Customer Reviews

Jewish Cooking For Dummies

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If you've never had to make homemade Challah before (or you dont even know what that is) and always wanted to learn how, this the book for you. Jewish Cooking for Dummies is the perfect book for the novice Jewish chef. It has recipes for every major holiday, and some not so major ones, with recipes for every day of the week. Faye Levy, who has previously written other books on Jewish cooking, delivers again with a well thought out book. There are tips for keeping kosher, for substitutions, for making things faster. It's everything you need if youre just starting out in the Jewish kitchen or in a kitchen in general. The only real complaint I have is that the recipes are very basic and that there aren't enough to go around. Also, many to the recipes take longer to make than listed in the book, especially when you first start making them. You gradually improve, but plan a little bit of a cushion into your work time.

From Faye Levy, internationally renowned cooking authority and author of over 20 cookbooks, comes "Jewish Cooking for Dummies" (IDG Books Worldwide, $19.99), everything you ever wanted to know about Jewish cooking, complete with cartoons, from the holidays to kashrut (kosher laws), with tips from her toolbelt on everything from peeling a tomato to quartering a whole chicken. Her motto: "Have fun and be confident." "Lots of people want to celebrate with Jewish food but don't know how," says Levy, "converts, nonJews married to Jews, even those who grew up Jewish but never had the traditional foods." The Passover section (subtitle: "What Happened When the Bread Didn't Rise") demystifies the complexity of preparing for the seder, offering such must-try recipes as Garlic Roast Lamb, Asparagus and Carrots with a tangy Lemon Dressing and her luscious Passover Pecan Chocolate Cake...Levy stresses that Jewish cuisine does not have to be high in fat and calories. "Check any health food catalogue and you'll notice how many of the foods are labeled organic and kosher."

A complete waste of $$$, very few recipes. The only knish recipe is for spinich. Talks about A meat blintz but no recipe.Only good if you want to learn how to keep A kosher kitchen.

These recipes are passable, but definitely not traditional. It seems the author got in a jam trying to include the old favorites, but not wanting her recipes to be the same as in other books. Instead of deciding up front to give recipes that are new and modern, but in the spirit of traditional holiday cooking, she tampers with the traditional ones, not to good effect. This leads to recipes that are neither here nor there.

For instance, she says about her recipe for Jewish apple walnut cake, "This style of apple cake has long been a popular Jewish dessert", and then gives a recipe full of orange juice and zest, omitting the traditional sour cream or buttermilk, and not even baked in the traditional bundt cake shape. All the orange flavor overwhelms the taste of the apples, and ruins the cake, IMO, and the texture is wrong. Whatever her cake is, it has never been "a popular Jewish dessert".

Traditional cheese blintzes are hard to make these days, and almost impossible if you are kosher because the pot cheese that was used is almost unavailable outside non-Kosher Polish ethnic food stores. It was a little softer and drier than present-day farmer cheese, and cottage cheese is even worse--much tougher curds & much more watery. It is understandable that she added some (non-traditional) cream cheese to the farmer cheese to make the texture more like pot cheese, but what is the purpose of including cottage cheese in the filling, which moves it in the wrong direction? And why create an extra step to making the thin crepes by melting butter and trying to mix it into the batter, when the crepes can be quickly cooked in a buttered pan? No one I knew ever did it that way.

And the potato-onion fritters known as latkes have always been served w/ plain applesauce. They are wonderful like that, and the lengthy prep they need make them a particularly appreciated, seasonal treat. Her recommended cinnamon-flavored applesauce clashes w/ the oniony latkes. They are seasoned only w/ salt & pepper, so spiced applesauce just tastes wrong, as though you put it on top of hash browns. Mind you, I love spicy Morroccan chickpea tagines, so I have nothing against spices. It doesn't work in this context. Less important is that there is no purpose to the baking powder in the latke recipe.

There are occasional errors in technique, like telling the cook to core peppers after they are grilled instead of before. These make cooking harder than it need be.

These are just a few examples of the many additions that are not improvements, done, I think, to change the recipe from those readily available online, put there by home cooks. I advise you to use those, and any advice you can get from an experienced Jewish grandmother. Furthermore, all the gilding the lily she does makes already labor-intensive recipes even lengthier. Be aware that these are mostly holiday and special occasion recipes (including the Sabbath), and most women won't want to spend the necessary time on a weekday to prepare them.

Though she does explain kashrut, the recipes often suggest non-Kosher cheeses, and include dairy in some side dishes that are often eaten alongside meat or poultry, so an inexperienced reader planning a Kosher meal needs to be careful.

The underlying problem is, w/ all the nostalgic Jewish recipes available online, there may have been no need for a book like this, and the author spoiled the recipes a bit in trying to justify writing it.