If you've been cooking Mama's Eastern-European recipes long enough, and you want your meals to turn over a new, more Sephardic leaf, in step with Israeli-style cooking, Sheilah Kaufman's cookbook Sephardic Israeli Cuisine: A Mediterranean Mosaic is for you.
Start changing your cooking by changing your ingredients. Put aside the potatoes and the cabbage in favor of eggplant and artichokes. Forget the wheat and barley and go for rice and couscous. Leave the apples and pears on the shelf and choose the melons and apricots. Now that you have a lot of ingredients that you have no idea what to do with, reach for Sephardic Israeli Cuisine: A Mediterranean Mosaic .
To follow these authentic recipes you will have to stock up on some new-to-the-Polish-palate, spices. The section on Condiments and Spices will guide you right through the Middle Eastern spice market. I doubt that any of us will actually bother to make the spices when they are so readily availalbe in any Israeli market. But in this section you will learn what Zatar and Zhoug (and many other spices) are really made of.
In my eternal search for easy-to-make appetizers that taste good even when prepared several days before serving, this cookbook offers Leah Spiegel's recipe for Walnut Dip. Combine all the easy to find ingredients into a food processor, zumm, and store it in the frig. Alas! My kind of recipe.
Here are the recipes for the well known but Gd-know-what's-in -`em dishes like Mafrum. This exotic sounding Lybian dish turns out to be beef stew. What's special about Morroccan Cholent? In addition to all the unique spicing that Bubi never dreamed of, Moroccans make their Cholent with honey. Yes, honey.
We all know about the eggs that brown in the Cholent over night. Huevos Haminados is another Shabbat dish that Sephardi Yerushalmim and Turkish Jews make, that gives you the brown eggs but without the Cholent.
Your Polish taste buds may be adjusting to Sephardic and Middle Eastern foods slowly, but everybody loves those great Sephardic and Middle Eastern desserts. No matter where you are from, you will delight in those bite-size syrupy sweet and often crunchy specialties like Baklava. Kaufman offers a recipe for preparing Baklava by the sheet that you later cut into individual pieces. I was more intrigued by the recipe from Lybia for sweet roses called Debla, which is popular on Purim. These beautiful individual edible rose-shaped sweets are made of dough that is wound around into a rose-like shape and covered in sugar syrup. They look just like flowers covered in morning dew, and must be gorgeous in mishloach manot.
This cookbook has an excellent section on Sephardic Passover recipes. This Pesach, in addition to your traditional haroset you can prepare the Haroset from Turkey - also made with apples, nuts and wine, but with the addition of dates and raisins. Or you can make the Abravanel family haroset recipe originating in Portugal. In addition to the nuts and the wine, this recipe has - you won't believe it - orange juice and cherry jam. I liked the Passover recipe for sponge cake, which has a lot of eggs but no oil, so much for kitniyot issues.
The cookbook ends with a small section on Ashkenazi foods. I am not sure why this was necessary. From my point of view the book held its own with just the Sephardic recipes.
In addition to all the great recipes the cookbook has a section on the history of Sephardic Jews and an essay on the foods traditionally eaten on the Jewish holidays.
The books opens with a translation of the Bendigamos, the Grace After Meals according to the tradition of the Spanish Portuguese Jews. It would have been nice had the Ladino text appeared alongside the English translation.
Sephardic Israeli Cuisine: A Mediterranean Mosaic is a fine addition to your cookbook collection. You'll enjoy preparing these unique recipes and incorporating them into your standard repertoire.
