The Gefilte Variations: 200 Inspired Re-creations of Classics from the Jewish Kitchen, with Menus, Stories, and Traditions for the Holidays and Year-Round [Hardcover]

Jayne Cohen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 22, 2000

"THE GEFILTE VARIATIONS" IS ABOUT MUCH MORE THAN GEFILTE FISH. Inspired by the rich traditions of the Jewish community, this cookbook offers all the excitement of a newly discovered world of eating. Food writer Jayne Cohen celebrates her culinary mother tongue, improvising with the foods she is passionate about. Faithful to the traditions -- all recipes are kosher -- she presents the full range of dishes: breakfasts and brunches, starters and noshes, soups and garnishes, fish, meats and poultry, dairy dishes, nondairy and pareve grains and vegetables, fruit sauces, sweet kugels and desserts -- 200 mouthwatering reinterpretations of traditional dishes designed for everyday meals as well as every holiday.

EVEN IF YOU'VE NEVER GOTTEN BEYOND TOASTING A FROZEN BAGEL BEFORE THIS, you'll find the recipes in this book readily accessible. Transform ready-made wonton wrappers into sheer silken salmon kreplach floating in warm shav (sorrel soup), or fashion supermarket phyllo into airy knishes brimming with luscious garlic mashed potatoes. Or make a batch of buttery rugelach with store-bought caramels.

HERE ARE THE DELICIOUS REINTERPRETATIONS OF A FEW CLASSICS...Matzoh balls that begin with roasted fennel and change with the seasons, a whole chicken rubbed with a garlicky marinade and roasted on a bed of lemons, and a sleek buttermilk noodle kugel bursting with fresh and dried peaches.

THERE'S AN ENTICING VARIETY OF MEATLESS MEALS, emphasizing fresh vegetables, fruits and herbs, and using them in exciting, novel ways. A simple staple like hummus becomes a sensuous feast prepared with quick-cooking lentils, perfumed with pomegranate and mint, and served with toasted spiced matzohs.Kasha is lightened up with a caramelized onion marmalade and cubes of melting eggplant. Fabulous, easy-to-prepare cheese latkes are graced with fresh persimmon sauce.

STORIES AS ENCHANTING AS THE RECIPES that you will want to read around your own table to family and friends. Follow the author as she takes you through the streets of the old Jewish community in Carpentras, France, sleuthing after a recipe for a Passover breast of veal from a forgotten novella. Learn why Jews light menorahs against the darkness of winter with everything from olive oil to goose fat in potato or egg shells. Or share a sip of Kiddush wine around her father's Sabbath table.

IMMERSE YOURSELF IN THE WORLD OF JEWISH CUISINE. Learn what Jewish food is, how to stock your pantry to make basic preparations such as olive oil schmaltz and yogurt cream to create lighter versions of your favorite dishes, and find the definitions of Jewish terms in a comprehensive glossary.

CELEBRATE THE HOLIDAYS. Discover new recipes for your Sabbath and Hanukkah tables in the extensive section devoted to the holidays. Create memorable seders and complete break-the-fast Yom Kippur buffets using the suggested menus. Richly woven details of biblical origins and today's customs vividly bring these occasions to life.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Jewish food--the cuisine of the Diaspora--has remained largely unchanged, even as other venerable cooking traditions have been renewed. But this savory fare was meant to be potchkeyed, or played with, writes Jayne Cohen, author of The Gefilte Variations. To prove her point, she offers 200 kosher recipes that reinterpret the classics of American, European, North African, and Asian Jewish cooking. Resisting the obvious pitfall of devising hybrid "cheffy" concoctions, Cohen has found a way to be satisfyingly innovative, lightening kasha, for example, with caramelized onion marmalade and melting eggplant cubes, or boosting matzo-ball flavor with smoky roasted fennel. Cooks, kosher and not, who have long sought a fresher take on Jewish fare, as well as those who relish hearty but sophisticated dishes, should welcome the book. Cohen first presents year-round favorites, organized by categories like breakfasts and brunches, dairy dishes, and sweet kugels and desserts. Among these, readers will want to try Aromatic Marinated Brisket with Chestnuts, Potato-Onion Kreplach Potsticker-Style, Sorrel-Flavored Mushroom Barley Soup, and Rich Noodle Pudding Baked with Fresh Plums and Nectarines. The book's second section offers a contemporary look at Jewish holiday cooking and introduces international dishes, such as Cheese Latkes with Persimmon Sauce, that would make a delicious Hanukkah-table addition. A pantry and procedures section, a collection of menus, and a glossary of useful terms, both culinary and cultural (finally--a right-on definition of ongepotchken, that onomatopoeic Yiddish word for "fussed with to tackiness"), round off this useful and imaginative book. --Arthur Boehm

From Publishers Weekly

Few can explain the essence of Jewish food as charmingly and lyrically as freelance writer Cohen does in this outstanding debut. In this collection of innovative yet tradition-based recipes--what she calls "the autobiography of one palate"--Cohen often takes a simple, familiar dish (matzoh brie, for instance), dissects all its possibilities (in this case she explains how to make it crispy or fluffy), then offers experimental versions (Savory Artichoke Matzoh Brie and Overnight Caramelized Apple Matzoh Briesame). Cohen incorporates both international Jewish tradition (Chopped Chicken Liver from the Rue des Rosiers, Veronese Rolled Turkey Loaf, Bombay Pineapple-Coconut Milk Kugel) and her own fertile imagination (Pastrami-Style Salmon, Chicken Soup with Asparagus and Shiitakes, served with Roasted Fennel Matzoh Balls) to offer new takes on the classics. She also invigorates some forgotten customs: her grandmother's habit of sprinkling fresh latkes with sugar lives again in Crispy Shallot Latkes with Sugar Dusting. Cohen also happens to write beautifully; her stories about relatives and her portraits of Jewish communities around the world and their individual customs could stand alone in a book of essays. This well-rounded cookbook will appeal to the observant and the nonobservant--even to those who are not Jewish at all. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (March 22, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684827190
• ISBN-13: 978-0684827193
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 7.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,379,978 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Jewish Cookbook that would make J.S.Bach proud, March 24, 2000

By 

Larry Mark "editor of MyJewishBooks.com" (nyc) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Gefilte Variations: 200 Inspired Re-creations of Classics from the Jewish Kitchen, with Menus, Stories, and Traditions for the Holidays and Year-Round (Hardcover)

These are the GEFILTE VARIATIONS by Cohen, not the GOLDBERG Variations by JSBach as performed by Glenn Gould. Just a note of history first. The Goldberg Variations (Aria with 30 variations) were composed by J. S. Bach for Count Herman Carl von Keyserlingk of Dresden to be played to soothe him by his harpsichordist and 15 year old prodigy Johann Gottlieb Goldberg (1727-1756). The variations explore the full palette of emotions: joy, contemplation, happy, quiet, tragic, resurrection. Okay, now what about this Jewish recipe and story book? Just as Bach showed full range and innovation, the Gefilte Variations is innovative in its presentation and reinterpretation of the Jewish musical, I mean recipe, standards, such as matzo balls (with fennel and seasonal changes), kasha (with melted eggplant) chopped liver, kugels (with peaches), entrees (like fish and rhubarb and tomato), soups, latkes (with persimmon), and matzo brei (with artichoke hearts, with wine and dried plums, or french toast style, or fritatta style, or fluffy egg style, or pancake style). Oh their are so many variations. Speaking of matzo, Cohen provides a recipe for recrisping matzo to give it that fresh from the Williamburg oven taste (toasting it at 400 degrees), as well as at least five variations of flavored motzot, from lemon to cheese to sweet to onion, garlic, thyme, or herb. I hope I have given you a flavor of the book's contents.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Entirely New Gourmet Cuisine, April 4, 2000

By 

edward m kabak (Westport, Connecticut) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Gefilte Variations: 200 Inspired Re-creations of Classics from the Jewish Kitchen, with Menus, Stories, and Traditions for the Holidays and Year-Round (Hardcover)

Jayne Cohen's The Gefilte Variations not only is an exceptionally well written collection of personal and historical Jewish memorabilia and literary and folk,scholarly and pungent and often quite humorous anecdotes;it is also that rarest of creations, a truly and compulsively readable food book. What makes it so exceptional is the author's obvious lifelong passion for memorably earthy,redolent food and her creativity in rendering five-star meals out of what so many of us (non-culinary cognoscenti)grew up thinking was a clunky, Eastern European poor substitute for appealing French Italian or Asian meals. The international range of these dishes-from Iranian Stuffed Chicken, Egyptian Ground Fish Balls with Tomato and Cumin to Bombay Pineapple-Coconut Milk Kugel and the numerous inspired pomegranate based creations, make this even more appealing than the finely-tuned work of Joan Nathan and Claudia Roden-and that's pretty rarefied territory. Gefilte Fish itself, a dish one would never normally consider in the same breath with gourmet foods, rises to ethereal levels in the author's several fish-ball recipes, using as alternatives to pike combinations of lean fish like red snapper or striped bass mixed with the more succulent flavor of pompano,whitefish or salmon.Or as another alternative,inspired by Chinese dumplings, quickly steamed between cabbage leaves. And the directions for cooking are literally a treasure trove of generations of secrets perhaps not seen before in this form in the light of day. In addition to mining culinary traditions, one also gets the impression from this book that much of the author's creation of these tantalizing and often tart-sweet dishes arose in the night kitchen of her fertile mind. The book is elegantly divided into sections for dairy, fish meat etal and a separate easy to follow section suggesting various alternatives for the holidays-all nicely mixed in with family story-telling,folklore and easy to read scholarship. This is plainly one of the most exciting cookbooks I have ever come across-one which transcends in its universality, humor and sauciness any one religion while remaining faithful to the tenets of underlying rules. Listen to the author describing Rich Noodle Kugel Baked with Plums and Nectarines-"The paradigm of ongepotchkeh(the author's all-time favorite Yiddish word, meaning overly fussy) is taking noodle kugel- a luxurious confection of pasta eggs butter and milk or cheese-and then slathering it with some sweet stickiness that may have been a fruit in another life.The very lushness of a noodle pudding demands an innocent topping. .." This is a book to take on vacation. An outstanding culiniterary work.

5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting variations on traditional dishes, November 1, 2011

By 

Steven Rossellini (Twin Cities, MN) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Gefilte Variations: 200 Inspired Re-creations of Classics from the Jewish Kitchen, with Menus, Stories, and Traditions for the Holidays and Year-Round (Hardcover)

I came across a copy of this recipe book at a garage sale and found it to be extremely interesting. As an amateur/volunteer, I've catered over 150 events over the past thirty years, some up to 750 diners. Usually, when I cater, it's for charitable events or for personal friends. As a result, there have been requests for many varieties of ethnic cooking. I try to keep many ethnic cookbooks on hand. The Gefilte Variations: 200 Inspired Re-creations of Classics from the Jewish Kitchen, with Menus, Stories, and Traditions for the Holidays and Year-Round puts an interesting modern twist on many recipes you'll find elsewhere. What I found extremely encouraging about this cookbook is that it's very clear that the author has created, actually tested, and retested every recipe. As one who collects cookbooks, I can vouch for the often stated FACT that many, if not most, cookbook authors don't personally test recipes and often use researched, but untested recipes in their books by altering one ingredient. Again kudos to Jayne Cohen for her honesty and effort in creating a unique and valuable cookbook. I've purchased two additional copies via Amazon to give to friends, because I believe this cookbook to be an extraordinary delight.