Joan Nathan looks to the Shtetl in NYTimes
Happy almost Thanksgiving American friends. Here’s our friend Joan Nathan in the New York Times today, sending us off to the turkey in haymish style:
Photo credit: Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times
To Revive Jewish Dishes, Some Cooks Look to the Shtetl
GROWING up in Montreal, Noah Bernamoff had an issue with his mother’s kasha varnishkes.
“My mom’s had so much kasha with a noodle here and there,” he said. “I wanted to reverse the process to make it taste better.”
Two decades later, in his Brooklyn delicatessen, Mile End, he is reinventing this Eastern European comfort dish in what he thinks might be the tradition of his ancestors.
Clearly, his Lithuanian great-grandmother never purchased bow tie noodles at the supermarket, so in his commissary kitchen he pinches dough into butterfly shapes by hand. They will later be tossed with buckwheat groats, caramelized onions and mushrooms cooked in duck fat, with a confit of chicken gizzards gently stewed in duck fat.
For several decades now, many American Jews with a passion for food and a desire for broader horizons tended to explore Sephardic cooking, with its lush Mediterranean accents. Recently, though, cooks have been pouring their energy into old Ashkenazic dishes that had traveled so far they had lost much of their flavor.
Mr. Bernamoff is one such cook, who wants to preserve the past, but not necessarily the recent past. For some cooks, the search for authenticity begins with ingredients that taste as they might have in Eastern Europe. CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THE STORY
Enjoy the next few days. I’m going to be off in the Bahamas for a wedding. Oh yeah.
Also, the CBS story is now going to be the weekend after this one. Keep crossing those fingers.
Happy Thanksgiving
