Customer Reviews

The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York

5 star:		(44)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

November 1998 -- I just checked this book out of the library yesterday and stayed up until midnight reading from it to my husband. Now, he's not interested in recipes - it was the stories about Jews in Cairo, Jews in ancient Babylon, Arab and Jewish cooking under the Abbasid Caliphs in Baghdad, Jews in India, and most of all -- ANDALUCIA and the glories of Spain before the "Reconquista" that kept him entertained. Claudia Roden, culinary Scheherezade...

Born in Cairo to a Sephardic family who left Spain in the 15th Century, Roden has a lot of good things to say about Arabs and Jews in the Middle East. She doesn't gloss over the difficulties but she's much more interested in talking about the long, long shared history of the two peoples.

And she's interested in great food. You should check out the recipes from the various Indian Jewish peoples. I am planning to cook at least twelve of her recipes in the next month.

Roden's writing style is direct, simple and wonderful. I am such a fan!!!

As a Lebanese American Gentile married to a Jew (of Ashkenazi descent), I feel so grateful to have this book. It confirms my passion for all things Sephardic/Levantine, and gives me a culinary bridge to my extended, multicultural family.

Thank you, Claudia! You're a beacon of peace, besides being a culinary star!

Nowadays, when hundreds of cookbooks flood the book market, and each regional or ethnic cuisine type gets its share of ink and paper, choosing a cookbook is not an easy task. Well, this task becomes much easier when one book of its kind stands far above the rest - and I believe that this is the case with Claudia Roden's book of Jewish Food. This book is remarkable in many ways - the clear and simple way in which the recipes are presented, the wonderful historical inserts, and above all - the feeling that there's someone with you in the kitchen when you cook, someone who's deeply informed about the recipe and its cultural background, and who's also there with you, helping you to make the best out of it. The book is masterfully organized - the grouping of recipes is so logical and yet not annoyingly rigid, and the index is a masterpiece on its own - there's no way you can miss a recipe that you want: you'll find it under its name, or under any of the principal ingredients used in it. Timing given for each recipe is relatively realistic, and so are the serving amounts. I strongly reccomend this book.

The book is filled with delightful illustrations, photographs, and the sort of Jewish history I hungered for. But speaking of hungry, if you plan on doing more than just reading this book you may be disapointed, as I was.

The recipes were too basic. Once I followed through with them, I realized that Ms. Roden had to be leaving fairly important things out. She states that she chose the versions of the recipes that she found most appealing, but I believe her choices in fact reflect her desire not to frighten more simple and less experienced chefs with too many instructions or ingredients. But it is not helpful to leave out basic instructions, ie: in the "Pot Roast" recipe she fails to instruct the reader to brown the meat before adding the water. For Ashkenazi recipes there are many more helpful books on the market. For myself, I'm still searching for a good Sephardi cooking resource.

In the end, I'm not sorry I bought the book, while it is not a great cookbook, it is a beautiful treasure of a book and an outstanding tribute to our culture.

This is a great Middle Eastern and Central Asian cookbook. It's not such a great Ashkenazi cookbook -- there are shelves full of better, more complete, and more varied Ashkenazi cookbooks out there -- but it does make a nod in that direction, which is rather more than a lot of Ashkenazi books do towards Asian cooking.

As an Asian cookbook, it's wonderful. The recipes are plentiful and varied. There is indeed more to Sephardic cooking than eggplant. Each recipe comes with twiddles and variations, which are liberating. If you don't have quite enough of an ingredient, it's helpful to have suggestions for adjusting the dish. The quantities are reasonable, and listed in several different systems (i.e. metric/imperial, weight/volume), and the cooking techniques are pretty simple and thoroughly explained. One should be aware, however, that many of the dishes date from an era when women stayed home and had all day to make a single dish. Some things, in particular the Salonika Meat Pies and some of the pastry sweets, take far longer to make than one would anticipate.

For me, this book's two greatest strengths are its asides and its scope. It's great to see essays on some of the remoter Jewish communities. The Bukharans, the Bene Israel of India, and the Jews of Caucasian Georgia just don't get the press in the United States that the Ashkenazi and Sephardi communities do. There is even a wonderful story on the lost Kaifeng community in China. The traditional foods of these cultures (except the Kaifeng and the Ethiopian Jews) are well represented, making this very much a world cookbook.

After I served a dessert from this book (the quince compote) to my cousin, we started talking, and we discovered that we had both independently discovered and enjoyed it. It strikes me that such a varied book as this could be a useful tool for reaching across cultures and forming diverse friendships. The quince compote is a pretty good place to start.

I first heard about Claudia Roden from a magazine feature that was written about her. In this article she gave a receipe which I tried out and also a short history about this dish. I happen to be studying Old Testament Scripture in College, and I decided to order her book on The Book of Jewish Food. This book I found really fascinating. In it she writes in great detail of the history of the Jewish culture and origins and the many receipes (0ver 800) she has collected down through the years. A lot of research has gone into this book and I am very interested in how most of these dishes originated. The receipes are well laid out in various sections and the fact that there are no colour photos of the dishes does not detract from the book at all. I found through reading this book that it has helped me in my studies in Scripture. For anyone who is interested in the whole Jewish culture and cooking this book is definately worth getting

A wonderful book that most of my family and friends own, my non-Jewish flatmate read through like a novel, and I always have difficulty putting down. Since Ashkenazi cooking can be found in countless other Jewish cookery books, I appreciated the main focus on Sephardic cooking. I am vegan and even so found hundreds of recipes. The cultural background information is fascinating, and the religious information enables you to produce something a bit different at the festivals - we had the most fabulous (Iranian, I think) stew last Rosh Hashanah, together with home-made challah, and were quite spoilt for choice when it came to making haroset. The only problem is that I get so seduced by reading the recipes that I end up making too much food! However, my friends have certainly been enjoying the pastries I take to meetings. I have had no problems following the delicious recipes and Roden is usefully realistic about substitutes for ingredients unobtainable in Britain, warnings for extra-hot dishes and so on. She also gives basic recipes followed by several variations for many dishes, especially the popular ones; this can be useful if you want a different slant on a traditional dish, for example a borsht which isn't too violently beetrooty. The personal touch - anecdotes about where she met the recipe donor, or traditional dishes in her family - is delightful.

The narrative that comprises a large amount of the book is the most fascinating informal history of the Jewish people that I have read. The old photographs alone are worth the price of the book. I have glanced at the incredible variety of recipes from all over the world and someday I may try one. A gourmet cook will have a field day. A historian will be enthralled.

The best Jewish cookbook out there! Claudia Rosen spent 12 years researching and testing recipes that always work. In addition to being a fabulous cookbook it is also an incredible history of the Jewish people as they moved around the world and incorporated local foods into their cuisine. Rosen writes with such clarity and makes the whole experience feel like an adventure in which you want to participate.

This book is a history of a nation intertwined with smell and taste. As you read you can picture yourself observing the magic of the preparation of food. Wonderful.
First recipie book that I read as a novel.

The book is not only a culinary delight... it is a historical reference to the traditions of Jewish food in all of the diaspora, from the Sephardic communities with their rich cultures now long gone, as well as the Eastern European soul food we have all come to know and love. Variations on the themes, classical presentations and a very entertaining and personal style that also reveals the authors joy of food and cooking. It is THE book I turn to every holiday and so many days in between. Exceptional, useful, worth every penny you will spend.