MAKING MODERN PASSOVER TRADITIONS
Jake Cohen’s Seder recipes create an intersection where old meets new
Jake Cohen’s first Passover Seder with his husband’s family was a colorfully delicious mix of Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jewish traditions. Jake’s juicy sliced brisket graced the table alongside the crunchy Persian tahdig and Iraqi kubbeh that Alex grew up eating. But for anyone who has attended a Seder, it was the former Saveur staffer’s unusually dazzling Seder plate that likely made tummies rumble. For the plate, Cohen, author of the new cookbook “Jew-ish: A Cookbook: Reinvented Recipes from a Modern Mensch” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30) and a social media maven with more than half a million Tiktok followers, reimagined the six foods symbolizing the Jewish exodus from Egypt.
Instead of a sad gray dollop of horseradish to symbolize the bitter herb of slavery, Cohen whipped up zingy horseradish mayo and slathered it on pieces of matzo for each guest. In place of a lone lamb shank, or zeroa, which recalls the lamb sacrificed by the Israelites before fleeing Egypt, Cohen plated 30 pomegranate-kissed barbecue chicken wings. And standing in for the roasted egg reinforcing the circle of life, smoky deviled eggs for everyone.
With tummies happy — and not overstuffed with dry matzo — guests could dig into Passover’s serious themes of plague, oppression and freedom, not just during antiquity, but also today.
“There is no one way to celebrate this holiday,” says Cohen, who most recently worked as the editorial and test kitchen director of the social media juggernaut The Feedfeed. “But there’s nothing more important than modernizing it, because every part of the Seder contains important conversations you should be having with your loved ones.”
This Passover will be slightly sweeter than it was last year, when families gathered over Zoom during the lockdown. With many loved ones 65 and older vaccinated against COVID-19, Jewish families can again commemorate the holiday around a table.
Cohen’s cookbook serves as a worthy roadmap. The 100plus recipes include updates to traditional Ashkenazi dishes (hello, short rib cholent and cacio e pepe rugelach) as well as modern takes on the Iraqi and Persian specialties he fell in love with after meeting Alex in 2015. It’s also a very personal story about Cohen’s search for Jewish identity, and how he found it in the Shabbat dinners he began hosting three years ago.
“All of these recipes were tested and developed during Shabbat dinners,” says Cohen, who grew the gatherings from 12 people in his New York City apartment to 50-plus in the building’s lounge.
His roasted tomato brisket, a zhuzhed-up version of his Aunt Susi’s tomato sauce brisket, was a particular hit. Instead of sauce, Cohen uses canned whole peeled tomatoes, roasting them until caramelized, then mashing them to join caramelized onions, mushrooms, red wine and aromatics.
His tips for brisket mastery? In addition to selecting a beef brisket with fat cap intact, you want to make the dish in advance — like up to three days in advance — and chill it.
“This really amps up the tomato flavor,” he says. “And it slices clean only when chilled.”
Plus, as he writes in the cookbook, nothing represents hospitality like serving a dish that literally took days to make.
And while he’ll never reveal his recipe for sheet-pan brownies — the one Shabbat guests ask if he’s making as soon as they receive an invitation — his macaroon brownies come close. A rich ganache-based batter is held together with coconut flour and topped with an equally thick layer of meringue-bound shredded coconut. And yes, they are “kosher for Passover.”
Another recipe, Little Gem salad with pickled celery and tahini dressing, is a modern wedge that pops up on Cohen’s Seder plate in place of romaine lettuce, which serves as hazeret, the second bitter herb reinforcing the taste of bitterness the Jews faced. What’s on the plate is up to you, Cohen says. What matters is how you use it to fuel a discussion about the topics at hand.
“We make a sandwich of charoset, the nut and fruit paste, to remember the forced labor of the Israelite slaves to build with brick and mortar,” Cohen says. “My husband’s family uses chopped walnuts drizzled with date syrup. Mine was apples and Manischewitz.”
And that’s only half of the Passover conversation. “The other half is what we still have to do,” he says.
There is a seventh food on Cohen’s Passover plate: orange segments, which represent solidarity with LGBTQ+ Jews. Everyone gets a segment and spits out the seeds, which symbolize homophobia. Other modern additions include chocolate or cocoa beans for fair trade and labor issues, and an acorn to prompt conversations around Indigenous land acknowledgement.
“There are entire (Hagaddah) editions highlighting issues that are prevalent today,” Cohen says. “That is the beauty of Passover. It’s an opportunity.”