"A personal favorite, not only for its impeccable recipes but for its loving tribute
to a mother and the memories of a bygone New York City, this book is about
the wonderful food eaten every day in the "Austro-Polish-Rumanian-Jewish"
household in which New York Times restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton grew up.
Although the family did not keep kosher—she gives recipes for Manhattan clam chowder and fried-egg and bacon sandwiches—most of the foods are classically Jewish-American, with plenty of "kosher-style" dishes such as cabbage soup
and blintzes, stuffed cabbage, mandelbrot, and a thin, crisp potato kugel that
will let you celebrate Hanukkah without standing over the stove frying latkes
while everyone eats. Besides, how can you not love a book with a chapter on
"The Joys of Being Sick in Bed"? Now out of print, this book with close to
300 recipes is worth searching out in the public library or in a second-hand bookstore..."

Mimi Sheraton's Knaidlach!

Best for Ashkenazi Cuisine

Jewish Home Cooking:
Yiddish Recipes Revisited
by Arthur Schwartz, copyright © 2008
Published by Ten Speed Press
Photo credit: Ben Fink © 2008

"This is what most of us think of as Jewish cooking: Ashkenazic cooking
transmitted through the American immigrant experience. That means bagels
and stuffed cabbage, kugel and blintzes. It includes the heavy, memory-laden
dishes that these days mainly show up in the matzoh kugel and pot roast at the Passover seder, or the herring in sour cream and nut-studded coffee cakes we
eat when we break the Yom Kippur fast. Food maven Arthur Schwartz contends
that these foods (and there are nearly 100 recipes) are too good to reserve just
for the holidays. Rather, we can enjoy this way of eating year round, given a
little editing to lighten the dishes. Ask anyone who has sipped a cool glass of
beet borscht in summer or made an entire supper of that one-time appetizer,
stuffed cabbage (holishkes), in winter. Teeming with history and anecdotes,
like that of the quietly disappearing New York beverage the egg cream, the
book is frankly and unabashedly centered on the New York Jewish-American
experience. We'd expect nothing less from Schwartz, a native New Yorker
whose previous book was New York City Food."

Anne Whiteman's Birthday Kugel
Epicurious | September 2008

"Anne Whiteman was the mother of Michael Whiteman, a Brooklyn native and
the business and creative partner of the legendary Joe Baum in designing and
operating many restaurant projects, among them the food services of the World
Trade Center, including Windows on the World, and the restoration and
operation of the Rainbow Room.
If this is the kind of food Michael grew up eating, then it's no wonder his palate
is so finely tuned. This recipe is typical of highly evolved dairy noodle kugels,
in that it is dessert-sweet and topped with corn flakes, although it doesn't call
for the canned crushed pineapple that so many less refined recipes do. Here,
the cottage cheese is pureed with the sour cream, milk, and eggs to form a
silken custard to hold the noodles. Michael and I are not certain how his
mother arrived at the odd amount of sour cream, but I have decided not to
change it. It is called "birthday kugel" because his mother made it mainly
for those celebratory occasions."