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Food Writing

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Claudia Roden / Deb Perelman

Cookbook Authors

Tickling Tastebuds and Expanding Palates

Deb Perelman

Resisting trends towards fussy recipes with complicated instructions and esoteric ingredients, Deb Perelman focused her Smitten Kitchen food blog on “foolproof” recipes that incorporated feedback from online commenters.

Death of Ruth Fredman Cernea, cultural anthropologist of Jews in Myanmar and Washington, DC

March 31, 2009

Ruth Fredman Cernea said, "Jewish humor is not silly, but it is absurd absurdity. It is the opposite of deep seriousness."

Linda Eastman marries Paul McCartney.

March 12, 1969

Photographer and animal rights activist Linda Eastman marries Paul McCartney.

"Jerusalem" by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi

Review of Jerusalem: A Cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi

Katherine Romanow

Prolific is the word that comes to mind when I think about cookbooks these days. There are hundreds lining the shelves of bookstores or on your computer screen--depending on how you choose to do your shopping. Either way there are a lot of cookbooks to be had, and with new ones published on a regular basis, it can be hard to know which are actually worth purchasing.

There have been many excellent cookbooks published this past year, and Jerusalem is without a doubt at the top of that list. I remember my excitement when I read the news about its publication, and when I finally received my copy, I wasn’t disappointed. It’s one of those cookbooks that elicits exclamations of “I have to make this!” with almost every turn of the page.

Smitten Kitchen Cookbook by Deb Perelman

Tasty Treat: Talking Shop with Smitten Kitchen's Deb Perelman

Etta King Heisler

Just before my favorite holiday last week, I sat down with the prolific food-blogger-turned-cookbook-author Deb Perelman. The founder of the Smitten Kitchen was recently given a spot on the Forward 50 and is currently touring the U.S. to promote her new book, The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook: Recipes and Wisdom from an Obsessive Home Cook. Next week, I will post more of the story about how her recipes have inspired my own culinary pursuits. But first, here is your chance to be a fly on the wall in our conversation about how she came to write and publish her delicious new book.

Joan Nathan

Joan Nathan is the author of numerous cookbooks, each of which focuses on an aspect of Jewish life and culture. What makes her books unique is that each recipe comes with a story, enabling the reader to learn about much more than how to prepare a dish, but where the dish originated, how Jewish migration and living in different lands have changed the dish, and its meaning to the family from which it came. Thus, Joan is not only a cookbook author, but a cultural historian and food writer as well. Her books educate about Jewish life, tradition, and Jewish history.

United States Postal Service

Passover Postage: Sending matzah to China

Linda Frank

Two things I don’t understand about the US Postal Service: Why it’s the workers, not customers, who go “postal.” Secondly, how it could be in trouble when it has me.

June Salander, 1908 - 2010

June took the opportunity to study Torah with the rabbi and five other women and, at age 89, became the oldest woman in Rutland to celebrate her bat mitzvah.

"Kosher Nation," by Sue Fishoff

From Mashgiachs to the new Jewish food movement: "Kosher Nation" by Sue Fishkoff

Katherine Romanow

When you choose to purchase a jar of peanut butter with a hecksher on it or kosher chicken, you become one of the final elements in the long journey that the particular foodstuff undertook in order to be certified as kosher. It can be easy to take this process for granted when you are receiving these things in their final form, yet Kosher Nation by Sue Fishkoff highlights this process and provides an in depth look at the modern kosher food industry in the United States.

Denise Schorr, - 2010

Many of the stories of her young life in France give a glimpse into the shaping forces of her strong character, enormous empathy and compassion for others. This shaped her life as a giver.

Death of pioneering nutritionist Frances Stern

December 23, 1947

Frances Stern, social worker, nutritionist, educator, and pioneering dietician, died on December 23, 1947.

"Settlement Cookbook" author Lizzie Black Kander is born

May 28, 1858

Lizzie Black Kander, author of The Settlement Cookbook, was born in Milwaukee, on May 28, 1858.

Alice Babette Toklas

Alice Babette Toklas, cookbook author and memoirist, along with her companion Gertrude Stein, served as host to one of the liveliest literary and artistic salons in Paris, from 1907 until Stein’s death in 1946. In the last decades of her life, Toklas was sought after for her many stories about her famous friends and acquaintances—and enemies—including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Thornton Wilder, and scores of other writers, artists, and musicians.

Claudia Roden

Food writer and cookbook author Claudia Roden single-handedly opened up the world of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish foods to chefs, food critics and home cooks across the globe providing a new portal into understanding and experiencing Jewish food and culture.

Alicia Steimberg

Fiction writer Alicia Steimberg (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1933-2012) garnered important literary prizes. Her work as a translator was awarded by the Konex Foundation and she served the government as Director of Books of the Secretariat of Culture.

Lina Morgenstern

In the face of formidable anti-Semitic opposition, Lina Morgenstern was a highly successful feminist author, educator, and peace activist who was supported by many, including the Prussian Empress Augusta. In 1896 she organized the first International Congress of Women in Germany, which was attended by feminist leaders from all over the world.

Judith Montefiore

Often referred to as the “First Lady of Anglo Jewry,” Judith Montefiore embodied all the Victorian virtues of high moral purpose, sense of duty, charity, and public-mindedness and was also a fierce loyalist to her faith and her people, devoted to Jewish causes and the welfare of Jews the world over.

Lizzie Black Kander

Lizzie Black Kander was a Jewish philanthropist who turned the recipe book she made for a cooking class for new immigrants into a two-million-copy bestseller. Her decades of service in the early twentieth century had an unforgettable impact on the Milwaukee Jewish community.

Food in the United States

Food and foodways are a critically important area of documenting and deciphering the evolving experience of American Jewish women from the earliest days of immigration to the present. Food is a lens into American Jewish women’s worlds of family, religion, identity, work, political action, entrepreneurship, and more as they have encountered the forces of assimilation, anti-Semitism, systemic racism, sexism, changing consumer economies, and the long women’s movement.

Cookbooks in the United States

American Jewish cookbooks capture the range of Jewish religious and cultural expression in the United States. Women took advantage of the versatility and variety of cookbooks to add their voices to the growing and developing Jewish culture in the United States.

Australia: 1788 to the Present

The first Jewish women, like the first Jewish men, arrived in Australia on the very first day of European settlement in 1788. Those convict pioneers were followed by free settlers who made Jewish communal and congregational life viable and helped to develop the vast continent. Jewish women have made significant contributions to Australia's national story.

Book Review: Cooking Jewish

Lily Rabinoff-Goldman

So the thing about getting married is that your precious bookshelf space, which you had reserved for brilliant novels written by brilliant writers, gets quickly engulfed by an ocean of cookbooks, which your mothers, aunts, and family friends are sure you'll just love.

From Flanken to Fortune Cookies: Jews and Chinese Food on Christmas

Jordan Namerow

On my seven hour drive back to Boston on Christmas Day, I was listening to a piece on "Talk of the Nation" about the long-standing tradition of Jews eating Chinese food on Christmas. 

Topics: Food Writing

Memories, Meals, and “Aromas of Aleppo”

Jordan Namerow

With the exception of Yom Kippur, the past few weeks, for many of us in the Jewish community, have been bountifully full of food. I’ve been happily partaking in pumpkin bread/pumpkin muffin production (baking three loaves, and two tins of twelve muffins over the course of two days) and enjoying my friends’ seasonal culinary creations on a chilly evening in their sukkah.

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