The processing and preparation of food can transform a kosher item into a non-kosher item.
— Gil Marks
Food is never static; culture is never static.
Passover is the most widely observed of all the Jewish holidays, and the Passover Seder... is the most practiced of all the Jewish rituals.
The kosher community tends to follow often several years behind the general societal trends.
People remember the different variations of stuffed cabbage based on their mothers and grandmothers. It's not just about food. Eating something as traditional as this is a cultural experience, one that is spiritual and nostalgic. It manages to transcend time; it's food for the soul.
Throughout history, Hanukkah was a relatively minor festival, but it's become very popular in America due to its proximity to Christmas.
I tend to avoid cakes made with matzo meal instead of flour. Also, most prepared dessert products and mixes. Sometimes the packaging they come in tastes better than the product.
Every holiday has unique fare and symbolic foods, but none as much as Rosh Hashana.
A Jewish food is one that is almost sanctified, either by its repeated use or use within the holidays or rituals. So food that may have not been Jewish at one point can become Jewish within the cultural context.
The key to Judaism's survival is the emotional attachment to the religion.
I never serve a dessert on Passover that I would not serve the rest of the year.
Although I generally avoid the cloyingly sweet wines, I have used them for poaching fruit.
Judaism is not, per se, a religion in the sense most Americans think of. Even if you don't adhere to the various precepts, you're still a Jew.
In Judaism, almost every ritual entails either food or the absence of food. Yom Kippur, for instance, is the absence of food. Part of it is Talmudic, part of it is custom. So much of Judaism was bound up in dietary laws. So everything you ate - the very act itself - was part of religion.
The Passover experience is an incredibly pedagogic one.
Preparing foods from other Jewish communities is broadening. It's interesting to sample the foods of other Jewish communities and see what they developed.
Most of the traditional foods we eat on Jewish holidays start out with a seasonal reason as to why we eat them, and later a religious significance is tacked on.
My family is notorious for its sweet tooth.
I don't understand a mentality that will accept eating something that doesn't taste good just because it's low-fat or is made with matzo or whatever.
I have been collecting recipes and information for over 20 years, but three years ago, my editor said to me, 'You're a walking encyclopedia of food, so why don't you do an encyclopedia?'
To know a community is to know its food.
Throughout history, particularly in the last 2,000 years, Jews have been key in adapting local foods to Jewish sensibilities and dietary laws and then spreading them.
The more things you make from scratch, the less expensive and usually healthier and tastier.
The knish is a classic example of peasant food evolving into comfort food and even sophisticated fare.
We can all be defined by food.
If I'm doing an olive oil tasting, I would do a very lean bread: an Italian style or pita bread. You want the flavor of the oil to shine; you don't want the bread or anything else to mask it.
There is a biblical injunction to tell your children, but the sages who created the Seder several thousand years ago understood that it had to be more than just speaking: that in order for something to connect so emotionally in human beings, it had to be relived.
Sephardic Jews were always known as good cooks.
In the New York metropolitan area, you can find Jews from just about every Jewish cultural community in the world.
Every year, my father comes by and samples the chremslach - like quality control - and tells me how they taste just like his mother's.
To me, that aspect of life that most touches the everyday and celebrations is food.
Judaism is not just a religion but a people, and the food and customs of one part of the people is connected to the other part of the people. They are part of a larger story.
Food is sort of like the Jewish sense of humor, a defense mechanism. It is one of the things that helped the Jews survive through 2,000 years of an often very harsh Diaspora.
One of the keys to Jewish culinary history is that the Jewish role was not so much innovation but transition and transformation.
Each Passover, I prepare all sorts of fancy desserts for my family and friends, often experimenting with adaptations of sophisticated modern fare.
