Customer Reviews

The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a fabulous cookbook and so much more. I've tried several of the recipes. They turned out delicious. I am looking forward to trying lot's more.

The variety of international cuisine is fabulous. The history, rich cultural information and stories make this so much more than just a cookbook. The collection of Jewish History is a treasure. The recipes can be enjoyed by all, regardless of culture or faith.

I recently purchased Aromas of Aleppo by Poopa Dweck as well. I am wondering if Ms. Roden and Ms. Dweck are related? They both share Alepan Jewish backgrounds and Ms. Roden's family name was 'Douek' which although spelled differently, is pronounced the same. They both are outstanding culinary authors. If anyone knows, I'd be curious to learn the answer.

I highly recommend this book as a must have to any good international cookbook collection!

I find myself reading this cookbook even when I am not looking for recipes. It describes the ways in which Jewish culture and cuisine borrowed from and contributed to the culture and cuisine of the many places they've lived. Roden is a wonderful writer who can evoke the sights, sounds and tastes of Jewish history. Most of the recipes I've tried are great too.

A wonderful book that most of my family and friends own, my non-Jewish flatmate read through like a novel, and I always have difficulty putting down. Since Ashkenazi cooking can be found in countless other Jewish cookery books, I appreciated the main focus on Sephardic cooking. I am vegan and even so found hundreds of recipes. The cultural background information is fascinating, and the religious information enables you to produce something a bit different at the festivals - we had the most fabulous (Iranian, I think) stew last Rosh Hashanah, together with home-made challah, and were quite spoilt for choice when it came to making haroset. The only problem is that I get so seduced by reading the recipes that I end up making too much food! However, my friends have certainly been enjoying the pastries I take to meetings. I have had no problems following the delicious recipes and Roden is usefully realistic about substitutes for ingredients unobtainable in Britain, warnings for extra-hot dishes and so on. She also gives basic recipes followed by several variations for many dishes, especially the popular ones; this can be useful if you want a different slant on a traditional dish, for example a borsht which isn't too violently beetrooty. The personal touch - anecdotes about where she met the recipe donor, or traditional dishes in her family - is delightful.

The greatness of this Jewish cookbook lies not only in its stellar recipes but in its viewpoint. Claudia Roden grew up in Cairo, and her definition of Jewish home cooking is definitely of the Middle Eastern variety than the usual European. She does not ignore European Jewish cooking; she devotes some 100 pages to it. But the bulk of the book is Middle Eastern and Northern African Jewish food. While the recipes are / taste somewhat exotic, I have found them very easy to adapt to whatever I am cooking at the moment. I often fuse recipes from this book with recipes from other cookbooks-always with great success.

This is not only a great book of recipes, but it is an inspiration as well. Happy Cooking!

This is a great Middle Eastern and Central Asian cookbook. It's not such a great Ashkenazi cookbook -- there are shelves full of better, more complete, and more varied Ashkenazi cookbooks out there -- but it does make a nod in that direction, which is rather more than a lot of Ashkenazi books do towards Asian cooking.

As an Asian cookbook, it's wonderful. The recipes are plentiful and varied. There is indeed more to Sephardic cooking than eggplant. Each recipe comes with twiddles and variations, which are liberating. If you don't have quite enough of an ingredient, it's helpful to have suggestions for adjusting the dish. The quantities are reasonable, and listed in several different systems (i.e. metric/imperial, weight/volume), and the cooking techniques are pretty simple and thoroughly explained. One should be aware, however, that many of the dishes date from an era when women stayed home and had all day to make a single dish. Some things, in particular the Salonika Meat Pies and some of the pastry sweets, take far longer to make than one would anticipate.

For me, this book's two greatest strengths are its asides and its scope. It's great to see essays on some of the remoter Jewish communities. The Bukharans, the Bene Israel of India, and the Jews of Caucasian Georgia just don't get the press in the United States that the Ashkenazi and Sephardi communities do. There is even a wonderful story on the lost Kaifeng community in China. The traditional foods of these cultures (except the Kaifeng and the Ethiopian Jews) are well represented, making this very much a world cookbook.

After I served a dessert from this book (the quince compote) to my cousin, we started talking, and we discovered that we had both independently discovered and enjoyed it. It strikes me that such a varied book as this could be a useful tool for reaching across cultures and forming diverse friendships. The quince compote is a pretty good place to start.

This is not a book that you just open when you are ready to start cooking. This is a book that you spend Sunday morning in bed reading for two or three hours before you start cooking. It gets you in the mood. The photos of the vanished Jewish communities of Europe and the Middle East put these recipes into the context of archeology. You feel like you are going on a dig while reading about the evolution, migration, and diaspora dispersal of these favorite family recipes, some of which survived the very cultures that they were created in.
It made me want to cook, which I almost never do....

The book is filled with delightful illustrations, photographs, and the sort of Jewish history I hungered for. But speaking of hungry, if you plan on doing more than just reading this book you may be disapointed, as I was.

The recipes were too basic. Once I followed through with them, I realized that Ms. Roden had to be leaving fairly important things out. She states that she chose the versions of the recipes that she found most appealing, but I believe her choices in fact reflect her desire not to frighten more simple and less experienced chefs with too many instructions or ingredients. But it is not helpful to leave out basic instructions, ie: in the "Pot Roast" recipe she fails to instruct the reader to brown the meat before adding the water. For Ashkenazi recipes there are many more helpful books on the market. For myself, I'm still searching for a good Sephardi cooking resource.

In the end, I'm not sorry I bought the book, while it is not a great cookbook, it is a beautiful treasure of a book and an outstanding tribute to our culture.

This ambitious book combines superb, easy to prepare Jewish recipes with fascinating historical and cultural blurbs on everything from NYC deli's to the history of Moroccan Jews. Amazingly, the book succeeds on both these levels.

The sepia-toned photographs and drawings that decorate the book magnificently illustrate the historical and cultural asides. However, if you're expecting photographs of the food itself, you're in for disappointment. The individual recipes don't come with photographs showing the final dish.

A great gift idea for yourself or any other cooks you might know.

Claudia Rodem must have spent years preparing this work. I received this book as a gift, and have enjoyed the recipes and the historic detail. As an Ashkenazic Jew, this book includes pages and pages of things I've never even heard of, Sephardic dishes I've enjoyed, but never thought I could make, and staples from my grandmother's kitchen. If I could meet you, Claudia, I would love to hug you!!

Nowadays, when hundreds of cookbooks flood the book market, and each regional or ethnic cuisine type gets its share of ink and paper, choosing a cookbook is not an easy task. Well, this task becomes much easier when one book of its kind stands far above the rest - and I believe that this is the case with Claudia Roden's book of Jewish Food. This book is remarkable in many ways - the clear and simple way in which the recipes are presented, the wonderful historical inserts, and above all - the feeling that there's someone with you in the kitchen when you cook, someone who's deeply informed about the recipe and its cultural background, and who's also there with you, helping you to make the best out of it. The book is masterfully organized - the grouping of recipes is so logical and yet not annoyingly rigid, and the index is a masterpiece on its own - there's no way you can miss a recipe that you want: you'll find it under its name, or under any of the principal ingredients used in it. Timing given for each recipe is relatively realistic, and so are the serving amounts. I strongly reccomend this book.