Encyclopedia of Jewish Food Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)This book, Gil Marks' fifth, takes Jewish cookbook writing to a whole new level.
Marks ventures out of the genre of recipes peppered with anecdotes and cultural observations (the hallmarks of virtually all Jewish and general cookbooks with which I'm familiar) and presents us with a resource book for everything we want to know about Jewish food. The book has information about a whole range of "Jewish foods" from the Biblical (e.g., matza), to the rabbinic/traditional (e.g., charoset), to the cultural (e.g., bagels, blintzes, seltzer, etc.), even to items where Jews had major commercial impact, though not normally thought of Jewish in the culinary or cultural sense (e.g., bananas, yogurt). We are also given a historical sweep of how basic universal foods (e.g., bread, meat, cheese) were prepared and appreciated from biblical times to the present.
Where appropriate, etymologies for the names of the foods are given, religious significance or symbolism is explained (supported by a range of references including the Bible, Talmud, responsa, and related literature), and the cultural and culinary context are made clear. Historical factors play a very large role in the explanations; Marks uses his understanding of both general Jewish history as well as the history of the various foods to explain how various Jewish foods developed (or disappeared) for reasons relating to geography and time. For example, raisin wine took the place of 'regular' wine where fresh grapes were unavailable, and horseradish replaced fresh greens for the Passover bitter herb for similar reasons. Conversely, when herring and hamantaschen (or its German antecedent) entered the orbit of Ashkenazic Jews, they readily became part of the Jewish story. And, despite these examples, the book is far from ashkenaz-centric. Moroccan, Persian, Ethiopian, Greek and Syrian (etc., etc.) food traditions all become part of the corpus of Jewish food and find their appropriate home in this magisterial volume.
Besides living up to its name as an encyclopedia, this is still a cookbook, too. Many recipes are included (350, I believe), though not as many as you'd expect in a 600+ page book. That's because what you're really getting here is not the standard cooking manual. You're getting a window into Jewish life as defined by food (such a huge part of an culture, but of Jewish life in particular, I believe), along with clear and easy-to-follow recipes you can use in your own cooking.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Encyclopedia of Jewish Food

Get 33% OFF

Click here for more information about Encyclopedia of Jewish Food