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Cooking for Passover

By Daisy Carrington | dcarrington@am-ny.com

2:02 PM EDT, April 15, 2008

Chicken for Passover.

Passover is the time of year when Jews and gentiles alike will turn their thoughts to Jewish cuisine.

For many of us, the holiday is associated with a grandmother's matzoh ball soup or a mother's haroset, weaving together holiday memories of family and food .

When Jane Cohen, a Greenwich Village-based food writer and author of "Jewish Holiday Cooking: A Food Lover's Treasury of Classics and Improvisations," set out to write a definitive Jewish cookbook, she found these connections impossible to ignore.

"It sort of became obvious to me after loosing my grandparents, and then my parents, that this is a grandmother cuisine," said Cohen. "And a grandmother cuisine will die when no more grandmothers are around to cook it, unless you have a younger generation that is eager to prepare that kind of food."

In "Jewish Food," Cohen not only provides recipes for Passover staples such as gefilte fish, she details how to set up a Seder (for the uninitiated) and enlivens each recipe with autobiographical narrative.

Don't expect her matzoh ball soup brimming with shitake mushrooms, asparagus and roasted fennel matzoh balls - to resemble grandma's. Though she is invested in preserving Passover traditions, she likes to do so while bringing the food forward.

"Palates change," Cohen noted. "Jewish writers used to write about chicken soup glowing with circles of golden fat. To me, that's not very appealing."

For those who are loath to mess with tradition, Cohen points to a number of examples when Jewish cuisine was altered to fit the environment. While gefilte fish is made from carp and pike in Eastern Europe, where the recipe originated, in Hawaii, it is made with Maui Maui. In Louisiana, matzoh balls are often made with hot peppers and wild spring onions.

"Some people feel, 'how can you mess with tradition?' and put Jewish cuisine into this fossilized cubbyhole, but it's the perfect cuisine to play with, because Jews have been traditionally experimenting with food because they were often forced to emigrate from one place to another."

Recipe: Fried chicken cutlets

Ingredients

¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
4 large garlic cloves, finely chopped
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 tablespoon olive oil, plus extra for frying
salt and pepper to taste
1 ½ pounds skinless, boneless chicken cutlets, trimmed of fat and gristle
1 cup commercially ground matzoh meal
2 large eggs
2 or 3 celery stalks, including leaves, washed, dried well, and cut into 4- to 5-inch lengths