Food is a powerful medium. It feeds us body and soul, nourishing us and allowing us to more easily connect with stories past and present. As Stelle Hanan Cohen explains in The Jewish Holiday Table, “Every mouthful is a piece of history.”
Seven years after Naama Shefi established the Jewish Food Society (JFS) with a mission to preserve these histories (and their often previously unrecorded recipes!), she has created this beautiful and heartfelt cookbook, full of flavors and memories from across the Diaspora.
The Jewish Holiday Table contains stories, holiday menus, and recipes from thirty different contributors. While many are culinary professionals, their recipes are quite accessible and adaptable. Each menu is preceded by an endearing story about the grandparents who safeguarded these foods and introduced them to the next generations. The stories pull us in, encouraging us to try these recipes out and put our own spin on them. As the grandmother of coauthor Devra Ferst acknowledges, “Every chef in New York makes [gravlax] somewhat differently.” She’s intimating that Ferst — and, by extension, we readers — can feel comfortable making mistakes until we find our personal approach.
Recipes aside, this JFS cookbook is gorgeous. Most every recipe has an adjoining photo that is lustrous yet haymish. The images reaffirm that these dishes could have easily come from our grandparents’ kitchen, wherever in the world that is. The book gives us the sense that serving these foods will bring us and our family joy, whether we are introducing a new dish or recreating a traditional food that was lost in our family’s migration.
When Beejhy Barhany, the chef/owner of Tsion Café in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood, explains that dabo—an Ethiopian Jewish Shabbat bread — “has been traveling with us throughout all our journeys and our lives,” she demonstrates why JFS has published this cookbook: to teach us how the foods we eat help preserve and strengthen Jewish identity and history.
Avery Robinson is a Jewish nonprofit professional living in Brooklyn. In his spare time, he freelances as an editor, culinary historian, cofounder of the climate change nonprofit Rye Revival, and manager of Black Rooster Foods. His writings have appeared in Marginalia Review of Books, Jerusalem Post, TabletMag, and The Forward.
