Jewish Soul Food

I have a friend who worked as a food stylist. He taught me that the pictures of food you see in magazine ads, blogs, infomercials and cookbooks are professionally designed to look spectacular in photos. In real life, they are as likely as not to be inedible.

 

Photographs of cereal often use glue in place of milk. Sesame seed buns might have the sesame seeds placed individually, using a tweezer. Motor oil is sometimes used in place of pancake syrup and meat in ads is generally “cooked” with a blowtorch or hairdryer and then painted with shoe polish to give it the right color. These tricks are a small part of the clever art form known as food styling and it’s in evidence in many contemporary cookbooks, whose oversized, full color pictures on glossy paper have been referred to as food porn.

 

By contrast, the new cookbook Jewish Soul Food: Traditional Fare and What it Means by Carol Ungar, looks like a paperback novel that you’d bring on a beach vacation. It’s filled with hand-drawn illustrations and the photographs are black and white. At first glance, you might be tempted to dismiss this book as a low quality publication.

 

And that would be a mistake.

 

Instead of publishing yet another upscale cookbook, Ungar wrote a cookbook that could only be produced by a cross between a Jewish grandmother and an adult Jewish educator. By eschewing stylized, color photos and writing extensive descriptions about the background of why Jews eat what we eat when we eat it, Ungar connects her readers to Jewish history. One of Ungar’s themes is how the physical, spiritual and cultural aspects of Jewish life merge in food. Her understated, occasionally humorous prose reminds readers, and prospective Jewish cooks, that there’s cultural depth and a measure of Jewish literacy involved in making cabbage soup, teiglach and kreplach.

 

Ungar divides the book into three main sections, corresponding to times when Jews eat ceremonial foods – Shabbat, Jewish holidays and life cycle events. In the modest, 200-page book, she’s included well over 100 recipes. Ungar includes recipes (and explanations) for many familiar dishes like chopped liver and cucumber salad, and for not so familiar dishes, like etrog confit (a sweet-tart jam) and Ruota di Faraone (a meat and pasta casserole from Tuscany).

 

Even if you end up never taking a single pot out from the cabinet, reading Jewish Soul Food is like stepping into a complex, colorful Jewish cultural story. It’s a cookbook, yes. But it’s also a short course in adult Jewish literacy.