Customer Reviews

From My Mother's Kitchen: Recipes and Reminiscences

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_From My Mother's Kitchen is half cookbook, half stories about the author's childhood. The kosher-style recipes come out tasting good and aren't too difficult (try "May's Sour Cream Coffee Cake"), although some of them take longer than this generation of cooks is willing to spend. But the real reason to have this book is for the "reminiscences". It's impossible to read the essay about pickles without eating one, and "The Joy of Being Sick in Bed" almost make me wish I had the sniffles. The same way Anne Fadiman's _Ex Libris_ is a love story about books, this is a love story about the unnofficial ceremonies surrounding food.

This is one of those cookbooks that are as enjoyable to read as to use. I have plenty of good, modern-day cookbooks, but lately have been seeking out older cookbooks like these, with more traditional ingredients. The stories that go along with the recipes are touching, sometimes funny. I wanted to learn how to make crock dill pickles the old fashioned way--and this book told how. This is an extremely well done, traditional cookbook.

I have used this for years..Hungarian Jewish cooking and baking. Excellent recipes and great stories. I have given at least 5 as gifts to my family members. It has recipes my grandmaother made, Mohn Kuchen among others. Fabulous book. JDB NYC and Mpls

Yes, this is a fun book to read, but her recipe for Latkes is worth the price of the book alone. And the one for chicken broth, too.

I read this, bit by bit, at the kitchen table while enjoying (?) solitary meals. It is a wonderful reminiscence, and evocation of a time and place -- rising middle-class urban Jewish life after WW II. The recipes are excellent, and the food delicious -- but the time and fussing it takes to prepare them! It is a chronicle of a life in service to the consumption of food by others, leading to a perhaps unsavory mix of subservience and domination, love and guilt. But there are pleasures, too, in succumbing to the comfort of a Jewish mother.