Teacher blog

Yield: 30 to 35 macaroons

Serves about 8

Deliciously spicy matzoh balls plus earthy collard greens and the pot liquor they give off make Southern magic in this homey chicken soup. You can use a readymade creole seasoning mix for the matzoh balls, if you wish, but you may need to adjust the salt in the recipe. The larger amount of fat or oil will give you richer-tasting, creamier matzoh balls  that are slightly denser and heavier; using less will yield dumplings that are lighter and  more delicate. So choose the amount of fat according to your preference.      

Pecans and a shot of Jack Daniels stirred into haroset. Smothered greens with schmaltz and griebenes. Creole matzoh balls simmered in the gumbo.

Sounds like the inventive Seder menu of a hipster chef on Orchard Street or some bistro in Bushwick, Brooklyn? But dishes like these—many co-created with African-American cooks and caterers--have been savored at Jewish Passovers in the American South for generations.

LIZ: Tsimmes is a sweet Ashkenazi stew in which the ingredients vary depending on family origin and tradition. The dish is often eaten during the Jewish High Holidays to symbolically usher in a sweet new year. This sweet-and-savory chicken tsimmes is an easy dish with a built-in side. The juices of the chicken enhance the flavors of the carrots and prunes. It’s filling when paired with rice or kasha, and it’s colorful and complex enough to serve for the holidays.

SERVES 4

My grandpa Jake was a gifted storyteller in the spinner-of-tall-tales manner. So when he described the one time he ate ice cream as a boy—far superior to any frozen dessert you could buy in our huge suburban supermarket and so memorable he hadn't forgotten it in fifty years—I was, of course, skeptical.

After all, he also said the weather in the Old Country was better too—never that cold because it was remarkably “dry.” And we’re talking Minsk, Belarus.

photo taken by Liz West, on Semptember 28, 2010, CC licensing

photo taken by Lauren Fan, on July 24, 2007, CC licensing

Yield: 6-8 servings

• 2 1/2 to 3 pounds sole, flounder, or similar white-fleshed fish fillets, no more than 1/2-inch thick (any stray bones removed with a tweezer)
• Salt
• 3 large eggs
• About 2 cups matzoh meal
• Freshly ground pepper
• Optional additions: your choice of spices, such as, smoked paprika, ground cumin, coriander, cayenne, ground fennel
• Olive, peanut, or grapeseed oil, for frying

Accompaniments:

The women in Cara De Silva's remarkable book, In Memory’s Kitchen: a memoir of life in Terezin, written in recipes," transcended their hunger by “cooking with the mouth”--talking constantly about food--and writing cookbooks. It was not the only cookbook to come out of the concentration camps. According to De Silva, there are five more that she knows of, and certainly others exist. She described one of these manuscripts, authored by Malka Zimmet, an inmate in a work subcamp of Mauthausen.

"Manischewitz, look at that go!" When Apollo 17 astronaut, Gene Cernan, uttered those words during his 1973 walk on the moon, the kosher Concord wine brand he mentioned was his favorite substitute for a swear word. 

It was only a matter of time, then, before those wines found their way into hipster circles.