Customer Reviews

Classic Italian Jewish Cooking: Traditional Recipes and Menus

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I purchased this book for one of my co-workers who was engaged to be married. He is of an Italian background and his fiance's family is Jewish. They both love to cook. I was doing a search for Italian and Jewish cookbooks, seprately, not realizing that this book even exisited. The couple being married not only likes to cook, they enjoy more unusual and exotic tastes. This book had interesting recipes that came from a very specific region where there are Jewish and Italian people living in the same area, and therefore the book had delicious and quite different types of recipes that I had not seen before. In the week in which the couple returned from their honeymoon, my co-worker said they had already tried out several of the recipes and they thought that this book was one of the best and most thoughtful gifts they had received. Bon appetit and Mazaltov!

I have given this book a prominent position on its bookshelf, along with some other well used cookbooks. This book is an impressive looking volume, an inch thick, and lovingly designed.

The first 26 pages describe the author's life growing up in the Italian Jewish community before WWII--a culture that hardly exists anymore.

As for the cuisine, it follows the mediterranean pattern, with, here and there, a strong suggestion of the middle east. Thus, anyone who enjoys mediterranean/ middle-eastern cuisine, will appreciate this book

An added bonus, is a chapter on "Breads, Pizzas and Bagels". In this chapter, you will find 23 recipes, inclouding Sourdough Bread, and three recipes for Chollah--that's the rich egg bread that jewish people eat on the sabbath.

The author of this review is not jewish, but what of that? Good food is good food, and the food described here would be hard to improve upon.

I bought this book used, and boy what a bargain! It came in pristine condition.

I needed a Jewish-Italian cookbook, because although I love Italian food, I want to keep things kosher, and that means that most of the recipes in a regular Italian cookbook go to waste. I especially needed something for dairy antipasto that is not the same old same old that you usually see at Bar Mitzva's, etc.

I've tried a few of the antipasto recipes, and every one is a winner. All of the other recipes also look tasty and something I would like to try. As far as Italian Jewish cooking, I may never need another cookbook... but it seems the author has written a second!

It doesn't hurt that the author was born in 1926, making her the same age as my mom (may she rest in peace). She has wonderful stories to tell, and I feel her motherly presence through the pages.

I am very, very glad I purchased this book.

I've owned Classic Italian Jewish Cooking for over a year, and have made only a few recipes from it. I flip through it almost every week before I start cooking for the Sabbath, hoping to find something appealing. However, I don't find many of the recipes particularly enticing. Worse, what I have made has not turned out well. I'm an experienced cook, and I dubiously followed Machlin's instructions to add pap (bread soaked in water) to meat to make her meatballs with peppers. Wait, I thought- don't you normally add bread crumbs to meatballs? Yes, and for good reason- these completely fell apart, but they were delicious.

That has been my experience with the recipes I've made from this book- the results are tasty, but unattractive and somewhat failed, despite scrupulous adherence to detail and execution. I really enjoyed Machlin's stories of Jewish life in Italy, and I want to like this book more. If the recipes were as accurate as the stories are compelling, maybe I would.

The recipes are great. The Tagliatelle Al'Ebraica and the Passover Biscotti were big hits. What is especially wonderful is how the text in this cookbook makes me cry--e.g., some of the stories of Jews sharing food with non-Jews and vice versa in Holocaust times are extremely moving.