My Family Recipe
I'm Not Religious, but I Connect With Judaism Through Food
Finding new meaning behind my family's recipes.
Good food is worth a thousand words—sometimes more. In My Family Recipe, a writer shares the story of a single dish that’s meaningful to them and their loved ones.
If my great grandmother Pearl looked around my kitchen, she would say I wasn’t Jewish. And she’d be right, in a way. I don’t keep kosher, eating pork and shellfish when I feel so compelled, no qualms about mixing dairy and meat. I’ll use schmaltz out of respect for depth of flavor, not religious mandate. Still, nothing makes me feel more connected to Judaism than cooking Jewish food.
I fry bundles of potato and onion bound with matzo meal in pools of oil, watching the latkes tan gold, then dark brown. I knead challah dough, braid it, and brush it with honey. I fold sweet coconut into clouds of whipped egg whites, dunk the lacey-edged macaroons in dark chocolate. And when I make these dishes that have been made over and over by Jews for centuries, I sense that I’m a part of something bigger.
I didn’t always feel it. My parents, neither of whom connected much with their respective religions, didn’t enforce church or synagogue on the family. Still, we lit the menorah and decorated Christmas trees, dyed eggs, and ate matzo. My sister and I listened to our friends complain about Bible camp and Torah portions, while our familiarity with scripture was limited to a robust obsession with the soundtrack to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
My maternal grandfather (an Italian Catholic) and grandmother (a Dutch Methodist) shaped my mom’s struggle with finding peace in religion. “When my parents got married in my mother’s church, my father’s family didn’t recognize the marriage,” she tells me. Her father wanted to raise his children Catholic as a remedy, but never followed through. So my mom grew up going to Methodist services with her mother and siblings, but never felt connected to what she was taught. “I sometimes had a hard time believing in religion. I didn’t know what it did for me, but I found other ways to be grounded,” she explains.
“After I was bar mitzvahed, I’d had enough,” my dad tells me, citing the combination of an unfriendly Rabbi and resentment of Hebrew school obligations as the start of his transition away from organized religion. “And if I felt that way, how could I force religion on my kids?” Still, he says, “I never give up feeling and identifying as Jewish.”
In The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, clinical psychologist Dr. Wendy Mogel describes repeated links between Judaism and food. “With the destruction of the ancient Holy Temple, each family’s table serves to replace the original holy altar,” Mogel explains, citing Judaism as a “table-centered religion.”
She notes that while demographers have found that fewer than half of American Jews belong to a synagogue, over 90 percent attend a yearly Passover Seder, the ritual meal that marks the liberation of Israelites from Egyptian slavery. Calling the phenomenon “kitchen Judaism,” Mogel posits further that Judaism in fact welcomes exploration of spirituality and family through food—that this type of daily interaction could in fact be a more effective tool for some young people than going to houses of worship.
As I got more invested in cooking professionally, one of my first jobs was developing recipes for a Jewish food website. Using the dishes my family members made for holidays as a jumping off point, I found that Jewish food went far beyond my great aunt’s tomato and onion soup mix brisket. My editor at the site, Shannon, told me that the sky was the limit when it came to types of dishes I could cover. So I researched bazargan, a Syrian tabbouleh salad sweetened with pomegranate molasses, and found it’s made in both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish cuisine; I studded bread with dried fenugreek (the fragrant herb is a symbolic, though often underrepresented, Rosh Hashanah food); I mixed olive oil into crunchy mandelbrot cookies.
Then, Shannon let me go off the rails—I developed recipes for fresh pasta dyed pink with Manischewitz wine for Valentine’s Day, and hamantaschen-shaped Jello shots for Purim (a holiday that is apparently all about booze, something my relatives never shared with me). Permission from another Jewish person to move beyond the stuffier dishes of my childhood and embrace flavors that appealed to me, in fact, brought me closer to the spiritual meaning behind the food.
There’s an ongoing argument between cooks about whether recipes should be accompanied by stories. Some feel strongly that recipes should exist independently of narrative—just give the instructions and leave it alone. But I think when that context is removed, so too goes a recipe’s ethos. Will skipping the explanation make a recipe fail? No. But without understanding why matzo or gefilte fish are significant to Jewish culture, one might turn up their nose seeing them on an ingredients list.
Take traditional Seder plate components, which are purposefully too bitter and too sweet, as they represent the roses and thorns of the enslaved Jews’ time in Egypt. I certainly wouldn’t eat parsley dipped in salt water (known as karpas) or a very hard-boiled egg (beitzah) outside of Passover, but the backdrop of the holiday—and knowing that millions of other Jews are eating the very same things this week—makes them taste exactly right.
| 1 | (3-pound) brisket, first-cut, untrimmed and sliced against the grain into 3 pieces |
| Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper | |
| 5 | tablespoons olive oil, divided |
| 1 | teaspoon chili powder |
| 1 | teaspoon paprika |
| 1/2 | teaspoon cayenne pepper |
| 1 | large yellow onion, chopped |
| 1 | (15-ounce) can tomato sauce (not marinara) |
| 1/3 | cup ketchup |
| 1/4 | cup light brown sugar |
| 2 | tablespoons unsweetened pomegranate juice |
| 1 | tablespoon distilled white vinegar |
| 1 | tablespoon onion powder |
| 1 | tablespoon Worcestershire sauce |
| 1 | (3-pound) brisket, first-cut, untrimmed and sliced against the grain into 3 pieces |
| Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper | |
| 5 | tablespoons olive oil, divided |
| 1 | teaspoon chili powder |
| 1 | teaspoon paprika |
| 1/2 | teaspoon cayenne pepper |
| 1 | large yellow onion, chopped |
| 1 | (15-ounce) can tomato sauce (not marinara) |
| 1/3 | cup ketchup |
| 1/4 | cup light brown sugar |
| 2 | tablespoons unsweetened pomegranate juice |
| 1 | tablespoon distilled white vinegar |
| 1 | tablespoon onion powder |
| 1 | tablespoon Worcestershire sauce |
| 1/2 | small head of red cabbage (about 1 pound), thinly sliced |
| 1/2 | small head of green cabbage (about 1 pound), thinly sliced |
| 1 | tablespoon apple cider vinegar |
| Kosher salt | |
| 1 | medium carrot, grated |
| 1 | shallot, finely chopped |
| 3/4 | cup mayonnaise |
| 2 | tablespoons fresh lemon juice |
| 1/2 | teaspoon celery salt |
| Freshly ground black pepper | |
| Toasted potato buns and pickled chips, for serving |
| 1/2 | small head of red cabbage (about 1 pound), thinly sliced |
| 1/2 | small head of green cabbage (about 1 pound), thinly sliced |
| 1 | tablespoon apple cider vinegar |
| Kosher salt | |
| 1 | medium carrot, grated |
| 1 | shallot, finely chopped |
| 3/4 | cup mayonnaise |
| 2 | tablespoons fresh lemon juice |
| 1/2 | teaspoon celery salt |
| Freshly ground black pepper | |
| Toasted potato buns and pickled chips, for serving |
Written by: Rebecca Firkser
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12 Comments
But the editors were wrong.
Rebecca rightfully points out that her recipe includes ways to make this brisket dish suitable for Passover - leave out rolls, get ones that are Kosher-for-Passover, serve over rice (if your ethnic group or rabbi permits kitniyot).
Charles, Maryea and Terry who wrote in suggesting she learn the kosher laws or that it's not appropriate to post this article just before Passover are also right.
It just doesn't look like a Passover-suitable article or recipe.
Nor would anyone who observes that holiday with its ban on grains and fermented produce have any interest in reading or studying that recipe.
Rather, the burden of inappropriate timing and selection rests on the editors, who could have posted this article any of the other eleven months of the year.
And they could have posted, instead, something more obviously suitable and/or interesting a few days before Passover started.
The buns I linked to are made with potato starch. Since they're sold by a Kosher organization I feel confident that they know what they're doing when it comes to advertising products as Kosher for Passover.
Still, if you were truly concerned about a product not being K for P, you don't have to eat it! And yes, the sandwiches would be great on matzo, I invite you to try it!
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