PASSOVER DIVERSITY
Jewish dishes from around the world
Long before shakshuka, the popular Israeli egg dish, hit tables in Canada, Evelyn Rose and Joyce Goldstein were transforming Jewish cuisine.
One of Rose’s guiding principles was that food should have ta’am — a quality that makes it taste exceptional.
The British doyenne of Jewish cuisine died in 2003, and Rose’s daughter, Judi, is continuing her legacy.
Judi Rose cooked with her mother for 30 years and they wrote two cookbooks together: The FirstTime Cookbook (1982), and Mother and Daughter Jewish Cooking (2000).
“Ta’am is the Yiddish and Hebrew word for taste. You can tell an Evelyn Rose recipe — it just sort of sings and the flavours are vibrant,” Judi says.
“Her reputation was founded not just on dishes being tasty. But for taking recipes that aren’t that difficult or complicated, making the instructions absolutely fail-safe and foolproof, and then getting an absolutely amazing result.”
Evelyn Rose produced thousands of recipes and wrote multiple books — including The Complete International Jewish Cookbook (Pavilion, 2011), which has remained in print for the past 40 years.
Judi took on the task of narrowing down her mother’s recipe archive and shares the highlights in 100 Best Jewish Recipes: Traditional and Contemporary Kosher Cuisine from around the World (Interlink Publishing, 2015).
“People would ask my mother, ‘What is Jewish cooking? What is Jewish food?’ And she’d say, ‘It’s food that Jews eat’, ” Judi says with a laugh.
“Jewish food is not just the traditional things we think of — chicken soup and matzo balls, and kugel.
A continent away, in San Francisco, Joyce Goldstein was breaking ground of her own. The chef and author opened Square One restaurant in 1984, serving specialties from France, Greece, Italy, Spain and Turkey, and the regions of North Africa and the Middle East.
In The New Mediterranean Jewish Table: Old World Recipes for the Modern Home (University of California Press, 2016), Goldstein takes readers on a journey throughout the region with more than 400 recipes.
“When you think of classic Ashkenazic (Central and Eastern European) food, it is meat and potatoes, a couple of root vegetables and an apple — there are no herbs, no spices. So when you open this book, it’s like my God, you’re in heaven,” she says with a laugh.