Introduction

When you invite someone to sit at your table, and you want to cook for them, you are inviting a person into your life.

—MAYA ANGELOU

WELCOME TO OUR COMMUNITY TABLE—a celebration of the remarkable community built at JCC Manhattan. We are the lucky three authors who embraced the challenge to create a cookbook celebrating the JCC. It is a cookbook that reflects how we cook today: conscientiously, healthily, creatively, locally, and internationally inspired. We are three New York women, all mothers, wives, and committed cooks: one art historian, one professional chef, one organic vegetable gardener; one traditional, one Conservative, one Reform Jew. We come from different backgrounds, yet share many passions and priorities, most important our love of food. As one of our daughters said, “You are always in your kitchen, or in each others’ kitchens talking, cooking, or tasting food.”

How true, and how fortunate we are. Whether we are poring over seed catalogues, discussing farmers’ markets in New York City or elsewhere, or helping with homework, we are most often found in the kitchen—the center of our homes. Each of us has always enjoyed cooking on her own, but cooking together for the last few years has been addictive. While we have always built mini-communities around our individual dining tables, together the three of us formed a micro-community. We started with different cooking styles and different palates, and emerged with those preferences intact, but with an added ability to compromise, and an eagerness to share.

Better yet, this food journey has turned us into the fastest of friends. For us, food is a way to nurture and build relationships. Our process of spending days, weeks, months together in the kitchen has made us tightly bonded. We’ve had a delicious time.

How did we choose the recipes to include in our book? We first looked at our community of JCC Manhattan. What are they cooking? If the wealth of languages one hears in the lobby—English, Hebrew, Korean, Spanish, and any number of others—is any indicator, the home kitchens of our members are extraordinarily diverse. We have relished all the culinary influences this community has shared with us. Beyond that, Jewish communities of both the present and the past have inspired us. Throughout Jewish history, Jewish cooks have adapted recipes and styles of cooking from their adopted homelands. As such, we have included classic recipes and our own updated versions of those dishes from Italy, Spain, France, Hungary, Morocco, the Middle East, India, and more. We did not set out to write a survey or a comprehensive chronicle of Jewish cooking. Rather, we wrote a book that reflects the great joy and diversity in cooking today—when exciting changes are happening in our food sources at the local level and every influence and ingredient is available to the chef on the web or around the corner.

Why this book now? Living in New York City, or really anywhere, life is fast-paced and can shift in a heartbeat. As home cooks, we passionately protect those precious times preparing meals for family and friends and the gatherings that ensue. Sure, the food is delicious, but the time spent together, creating our own “islands in time”—these are the moments that make us feel connected, engaged, alive, and thankful.

Food, family, and community have always been at the center of our lives. We hope this book will add to the bounty of your table and the richness of your lives. May your copy be filled with splatters and crumbs, and may you enjoy many new wonderful gatherings drawing inspiration from our book.

—Lisa, Katja, and Judy

The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community…

—MICHAEL POLLAN