Description:
Does Grilled Butterflied Chicken with Provençal Herbs sound quintessentially Jewish to you? What about Slow-Cooked Chicken on a Bed of Potatoes? The mother-daughter team of Mother and Daughter Jewish Cooking list the first recipe as "contemporary" and the second recipe as "traditional." Such is the organizing principle on which the entire book is based: we are Jewish women cooking, therefore this is Jewish cooking. The premise doesn't quite hold together at the seams. The book is divided by soups, appetizers, dairy dishes, eggs, tarts, pasta, fish, poultry, beef and lamb, vegetables, salads, rice and grains, desserts, and menus. There's even a glossary of Yiddish and Hebrew terms. You will find both chicken and matzo ball soup. But you will also find a tasty-sounding Oriental Chicken Soup as well as Sephardi Cheese Puffs, Turkish Mushrooms, Aunty Mary's Savory Noodles, Moroccan Beef Casserole, Greek-Jewish Red Wine Beef Casserole, Viennese Red Cabbage, Doris's German Cucumber Salad, and Healthy Somerset Apple Coffee Cake. "This book," Evelyn Rose says, "is an attempt to preserve the food legacy handed down by all our mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers, but to modify it to suit the lives we live now, and to introduce other dishes that are imbued with the same spirit yet are looking toward the future." So Mother and Daughter Jewish Cooking is more like two generations of women (Judy is the daughter) sharing traditional and contemporary recipes, in a kind of a mother-daughter coffee klatsch. Rose, who lives in Manchester, England, and broadcasts on the BBC, is a world authority on Jewish food. Her classic The New Complete International Jewish Cookbook is like The Joy of Cooking for the Anglo-Jewish home. That's a lot of muscle. Not enough of it is flexed in this collection. --Schuyler Ingle
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