In Jewish Holiday Cooking, Jayne Cohen shares a wide-ranging collection of traditional Jewish recipes, as well as inventive new creations and contemporary variations on the classic dishes. For home cooks, drawing from the rich traditions of Jewish history when cooking for the holidays can be a daunting task. Jewish Holiday Cooking comes to the rescue with recipes drawn from Jayne Cohen's first book, The Gefilte Variations -- called an "outstanding debut" by Publisher's Weekly -- as well as over 100 new recipes and information on cooking for the holidays. More than just a cookbook, this is the definitive guide to celebrating the Jewish holidays. Cohen provides practical advice and creative suggestions on everything from setting a Seder table with ritual objects to accommodating vegan relatives. The book is organized around the major Jewish holidays and includes nearly 300 recipes and variations, plus suggested menus tailored to each occasion, all conforming to kosher dietary laws. Chapters include all eight of the major Jewish holidays -- Shabbat, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Hanukkah, Purim, Passover, and Shavuot -- and the book is enlivened throughout with captivating personal reminiscences and tales from Jewish lore as well as nostalgic black and white photography from Cohen's own family history.
Jayne Cohen is the author of one previous book on Jewish cooking and celebrations -- The Gefilte Variations -- and is the co-author of The Ultimate Bar/Bat Mitzvah Celebration Book. "Jewish Holiday Cooking" was named a 2009 James Beard finalist in the International Books category.
Jayne writes frequently about food for publications such as Bon Appetit, Gourmet, Food & Wine, Epicurious.com, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, Jewish Woman, and Newsday, and writes the food column, Essen Around, for Centropa.org, a website devoted to European Jewish heritage. A native New Yorker, she lives in Greenwich Village with her husband, and their daughter Alexandra returns home to cook at every holiday.
How did someone, who, like many of her contemporaries, rejected her traditional Jewish background as a teenager, then become so involved not only in preserving the culinary roots of Jewish cooking and its links to the past, but also in making it vital and exciting for today's palates? That story, a very personal journey, the autobiography of one palate, is "Jewish Holiday Cooking."
In Jayne's words: "Here are all the culinary influences that nourished me and resonate within me, written in my culinary mother tongue: Jewish. Cuisine connects us to our past - and Jewish cuisine is above all a bubbe cuisine, a grandmother cuisine. My grandparents and parents are all gone now, but I continue to create new Jewish food memories for my daughter."
