six recent cookbooks on jewish cooking. Given the tradition of food preparation learned from generation to generation, we are blessed in having up-to-date cookbooks. The earliest one I own is a "ladies' manual" from Victorian England. After all, besides the "tsena rena" (Yiddish translation of the Bible), what did Jewish women read? Only recently, that is, in the last two hundred years. And what is a recipe? A little this, a pinch of that, something from the bin, some from the garden. And where are the kosher butchers? Wrapped in cellophane. What sets Jewish cooking apart from all others is kashrut (the laws governing food consumption) and custom, including Sabbath and Holiday celebrations and the adaptations made in the Diaspora to neighboring foodstuffs and cooking styles.

Ashkenazi Jews came from Poland, Russia, and other Eastern European countries in great numbers. Many settled in New York City and set up markets and restaurants, or rather "deli's" where "essen/fressen" (eating and overeating) were enjoyed. New York City Jews made the movies, the theater, and popular urban literature; Ashkenazi food habits became known as "typical Jewish food." (See the terrible ads currently put forth by Noah's Bagel Company.) In less broadcast parts of the world, Jewish cooking was integrated into the country's cuisine. The first time I read Edda Servi Machlin's The Classical Cuisine of the Italian Jews (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1981), I was surprised to learn that rice, not matzo balls, was an addition to the Passover seder soup. Was rice a violation of the "no food that rises or swells" rule? Kashrut or custom? The Mediterranean is not central Europe: one eats in the custom of the country.

The Mendocino Coast Cookbook was originally to be called No Pigs in a Blanket or The Oy of Cooking. The dinner table, it is said, is the altar of God. Today, especially in California, most food is "fusion," that is, it participates in all cuisine. We assume that upon entering a Chinese restaurant Jews know that pork becomes chicken and shrimp become flounder. We use curry to flavor soups and stews (as Jews in India probably always did) and eggplant as ersatz chopped liver. We put Thai peanut sauce on chicken and seek hummus, tabouli, cous-cous, and other Mid-Eastern foods to assist our Israel memories. These new trends have come about because we travel more than our immediate ancestors and because we have been warned that "essen/fressen" is deadly to health. I don't know the medical facts, but pastrami sandwiches and cheesecake, combined with big cigars and a sedentary life at the pinochle table, are said to produce heart attacks. Who knows? The authors of the cookbooks cited in this article have provided a w ide range of alternatives to "assumed" Jewish cooking and in the process, added to our understanding of our people's food habits around the world and new dimensions of kashrut and custom.

Besides talking, the greatest Jewish recreation is eating. Philosophers may argue that the people of the book like to study, travel, write, and perform, among other sports, but inevitably, eating and therefore cooking prevails as the top mitzvah. Why else do we have so many laws, blessings, special events and cookbooks about food.

The Bialy Eaters

I recently traveled from New York City to Berkeley, California bearing two dozen Bialys from Kossars, 367 Grand Street, NYC (212-473-4810). For Ms. Sheraton, Kossars bakes the only recommended edible bialy that comes close to the ideal kuchen she hoped to find in Bialystock, Poland. To my experienced "fresser" taste, Kossars bialys are good, but not as delicious as I remember from Bronx bakeries.

A bialy, like many great food stuffs, is made of memories, not just flour, yeast, water, onions, poppy seeds(optional) and a little sugar. Obviously, they are not Kosher for Passover. Next to the bagel (whose history should be told), the bialy evokes nostalgia for a town where the Jews were nicknamed "Bialystoker kuchen fressers"-"prodigious eaters of the oniony bread buns." At the start of her inquiry, there were no bialys made in Poland, but Ms. Sheraton has found bakers and "fressers" in Melbourne, Buenos Aries, Tel Aviv and Paris. She searched for them throughout the Bialystoker diaspora, listened and wrote recollections of bialy fressing, heard many discussions as to how they're made and what is added to complete the taste. Is it not remarkable to discover that children put halvah on bialys, as French children to this day add chocolate squares to their baguettes. Why not?