Acknowledgments

This book, like every good recipe, is the product of many hands. If you count the contributions made by colleagues from around the world, friends, family members, even ancestors—and you should—you’ll understand that it’s truly impossible to properly acknowledge everyone to whom we owe a debt.

To create and animate the original Tablet project, we worked with the dreamiest of dream teams: Gabriella Gershenson (project editor), Victoria Granof (food stylist), Noah Fecks (photographer), and Randi Brookman Harris (prop stylist). That process would never have been the success it was had it not also been for Emma Davis, Niki Russ Federman and Josh Russ Tupper of Russ & Daughters, Parker Feierbach, Elissa Goldstein, Echo Hopkins, Alex Puciarelli, Krystal Rack, Jen Snow, Rachael Weiner, and the hospitality of Noho Studios. We also owe debts to Einat Admony, Stacey Harwood-Lehman, Peter Shelsky, Adeena Sussman, and the late Gil Marks.

We are also grateful to the professional balaboostas who developed the bulk of the recipes for this epic compilation, and brought their iconic flavors to life: Mira Evnine, Anna Gershenson, Rebecca Flint Marx, Olga Massov, and Molly Yeh. A special thanks to Liza Chafiian and Jasmine BenJehuda for sharing their family recipe for Persian rice.

Without Mem Bernstein, Arthur Fried, and Morton Landowne, there would be no Tablet at all—and our lives in particular would be substantially less ambitious and less colorful.

Joan Nathan is our Jewish fairy godmother—and we know exactly how lucky that makes us. We owe Jin Auh at the Wylie Agency piles of lox for the rest of her life.

In Lia Ronnen, Artisan’s publisher, we found a person so committed to making smart and beautiful things that to call her kindred almost feels egotistical—and, in turn, Lia put us in the skilled and inspired hands of Judy Pray and the rest of the team at Artisan. That we found a home with them in the first place is because of Michelle Ishay-Cohen—my chosen family, and the woman at whose table I’ve literally been eating for decades—who helped us make this book the object of enlightenment and joy that we hope it is for you.

Finally, a note about authorship. The ideas here—from the largest conceptual ones to the smallest details—stem directly from the loud, teeming, at times angry but always loving kitchen that is Tablet. I hope we all live to 120 together.

Editor in chief: Alana Newhouse

Executive editor: Wayne Hoffman

Deputy editor: Stephanie Butnick

Editor at large: Mark Oppenheimer

Senior editor: Matthew Fishbane

Scroll editor: Jacob Siegel

Senior writers: Liel Leibovitz, Yair Rosenberg

Director of business development: Gabriel Sanders

Art director: Esther Werdiger

Copy editor: Larry Greenberg

Contributing writers: Marjorie Ingall, Armin Rosen

Literary editor: David Samuels

Critic at large: Paul Berman

Unorthodox podcast production: Josh Kross, Shira Telushkin, Noah Levinson, Sophia Steinert-Evoy