Lawrence Strauss

Comprehensive and fascinating, Oct 14 2012

First, a warning: This book's title is accurate. If you want a Jewish cookbook then you'll find many out there, but this is an encyclopedia that happens to contain illustrative recipes.

"Encyclopedia of Jewish Food" is endlessly fascinating. If you think that "Jewish food" is limited to a couple of heavy, starch- or meat-based dishes originating in Eastern Europe, I recommend opening this book to a random page and reading one of the meticulously researched articles on the cuisines enjoyed by Jews in the Middle East, eastern Africa, the southern Mediterranean, South Asia, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Western and Southern Europe. Marks, a rabbi and historian who knows his way… Read more

Good reading, great food, Oct 14 2012

This is one of our favourite and most-used cookbooks. Every recipe I have tried from it in the course of several years has been successful, and the historical and ethnographic information about different Jewish groups and their cuisines is just fascinating. Great for vegetarians and non-vegetarians, and for anyone who wants to expand their perception of "Jewish food" beyond the usual clichés developed by Eastern Ashkenazi Jews in North America.

My standard reference, May 17 2004

I received The New Joy of Cooking as a birthday present about half a year ago, and I've been using it consistently since then. It contains reliable and well-tested recipes, and employs a recipe format that would, in a perfect world, be adopted by all cookbook writers to come.

Of course, this is not the original Joy of Cooking, and it differs considerably from that volume. Opinions vary on the matter, but I feel that many of the complaints about this revised edition have more to do with sentimentality than with the quality of the book itself. The sections that have been sacrificed - though I'm sure they contained perfectly good recipes - are the ones for which the vast majority of… Read more