Connected by context

Leah Koenig’s The Jewish Cookbook offers some international inspiration for Hanukkah

After writing three literally little books — Little Book of Jewish Sweets ( 2019), Little Book of Jewish Feasts (2018) and Little Book of Jewish Appetizers (2017) — Leah Koenig took on the task of writing a bible of sorts. In The Jewish Cookbook (Phaidon, 2019), the Brooklyn- based writer offers an extensive look at the world of Jewish food: from Montreal’s cheese bagels and Toronto’s blueberry buns to a Moroccan meringue and Roman sweet rice fritters.

“It’s a really good time to eat Jewish right now. It’s partially because I think there’s more awareness about Jewish food, and there are fewer jokes,” laughs Koenig. And although there’s a legacy of extraordinary books dealing with Jewish food as a global cuisine — namely Claudia Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food ( 1997), she adds — the subject was due to be revisited. “Jewish food continues to evolve and change with every generation. It seemed like a good time to check back in and ask, ‘ How has our cuisine evolved and what does it look like in this snapshot in time?’”

As people migrate, ingredients change and information flows, the cuisine has shifted like any other. Adding to the expansiveness of Jewish food, though, is the fact that rather than connected by geography, otherwise disparate dishes and ingredients are connected by context; “the reason people are coming together around the table.” In this sense, Koenig writes, trying to encompass the entirety of Jewish food in a single cookbook was “an act of humility.”

“Every family does it a little differently. People hold really tightly — rightly, I would say — to their family’s traditions and how they do it,” she says. Often, when she’s leading cooking demonstrations, people will describe how their families do things differently. “It doesn’t mean that one version is more or less authentic than the other, but what it points to is that Jewish cuisine is just this super-expansive and super- personal cuisine. So, if I say ‘ it captures all of Jewish cuisine’ that would just be impossible because it’s such a varied and overlapping and beautiful mosaic.”

With more than 400 recipes from around the world for everyday dishes, as well as meals served on Shabbat and holidays (and a handful of “star recipes” interspersed throughout from chefs including Toronto’s Anthony Rose, Yotam Ottolenghi and Alex Raij), Koenig highlights that while the specifics of a particular dish may be unfamiliar, shared traditions present a “really fun way to explore the global cuisine from a very personal place.”

In this spirit, the following Hanukkah- appropriate recipes from the book all have different origins: Chicken, scallion and ginger fritters (arook tahine) — one of Koenig’s “absolute favourite recipes in the book” — which Calcutta’s Jews serve as a snack or appetizer; sufganiyot ( jelly doughnuts), an immensely popular festival food in Israel; and Roman Jewish sweet rice fritters (frittelle di riso) — flavoured with raisins, pine nuts and lemon zest — which “are so, so delicious.”