Open Arthur Schwartz’s Jew­ish Home Cook­ing, and you’re imme­di­ate­ly trans­port­ed to a kitchen steam­ing with deli­cious­ly famil­iar fla­vors with a side of authen­tic nos­tal­gia. In nine­ty-plus recipes Schwartz, cook­book author, restau­rant crit­ic, talk show host, and all-pur­pose food maven, doc­u­ments the dish­es that sec­ond- gen­er­a­tion Amer­i­can Jews grew up on. Turn­ing the pages, a read­er can almost con­jure up schmaltz sim­mer­ing on the stove. 

Today these dish­es, many of them once dai­ly fare, are served large­ly on Jew­ish hol­i­days. Hearty and rich, they recall a time when cho­les­terol and calo­ries were not part of our every­day vocab­u­lary, and abun­dance— with its accom­pa­ny­ing loaf of corn bread — was a nec­es­sary ingre­di­ent of any meal. Like most of the land­mark restau­rants, appe­tiz­ing stores, del­i­catessens, bak­eries, and kosher butch­ers of mid-20th cen­tu­ry New York, our taste for this sol­id old-fash­ioned food is fad­ing away. In this homage to the Yid­dish food of his Brook­lyn boy­hood, Schwartz laces the recipes with well-told sto­ries, excel­lent back­ground infor­ma­tion on Ashke­naz­ic food and cook­ing, per­son­al mem­o­ries, and a sprin­kling of Borscht Belt jokes. Even if you nev­er cook a sin­gle dish from this book, it serves up a feast of love and lore. Col­or pho­tographs, glos­sary, index, resource list.