Traditional Jewish Baking: Retro Recipes Your Grandma Would Make…If She Had A Mixer
by: Carine Goren
October 11, 2016, Page Street Publishing
240 pages
Review by E. Broderick
I have one special rolling pin that nobody besides for me is allowed to touch. When it goes missing, there is a mass panic and I cannot function. It’s a wooden french pin that works really wonderfully for rolling out everything from pie crust to hamentasch dough, but that’s not the reason it is so special to me. I love that pin because my grandmother taught me how to use it and every time I do, she is with me again. Carine Goren captures that nostalgia in her book Traditional Jewish Baking: Retro Recipes Your Grandma Would Make…If she Had a Mixer.
My own grandmother most definitely did not make most of the recipes in this book. For certain she was not using jello and she was not a big cheesecake fan either. Who had that back in Poland or Russia? She was more of a compote person. However, I distinctly recall the homemade checkerboard cake on the front cover of Traditional Jewish Baking appearing a few times in my childhood. It’s unclear who made it – turns out most of the women in my family in prior generations were not huge fans of spending time in the kitchen. A fact you’d never know from the way they took care to have the littles bake with them and the joy they took in feeding us.
Maybe that’s the point. They wanted to instill a memory and Goren is trying to keep that memory alive by bringing back some old school recipes that have fallen by the way side due to being too finicky or too old fashioned for modern tastes. The first recipe I tried was Flan. Goren’s instructions were flawless, and made the creation of this intimidating custard dessert fairly simple. I still managed to set off the smoke alarm and burn the caramel until I got the hang of it (turns out you really can’t turn your back on it for even a second) but I’d prefer not to dwell on that incident. Once I aired out the house and started again the results were wonderful.
There’s something special about baking and eating together as a family. I’m planning to try several of these classics, including the cheesecake. Who knows, maybe I’ll even whip out the copper jello molds. The nostalgia wafting off every page of Traditional Jewish Baking is more than worth the effort.