New Haven cook takes on Claudia Roden’s “Book of Jewish Food”
By Cindy Mindell

Last summer, Rebecca Koenigsberg saw “Julie & Julia,” a film based on the real-life story of Julie Powell, a New Yorker who cooks her way through Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” in a year’s time and documents her progress online.

The psychotherapist and passionate cook decided to do the same with “The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York” by Claudia Roden.
Never mind that the book contains some 800 recipes or that the author was inducted into the Cookbook Hall of Fame earlier this month for her 1972 landmark, “A Book of Middle Eastern Food.” “The Book of Jewish Food” is much more than a culinary how-to, Koenigsberg says. Rather, it’s a 688-page cultural, anthropological history and travelog of the Jewish Diaspora, told through recipes from its many cuisines – plenty of material to keep Koenigsberg’s interest.
A New Haven native, Koenigsberg grew up in Wallingford on traditional Ashkenazi-Jewish cooking. After seven years in Israel, she returned to the U.S. to earn a masters degree in social work at UConn, and has lived in New Haven since 1986, where she works as a psychotherapist at Yale Psychiatric Hospital.
Koenigsberg prepares a few recipes a week for a supportive and sometimes brutally honest test audience comprised of a group of friends and her husband and three children. She has been documenting her progress in an online blog on OpenSalon.com, including tasters’ comments on each dish.
“Cooking these recipes makes you think a lot about your own family,” she says. “I think about my great-grandmother making all these recipes by hand, while I have a food processor. Ingredients we use that are already prepared, she had to buy. For example, my mother told me that on Pesach there was no kosher-for-Passover vinegar so she had to make her own sour liquid. This project makes me ask my mother certain kinds of questions that I’d never asked before. When people respond to my blog, they tell me about their own relatives, and when I serve certain dishes to friends, they tell me family stories.”
Koenigsberg’s two younger children, aged 7 and 9, are always vying to be included in her blog. “They’ll say, ‘Is this a Roden recipe?’ she says. “I try to teach them a little about the food and its history. My husband is a wonderful guy but he hates when simple food is made into something too fancy,” Koenigsberg says. “His comments are always sardonic; he’ll say, ‘Who ever used a microplane grater in the shtetl?’ He likes authentic recipes and will run to his sources to check, like Joan Nathan, Jennie Grossinger, Mama Leah. He’s suspicious of Roden on Ashkenazi foods.”
Indeed, the Cairo-born Roden’s strong suit is reflected in the book’s one-third Ashkenazi to two-thirds Sephardic and Middle Eastern ratio. Koenigsberg has spent the last nine months working through the Ashkenazi section, to mixed reviews from her tasters and is happy to have reached the “mercifully very long” Ashkenazi dessert section. An avid baker, she is now making Shabbat kiddush treats for her fellow Westville Synagogue congregants.
Some recipe ingredients have been unavailable locally or only available seasonally, like sorrel for Schav. Koenigsberg reached that recipe in November; sorrel was only available in the spring, so she had to postpone making the cold soup. Some ingredients are unavailable even online, among them calves’ feet and goose. “If I really make an effort and can’t get something, I feel I’m off the hook,” she says.
One of her most unusual encounters was with saltpeter, a chemical compound used in fertilizer and as a food preservative, and once given to British sailors with the belief that it would suppress their libido. In her recipe for brisket, Roden calls for one teaspoon of the substance; Koenigsberg could only find a one-pound package on Amazon.com. “It came with a label reading, ‘For wives who don’t want their husbands to get involved with other women,'” she recalls. “After using my one teaspoon, since I’m not concerned about my husband, I brought the rest to work and put on the free-stuff shelf. It sat there untouched for months. Recently, I noticed it was gone.”
Among the hit recipes so far are Hungarian goulash and many of the pre-19th century Alsatian recipes, which Roden highlights in the Ashkenazi section as a now-lost fusion of Eastern European and Middle Eastern cuisines. “Roden writes that, in every country where the two cuisines met, one won out and it was usually Ashkenazi,” Koenigsberg says. (Thumbs-down recipes include “anything with liver” and the too-numerous carp recipes.)
Koenigsberg predicts that she will have completed her culinary adventure around November 2011. She admits to being “a little anxious” about the Sephardi section of the book, hailing from an Ashkenazi background, but has already recruited her Middle Eastern friends as advisors. Toward the end of her journey, she may contact Roden’s publisher and try to meet the author.
Follow Koenigsberg’s progress and insights on www.opensalon.com.

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