Preparing a Seder in the Cucina

By JOYCE GOLDSTEIN

My parents came to this country from Russia when they were children. Their families wanted to put the past behind them. All old-world traditions, both cultural and religious, were buried in their haste to assimilate as quickly as possible. Although I grew up in the shtetl of Crown Heights in Brooklyn, I did not have any religious upbringing. We were secular Jews; we went to temple occasionally to celebrate family bar mitzvahs and weddings, but that’s about all.

Our family had few culinary traditions. Both my parents worked full time. My mother thought cooking a necessary but un-pleasurable task. I was considered a “problem eater,” but I suspect that I was really a latent critic of the art of cuisine as practiced by my mother and other cooks in the family. However, when we dined in restaurants (and, later on, after traveling in Europe), I realized that food could be sublime and satisfying, and I was determined to learn how to prepare foods which gave me pleasure. I did not cook until graduate school, when I finally had my own kitchen and could exercise my dual passions: scholarliness and sensuality. I loved learning about fine ingredients, tasting new foods, reading about the food of other cultures, and mastering complex recipes. I also discovered that cooking for people gave me great pleasure. This eventually led to a career in teaching cooking and eventually to owning Square One, my own restaurant in San Francisco.
 
In 1989 a group of my favorite Square One regulars asked me to make Passover dinner at the restaurant. They didn't want to cook.  This presented me with a dilemma. At home we had not celebrated Passover, so I didn't have family food traditions to fall back on. The Jewish food I knew was based on my childhood dining experiences in New York. Plus, Square One was a Mediterranean restaurant, and I did not want to cook an Ashkenazic meal. The most popular food that we served was from the diverse regions of Italy, so I decided that our Passover meal should be Italian. This led me to do a great deal of research on the cuisine of the Italian Jews. For eight years we offered Italian Passover dinners and our repertoire of recipes grew to include zuppa di asparagi in sapor giallo (asparagus soup with saffron) and pesce freddo alla salsa di noce (cold poached fish with walnut sauce).

These Italian seders were such a hit that we started in on the Sephardic foods of Greece, Turkey, and North Africa. I enjoyed doing the research, and I loved cooking the food and refining the recipes for our clientele.

It was this research and my memories of living with an Italian Jewish family for a brief time that led to my writing Cucina Ebraica: Flavors of the Italian Jewish Kitchen. After Ebraica I was intrigued to find out what happened with the food of the Sephardic Jews after they fled Spain and Portugal and made their way into the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. Did they keep their culinary traditions? Did they modify their recipes after seeing what others were growing and cooking? This led to my writing Sephardic Flavors: Jewish Cooking of the Mediterranean and then to Saffron Shores: Jewish Cooking of the Southern Mediterranean. 

I soon discovered that working within long established culinary traditions was meaningful and gratifying. I gained respect for those who kept the faith, who knew that you could be independent and creative and still show respect for tradition and the ways of our ancestors. I liked being part of a culinary continuum. My own style of cooking is personal but it is based on tradition. Keeping that balance between tradition and innovation is my goal.  

Rather than obsess over haute cuisine, I have focused on the home cooking of diverse cultures. I love to see how a family's ethnic history is revealed through the foods it cooks for holidays and everyday meals as well. Today, with people working long hours and buying prepared foods, spending less time at the stove and dining table, I worry that we may lose many traditional recipes. As a chef and passionate student of food and culture, I feel an urgency to transcribe diverse family recipes in order to keep them alive. Otherwise these recipes might be lost to us forever. And what a tragedy that would be.

There is another reason that I love to cook this food. I was an only child so my family is very important to me. One of the reasons I closed my restaurant was so that I would have more time to spend with my family. I cook for my children, their spouses, and my beloved grandchildren as often as possible. Some of my happiest moments are when we are gathered around the large oval dining table, eating favorite family dishes, with time to talk about what's happening in our lives. It is important that we create our own family traditions so we have meaningful memories. Jewish Mediterranean food is delicious, and it has become part of my family's repertoire of favorite dishes as we create our own family history and extend our culinary traditions. Today at Passover my family and I feast on gefilte fish, salmon with sweet-and-sour rhubarb sauce, lamb with green onions and green garlic, asparagus with mint, almond sponge torte served with strawberries in blood-orange juice, and, of course, matzoh ball soup (my grandchildren made the matzoh balls this year, and they were great!).

Now, That’s Italian—and Jewish

Like the sound of Joyce Goldstein’s Sephardic cuisine? Our author/chef has provided some Italian Jewish recipes for you to try.>>