Andrea Marks Carneiro - Jewish Cooking Boot Camp: The Modern Girl’s Guide to Cooking like a Jewish Grandmother

Andrea Marks Carneiro is a freelance writer and editor based in Miami, Florida. She has worked on-staff at several national and regional magazines (including TALK and SouthFloridaCEO ) and has contributed to national and regional media including WE! Television, Modern Bride, JuliB.com, and Daily Candy. An amateur at holiday cooking, she is currently honing her skills by practicing on her husband and daughter.

Roz Marks is the go-to gal for all things culinary among her friends and her daughters friends. A former elementary school teacher, Roz parlayed her people skills and talent for marketing into a twenty-year real estate career. Roz comes from a long line of style-savvy Jewish cooks and spent years learning the traditions of old-world cooking and baking, observing and helping her mother and grandmother, both of whom emigrated from Russia in the early 1900s. She resides in Miami, Florida, with her husband and three rescue dogs.

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ThreeForks

Copyright 2009 by Andrea Marks Carneiro

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to The Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, P.O. Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

Three Forks is an imprint of The Globe Pequot Press.

Illustrations: Georgiana Goodwin

Text design: Georgiana Goodwin

Project editors: Julie Marsh, Jennifer Taber

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN 978-0-7627-5088-7

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Lor v dor

One of the most vivid and cherished childhood memories I hold centers around our visits with Grandma Rose in Rockaway Beach, New York. Several times a year my dad, mom, sister, and I would drive from our home in Bethesda, Maryland, to Grandma Rose and Grandpa Lous place on Long Island. Their walkup was small and cluttered, but the central room for me was the tiny kitchen. I will always remember the distinct smells, familiar tastes, gregarious chatter, and simple joy of sitting, for hours it seemed, at their crowded kitchen table while Grandma Rose showered us with an overabundance of delicious, homemade Jewish foods.

From her perspective, she could never make enough for us nor could we consume enough of what she made. From my perspective, I felt her steady love and adoration for my dad, extended now to his family, expressed through her caring preparation and presentation of Jewish foods for us. As I look back, I think the consistency, generosity, and pleasure of her creating family memories through food has deeply shaped me.

Today, I spend less and less time in my own kitchen as I work on issues of social justice and gender equity that often take me far from home. Yet, I regularly return to my kitchen for grounding. For it is at our kitchen and dining tables, often imbued with food prepared with my Grandma Roses recipes (captured by the diligent measuring and surveillance of my Aunt Bea who shadowed my grandma years ago), that I too seek to transmit the message of my relentless love for our growing family and my deep craving to nurture and gather my family to create memories that will sustain us now and inspire the next generations.

Grandma Rose taught me how to actualize the fundamental Jewish value of lor v dor passing values, traditions, and dreams from generation to generation. I try to do it in many ways, perhaps the most delicious of which is through food.

NANCY RATZAN

Nancy is a lawyer and a social justice activist. She is currently the national president of the National Council of Jewish Women and a national leader who works to ensure powerful grassroots engagement in progressive social issues. Her husband, Kenneth, and their blended family of three daughters, three sons, two daughters-in-law, and four grandchildren enjoy the gathering of family, always marked by wonderful food.

Thank you to all the friends and family who gave us support and encouragement as we worked to make Jewish Cooking Boot Camp a reality.

To Ellen Cohen and Jill Kaplan, the original Boot Campers and unofficial Marks family members. Their love of latkes sparked 200 pages.

To Adina Kahn for believing in our concept and to Jane Dystel for being our advocate and adviser.

To our wonderful editor Heather Carriero for bringing our vision to life and to Julie Marsh and the rest of the team at GPP for their hard work.

To everyone who donated their family recipes and traditions to make this book so complete.

And most of all to David, Sarah, Jacob, Gil, Edie, and Allan for their love, their ideas, and most of all... their appetites.

The idea for Jewish Cooking Boot Camp started a long, long, long time ago. You see, when you live in New York but your parents live in Miami... well, they end up with a lot of house-guests. In my case those guests were a small group of my friends who spent every winter holiday (and some others) flying down to bask in the sun and fun of Miami. We would take over my parents house with our suitcases and winter coats, spend all night running around South Beach, and finally end up gathered in the kitchen the next morning to share our stories from New York City with my parents as we picked over the seemingly unlimited food my mom, Roz, would have waiting.

As the years passed I eventually left New York, but my friends kept up their commute to Miami. We got new jobs and new apartments and new boyfriends, but our jet-set visits never changed. The annual Marks family Chanukah party raged on, and Rozs latkes continued their steady climb to legend status. One holiday, as we sat around the kitchen, my friend Ellen suddenly had a realization. What happens, she asked, when we all have our own families and we have to start cooking for ourselves? We were silent. And an idea was born.

At first it was a joke. We envisioned a long weekend, a syllabus, a holiday-by-holiday game plan designed to teach us everything from brisket to kasha and varnishkas, cabbage soup to nut cake. We laughed and moved on. But soon I realized that a Jewish Cooking Boot Camp was, in fact, an amazing idea. I thought of the millions of young people out there who were looking for guidance but were too intimidated to pick up a traditional cookbook, or who had grandmothers and mothers (like mine) who cooked without recipes, or who simply didnt have the time to learn in a traditional setting. I thought of my mom and how she defied the stereotype of a traditional Jewish cook. She was young and cool and had a career. She could just as easily navigate her way around a good Neimans sale as she could a noodle kugel. She made Jewish cooking less intimidating.

The truth is this: Its incredibly difficult to become a great chef, but its very simple to cook dinner for your family. My mom always says that if you have good recipes, youre two-thirds of the way there. And thats what were giving you.