Jewish Cooking Boot Camp

The demise of Gourmet Magazine in November of this year is not just a 75-year old institution of writing about how to prepare and enjoy food coming to an end. It is also the end of the Gourmet Cookbook Club, my best source for new cookbooks to consider and try. In memory of Gourmet, I am going to try to do something of that sort here. To commemorate Jewish Book Month, I am going to start with two Jewish cookbooks that came out this year. The first is fun and young, the second is serious and beautifully presented.

Jewish Cooking Boot Camp: the Modern Girl’s Guide to Cooking Like Your Jewish Grandmother, by Andrea Marks Carneiro and Roz Marks (2009)
This is a cookbook replete with fun-to-read information about what foods are associated with what holidays, along with what those holidays are all about. The book begins with Shabbat, and then goes directly to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, then proceeds in order throughout the Jewish year. This is not a new concept, but the presentation is full of cartoon illustrations (similar to the cover) that are inviting, and the book is quite short (200 pages) so you could read it in an hour. There are numerous “basics” covered, making the cookbook accessible to inexperienced cooks. The recipes are not numerous (only about 50) but they are simple to prepare. The book concludes with a couple of modern ideas—food that you can easily package to eat elsewhere and the other is Jewish comfort food. The best audience for this book is a Bar or Bat Mitzvah, or a newly married couple where one or both of them are unfamiliar with Jewish food and culture. If you are giving a gift for someone with a good grasp of the Jewish holidays and food associated with them, I think Joan Nathan’s The Jewish Holiday Kitchen (published in 1998, and available used on Amazon for $0.76) is still my favorite. One word of caution: this is cooking like your Jewish grandmother if she wasn’t all that concerned about keeping kosher. There is a recipe for crab dip included--which you could go imitation crab and be ok, but the fact that recipes are not kosher is not discussed, nor is the whole concept of kashrut mentioned. This limits the book’s usefulness, because the target audience for the book is not likely to know the rules of kashrut, and might bring something from this book to a temple pot luck thinking they were being very traditional and unintentionally offending someone.