Jewish Food: The World at Table
Author: Matthew Goodman
For centuries Jewish communities around the world forged dynamic cuisines from ancient traditions combined with the bounties -- and limitations -- of their adopted homelands. In this important new collection, Matthew Goodman has assembled more than 170 recipes from twenty-nine countries, handed down through the generations and now preserved in this historic volume.
The heirloom offerings Goodman gathered range from such iconic specialties as bagels, kugel, and chopped liver to such favorites, mostly unknown in the United States, as Turkish borekas, flaky cheese-filled turnovers; chelou, an Iranian rice specialty; and shtritzlach, a sweet blueberry pastry unique to Toronto. Together the recipes celebrate the ingenuity of Jewish cooks around the world, in Mexican Baked Blintzes with Vegetables and Roasted Poblano Peppers, Syrian Bulgur Salad with Pomegranate Molasses, Moroccan Roast Chicken with Dried Fruit and Nuts, Iraqi Sweet-and-Sour Lamb with Eggplant and Peppers, Italian Baked Ricotta Pudding, and many other unexpected delights.
These dishes have been shaped by the histories of the communities from which they come. This book also features dozens of lively, engaging essays that present the history of Jewish food in all its richness and variety. The essays focus on ingredients, prepared dishes, and cultures.
Food is a repository of a community's history, and here, in its broad strokes, is the history of the Jews. The recipes and essays in this book provide a fascinating new perspective on Jewish food. More than a cookbook, Matthew Goodman's Jewish Food: The World at Table is a book to learn from, to cook with, and to pass on through the ages.
Publishers Weekly
Jewish food is almost too huge a topic to be covered exhaustively, but Goodman, the "Food Maven" columnist at the Forward, takes a decent stab at it by dividing his book into chapters on appetizers, soups, fish, eggs and dairy, poultry, meat, kugels, breads, and desserts and interspersing them with essays pertaining to peoples, ingredients and dishes. For example, in the chapter on fish, Goodman spotlights a Jewish community in Northern Morocco, where one woman saved the almost lost language Jaquetia (a combination of Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic and Berber). A recipe for Pescado en Colorado (fish in tomato sauce with peppers and paprika), popular in that region, follows. In the poultry chapter, a piece on pomegranates explores the contention that the fruit on the tree of knowledge was not an apple, but a pomegranate; readers then find a recipe for Chicken in Pomegranate Sauce with Walnuts and Figs. In the soup chapter, an essay on chicken soup looks at the dish's legendary healing properties and also at how variations developed in Greece, Turkey, Iraq, Italy and Yemen (instructions for making chicken soups from Eastern Europe, India and Iraq follow). Goodman deftly tackles his vast subject with these enlightening, engaging essays, which, coupled with the volume's 170 recipes, make for a fine tribute to Jewish cuisine. 2-color illus. throughout. Agent, Bill Clegg. (Mar. 1) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
New interesting textbook: More or The Global Economy and International Financing
Horsemen of the Esophagus: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream
Author: Jason Fagon
“To be up on stage, shoving food in your face, beats everyday existence for most people.” —David “Coondog” O’Karma, competitive eater
“Hungry” Charles Hardy. Ed “Cookie” Jarvis. Sonya “The Black Widow” Thomas. Joey “Jaws” Chestnut. Will such names one day be looked back upon as the pioneers of a new manifestation of the irrepressible American appetite for competition, money, fame, and self-transformation? They will if the promoters of the newly emerging sport of competitive eating have their way. In Horsemen of the Esophagus, Jason Fagone reports on the year he spent in the belly of this awakening beast.
Fagone’s trek takes him to 27 eating contests on two continents, from the World Grilled Cheese Eating Championship in Venice Beach, California, to Nagoya, Japan, where he pursues an interview with the legendary Takeru Kobayashi, perhaps the most prodigious eater in the world today, and to the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest at Coney Island, the sport’s annual grand finale, where Kobayashi has eaten more than 50 dogs in 12 minutes. Along the way, Fagone discovers an absurd, sometimes troubling subculture on the make, ready to bust out of its county fair and neighborhood-fat-guys niche and grab a juicy piece of the big-time television sports/Vegas spectacle jackpot.
Fagone meets promoters like George Shea, the P. T. Barnum of the International Federation of Competitive Eating (aka IFOCE, “the governing body of all stomach-centric sport”) and enters the lives of three “gurgitators”: David “Coondog” O’Karma, a fiftyish, six-twohouse painter from Ohio who’s “not ready to become invisible”; Bill “El Wingador” Simmons, the Philly Wing Bowl legend who is shooting for a fifth chicken-eating championship despite the fact that it may be killing him; and Tim “Eater X” Janus, a lean young Wall Street trader who takes a seriously scientific and athletic approach to the pursuit of ingesting mountains of food in record-breaking times. Each in his own way feels as if he has lost or not yet found something essential in life, and each is driven by the desperate hope that through consumption he may yet find redemption, that even in the junkiest of America’s junk culture, true nourishment might be found. After all, as it says on the official IFOCE seal: In Voro Veritas (In Gorging, Truth).
With forays into the gastrointestinal mechanics of the alimentary canal (“it’s what unbuilds the world to build you,” but, hey, you can skip that part if you like), the techniques and tricks of the experienced gurgitators (pouring a little club soda on top of high-carb foods makes them easier to swallow), and the historical roots of the competitive eating phenomenon, Horsemen of the Esophagus gives the French something else to dislike about America. And it gives the rest of us food for thought about the bizarre and unlikely places the American Dream can sometimes lead.
Table of Contents:
Prologue: The Passion of the Toast 1
Coondog O'Karma's Got Nothing
In Gorging, Truth 11
The Fifty-Dog Day 27
The Sweet Science 39
The Big Tomato and the Blank Slate 61
"Mistah Coondog-He Full" 81
The Big Man Fights Back
Wing Bowl 101
El Wingador 113
Big Country 121
No Dipping, No Dunking, No Desecrating 135
Four-X is a Love Letter 167
Sonya, Where's My Massage? 179
Who is This Mysterious Eater X?
Slaughterhouse-Forty 209
The Teeth of Jim Mullen 215
The Two-Thirds Rule 227
The Gurgitator Islands 243
Coney Island 263
Epilogue: Thank You, Blueberry Fairies 289
Acknowledgments 299
