Thursday, February 3, 2011

Jewish cuisine – connecting history and nutrition

Jewish cuisine has a notorious reputation for being oily, salty and generally not very high on the healthy and nutritious scale. Fried onions, chicken fat, smoked salmon and shmultz herring - what are the chances of finding a single ingredient in these dishes that are remotely healthy?

I like to follow the general view that most things in this world have some form of goodness in them. However small it may be, however deep you have to dig – you will usually be able to find something positive. Take something like mould, where we hold our noses in contempt at the thought of it. Without it, we wouldn’t have all the different varieties of cheese with their unique flavours. Going along the lines of this philosophy, the time has come to up the ante on the traditional Jewish food we all have grown to love and pay kudos to the subtle nutritional benefits the cuisine has to offer.

Jewish cuisine. The truth is, there really isn’t one specific dish that is essentially “Jewish”, since our cuisine has been formed by the dietary laws of Kashrut and from the different countries Jews have wandered through over the years including Eastern Europe and the Middle East. There are however, several dishes that immediately spring to mind. Nothing shouts classic J.food like a hot stew of potatoes, onions, meat, barley and beans. Oh yes. It’s Cholent…

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