Where’s the Pyetroushka?
The Complete American-Jewish Cookbook.
by Anne London and Bertha Kahn Bishov.
World. 623 pp. $4.95.
In 1941 the Jewish Cook Book was first published and for nearly a decade it monopolized the American market as the only complete volume of its kind. Its tone was a combination of stern injunction and earnest exhortation, and it was addressed to that young bride or matron who had had the misfortune to be born with something less than perfect knowledge of how to make kasha varnishkas. It was a sober book and a sound one. Something of its flavor may be sampled from the following passage which concludes the introduction:
In conducting a kosher kitchen care must be taken not to mix meat and milk, or meat and butter at the same meal.
The utensils used in the cooking and serving of meat dishes may not be used for milk dishes. They should never be mixed.
To follow the spirit as well as the letter of the dietary laws, scrupulous cleanliness should always be observed in the storing, handling, and serving of food.
It is very necessary to keep the hands clean, the flours and cereals clean, the ice-box clean, and the pots and pans clean.
The Complete American-Jewish Cookbook (a new book, unrelated to the earlier volume) takes a tone of cautious reasonableness in these matters, and sheltered behind the coattails of historicity and objectivity explains why the non-observant Jew has found it unnecessary to burden himself with the commandments on kashrut since the invention of non-porous cooking and eating utensils—not to mention government-inspected slaughtering—has taken care of the sanitary concerns of our sages. The description of the rules for maintaining a kosher house are presented carefully and distantly:
Orthodox Jews must of necessity have at least two sets of dishes, utensils, and tableware, because meat and milk products may not be prepared or served in the same pots or dishes. Dairy products may not be served on a dish which contained meat, or vice versa. In fact, some Orthodox Jews will not eat at a table where meat and milk products are served simultaneously. It is believed that the restrictions on the utensils originated at a time when porous metals, unglazed porcelain, and wooden bowls were used. Glass was usually exempted from this prohibition. The prohibition is still regarded as prevailing, although non-porous utensils are now in general use.
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Once past these thickets, however, the authors enter with enthusiasm on their task, and have produced a first-rate cook book, so complete and varied that the omission of such staples of the American diet as pork products and sea food is hardly noticeable. Leaning heavily on chicken fat as a substitute for butter, the writers have managed to adapt an amazing collection of American, Continental, and even international recipes. And just as the advance publicity gave us to understand, there are verily recipes for Egg Foo Yong and Boo Loo Gai.
In its style the book reflects the current fashions in American cooking, both good and bad. At its best it includes simplifications of dishes out of the haute cuisine, and emphasizes the specialties of regional and national cooking. At its worst it offers, for example, a horror titled “Menorah Salad”—a representation of a candlestick done in fruit and vegetables. This type of imitation cooking which calls forth great pains to produce something visually questionable and gastronomically inedible sadly lowers the generally high level of the book.
While it does not speak with the culinary authority of a de Gouy or a Diat, or even with the overtones of elegance suggested by Rombauer, it will be a useful guide for beginners cooking in the Jewish tradition, and of interest even to experienced cooks who wish to develop their repertoire of Jewish recipes. In this ticklish field, it may be reported, the authors take no sides and all known variants of traditional delicacies are included.
Arranged in alphabetical categories, the book covers every aspect of cooking from appetizers through to that disheartening appendix responsible authors find it necessary to include: “Controlling Weight and a Calorie Table.” The appetizer section deserves a round of applause for the thousands of suggestions and recipes for canapés and hors d’oeuvres in its fifteen pages. It bears out, perhaps, the widely held opinion that the Jews are more of an eating than a drinking people, even when confronted with the two possibilities simultaneously.
The bread and cake section, which runs to over one hundred pages, includes excellent information on the chemical interaction of the major ingredients used in baking and explanations of the common causes of cake failure. The additional thirty pages devoted to pies and pastries list nineteen different recipes for strudel. There is even a recipe for making rolled strudel dough, presumably for cowards afraid to try the time-honored method of stretching the dough to transparent thinness on a table cloth. “You should be able to read a newspaper through it,” says tradition.
One of the most vexatious problems to the kosher housewife cooking in the American tradition is that of desserts. Jewish cooking of a generation ago was based largely on heavy soups and rich, gravied meats. Even the much maligned boiled chicken was customarily accompanied by potatoes mashed with vast quantities of chicken fat and, as our authors put it, cracklings. For these cooks, desserts were a matter of no concern; some stewed fruit or applesauce, accompanied on festive occasions with sponge cake or honey cake, was as much as anyone wanted. As they often said; “What is the purpose of dessert, after all? It’s just something to help you digest your meal.” But American-style meals which frequently dispense with the soup course put a greater responsibility on the dessert course. The authors of the American-Jewish Cookbook have handled this problem admirably with a fine section of the book thirteen pages long devoted to fruit desserts, and have also included many interesting butter-type cakes that require neither butter nor milk, using instead vegetable shortening and fruit juices, wine, honey, or coffee for the liquid.
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In the sections devoted to meat and poultry, the fact that the authors are restricted only to the forequarters of beef, veal, and lamb does not noticeably affect the number of recipes they offer. There are, for example, no less than eleven pages of chicken recipes, a vast variety of beef stews, and many variations on beef and veal pot roasts. Humble chopped meat conies off grandly with a whole division of recipes drawn from Rumania, Mexico, Syria, Greece, Turkey, Germany, Armenia, and Russia. Indeed, the key to the great variety the authors offer lies in their reliance on regional and national dishes.
The book has the further virtue of being splendidly illustrated with over 200 black and white and colored photographs. Many of them seem to have been included because the plates were easily available, and although pretty enough to look at are of no real interest, e.g., a meaningless fragment of a table setting titled “Buffet Table Setting,” but actually a reproduction of what might be an advertisement for Dirilyte tableware. Others illustrating step by step methods of preparing foods will be much appreciated.
A special Passover section, a number of interesting how-to-do-it appendices, several pages of diagrams on carving, and an odd “Glossary of Special Yiddish Terms” which left your reviewer quite bemused, round out the volume. This last list, in the words of the authors, “includes an explanation of the Jewish calendar, all major holidays, and traditional foods for the holidays, as well as general names for popular dishes and related terms.” Now, as any dictionary reader knows, the alphabet makes strange bedfellows, but the jostling in this small collection of 160 words of the most sacred and the most profane becomes almost unmannerly. Bagel, for example, interrupts the stately sequence of b’dikas kametz, bentshen, and ben zochor, which runs up short against beryah.
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If the truth may be told, however, the authors have failed us sadly in the soup section. A meager nine pages! One looks in vain for old favorites like barley and mushroom soup made with dried mushrooms, lung and farfel soup, or gruenkern soup, or onion soup.
Finally I would like to take the authors to one side and have a word with them about their chicken soup. Ladies, what’s this I read about using three quarts of water to cook one hapless bird? And a fowl at that! I have yet to hear a chicken buyer in a kosher poultry market lower herself by asking for anything less dainty than a pullet. But be that as it may, are you making soup for men or broth for invalids? Come, come, mesdames, surely you didn’t learn this peeking into your mothers’ cooking pots.
And then I don’t seem to recognize your soup greens. Do you stop after carrots, celery, two sprigs of parsley, and one small bay leaf? I do not even mention the yellow turnip, the dill, the parsnip, or the leeks. Where, I ask you, is the pyetroushka— the parsley root—practically the mandrake root of the Jewish housewife? This is not the soup, Mesdames Authors, that a generation fought over. Where, I repeat, is the pyetroushka?
I leave it to your consciences to answer.
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