BOOK REVIEW : From A to Zehug : Faye Levy’s International Jewish Cookbook, <i> By Faye Levy (Warner Books: $29.95; 364 pp.)</i>
What a magical book on Jewish food around the planet must be waiting somewhere in the country of unborn books! If it ever shows up, it will be as amazing as the Jewish Diaspora itself--and it will have to be the life work of some learned eccentric with the unlikely skills needed to fathom culinary/cultural links older than classical Greece or Rome, stretching in modern times from Brazil to Australia, Canada to Ethiopia to China.
While we sit around hoping for the right combination of catholic tastes and Talmudic thoroughness to coalesce in one author, there are lots of other interesting works wandering across the bookstore shelves. The books I most treasure in this field are those in which the writer’s individual voice happens to resonate with a distinctive facet of the Jewish experience--Mimi Sheraton’s evocation of the family table as the exact center of space and time in “From My Mother’s Kitchen,” the sense of honored memory that Joan Nathan conveys whenever she credits a fellow cook or points to the origin of a recipe in “The Jewish Holiday Kitchen.” The ones I can do without are the plastic-surgery manuals meant to make Jewish food presentable among food snobs. Somewhere in between are the diligent, carefully tested recipe collections like “Fay Levy’s International Jewish Cookbook.”
An “international Jewish” anthology of this kind surely would have been a simpler affair a generation or two ago, and also more insular. American Jews and Gentiles alike were then generally content to see “Jewish food” in terms of the fairly restricted range of influences brought to this country by a dominant immigrant group: Ashkenazic Jews from Germany and eastern Europe. The fantastic culinary melting pot of modern Israel has changed all that.
It is mostly thanks to Israel that many third- or fourth-generation American Jewish cooks have had some direct glimpses of the overall Middle Eastern cooking style--and, in a more fragmentary way, the cuisines of the different Sephardic communities that once were scattered about the Mediterranean and western Asia. Travel and new U.S. immigration patterns have played a role, too. Today backgrounds like Levy’s are perhaps unusual but not at all unheard of: some childhood exposure to a version of the Ashkenazic culinary traditions, many years’ firsthand acquaintance with Jewish life in Israel and France, and a decade’s immersion in the changing Southern California scene.
Reasonably enough, Levy has chosen to construct her book around what she knows. She does not try to collect fifth-hand recipes from every exotic Jewish outpost for the sake of completeness, but she does strongly emphasize the Middle Eastern and other Sephardic influences that she was introduced to in her years abroad. The holiday and Sabbath menus that open the book quickly set the tone: meals redolent of cumin, green coriander, hot chiles and olive oil alternate with others featuring chopped liver and matzo ball soup or eclectic menus drawing on several traditions at once.
What emerges most definitely throughout the collection is the large mosaic of different Sephardic influences in Israel, especially reflected in ways of handling vegetable combinations and braised meat dishes. Yemenite zehug , a fiery chile-garlic table sauce that is one of the author’s favorite accents, tells you a lot about the developing Israeli palate. So do dishes like the Lebanese-style baked onions with a rice and meat stuffing, Moroccan chicken stuffed with couscous, the ubiquitous “Israeli vegetable salad” that resembles fresh, sprightly cousins from Turkey to Spain, and the eggplant salad, “a favorite delicatessen item in Israel,” that has a foot in two cultures at once (the seasonings are Middle Eastern; the binding is a Western mayonnaise).
Despite the recurrent Mediterranean theme, many other approaches are represented, from Russian fish-and-cabbage piroshki , Romanian cornmeal kugel and Alsatian roast goose to such invincible American standbys as brisket pot-roasted with a cup of ketchup. Attention-grabbing “originality” with ingredients from different contexts is something that Levy mostly eschews; fresh ginger in a sweet-and-sour fish dish based on carpe a la juive is about as trendy as she cares to get.
The selection of about 270 recipes is generally planned to suit conventional American menu preferences, with heavy representation of desserts. I wouldn’t have minded seeing more in the way of soups, fish, and the “little dishes” served like tapas or appetizers. Some readers also will be less food-processor-happy than Levy when it comes to things like gefilte fish. But it should be pointed out that she is one cookbook author who knows how to whack recipes into the kind of manageable formulas that can easily be followed by cooks unfamiliar with the terrain.
If I expect this book to end up on my “useful” rather than “best-loved” shelf, it’s because a certain gift for pulling things together is missing. Levy never conveys the sense of family meals being not just sentimentally but ritually at the core of Jewish identity. What you are left with is an interesting, well-planned collection of hither-and-yon recipes for a kosher kitchen, rather than a book that lights up a cementing reality of Jewish life as preserved in some remarkable places and circumstances.
Still, this colorful and far-flung sampling of dishes deserves to make a pretty forceful impression for what it is rather than what it isn’t. Unfortunately, what it isn’t keeps intruding.
For instance, it would be nice if the publishers had sought to make it look like an adventurous exploration of modern Jewish culinary highways and byways. Instead they have plastered the pages with the sort of all-purpose spot art that book designers like to cannibalize from engravings in old cookbooks, chosen with so little attention to Jewishness that a table piled with oysters and crabs graces one suggested menu. Not one of the color photographs suggests anything more enduring or home-centered than a bunch of expensive props.
And the publishers might have followed through on other matters. Even if everything in the first two Passover dinners had not been entirely omitted from it, the index would be one of the most fragmentary and frustrating I have ever seen. Why do the people who produce cookbooks work with so little respect for the contents?
Production lapses or no, a work like this shows how fruitfully the field has grown since I bought my first dull, unenlightening manual of Jewish cooking 25 years ago. It may be that home cooking has not improved--gone are a lot of the women who used to make wonderful Hungarian or Polish or Lithuanian dishes purely by the knowledge in their hands, with no recipe--but the books are improving daily. “Faye Levy’s International Jewish Cookbook” would have been a dazzling and exotic eye-opener for my generation when we were learning to cook. Now we have the luxury of considering such a collection part of the Jewish culinary mainstream, and of cataloguing it as a good, solid, practical-minded effort that still leaves room for other attempts to convey the heart and soul of Jewish food.