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Midterm Assignment - Christina Rose

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  • 1Artisanal gefilte fish. Slow-fermented bagels. Organic chopped liver. Sustainable schmaltz.

    These arent punch lines to a fresh crop of Jewish jokes. They are real foods that recently arrived on New York Citys food scene. And they are proof of a sudden and strong movement among young cooks, mostly Jewish-Americans, to embrace and redeem the foods of their forebears. Thats why, at this moment in 21st-century New York, the cutting edge of cuisine is the beet-heavy, cabbage-friendly, herring-loving diet of 19th-century Jews in Eastern Europe.

    It turns out that our ancestors knew what they were doing, said Jeffrey Yoskowitz, an owner of Gefilteria, a company that makes unorthodox versions of gefilte fish and is branch-ing out into slow-brined pickles and strudel. The recipes and techniques are almost gone, and we have to capture the knowledge before its lost.

    The wave that began with Gefilteria, the Mile End del-is, Shelskys of Brooklyn and Kutshers Tribeca has suddenly crested, with three places opening in the last

    month. Black Seed Bagels, a brick-oven bakery from the owners of Mile End, features toppings like horseradish cream cheese, beet-cured salmon and watermelon radishes. Baz Bagel & Restaurant, a cheerful Minsk-to-Miami venture, offers bread pudding made from babka, lemon-scented blintzes and hand-rolled pumpernickel-everything bagels. And Russ & Daughters Cafe serves the stores legendary smoked fish and herring alongside remixed classics like whitefish chowder and halvah ice cream with salted caramel.

    The chefs and artisans behind these new enterprises are embracing the quickly disappearing foods of their grandpar-ents blintzes and babka, kasha and knishes and jolting them back to strength with an infusion of modern culinary ideas. Those foods became punch lines in the 1970s, when the health consequences of a steady diet of meat, salt, bread and cream became apparent, and when strong, smelly foods like garlic dill pickles and herring with raw onion seemed dated, even embarrassing. Food rejection was part of the assimilation process, said Devra Ferst, editor of the food blog The Jew & The Carrot.

    But now, as the values of the food revolution (fresh, local, sustainable, seasonal) have inspired a whole generation of young Jewish-Americans, they have found ways to bring the two camps together. Kosher food didnt reflect our generation or our tastes, said Mr. Yoskowitz; he and his partner, Liz Alpern, are 29. And modern food didnt reflect our history.

    There are new artisanal Jewish delis in Atlanta (The General Muir), Los Angeles (Wexlers Deli), Seattle (Stopskys) and

    San Francisco, the West Coast epicenter, where Shorty Goldsteins and Wise Sons and the Old World

    Food Truck compete not only in storefronts but also on the streets.

    Their goal is preservation, closely fol-lowed by improvisation. They are learn-ing to smoke fish, ferment pickles and

    bake pumpernickel bread in the ways their ancestors did. They are hold-

    ing pop-up Sabbath dinners on Friday nights, where the chal-

    lah might be swirled with

    Everything New Is Old Again: The New Golden Age of Jewish-American Deli FoodBy Julia MoskinMay 27, 2014

  • 2 3

    Chronogram: Food Everything New Is Old Again

    Cheddar or drizzled with harissa oil. And in kitchens and social media, they are building a hive of relationships, skills and ideas that can be described as a virtual shtetl.

    Noah Arenstein, a part-time lawyer, started Scharf & Zoyer (Yiddish for sharp and sour) to make crazed versions of deli sandwiches, like fried chicken skin and dill crme frache between slices of noodle kugel and a Korean lox spread of cream cheese, lox, gochujang and scallions. When he was looking for an aromatic bread for a tuna salad sandwich, he was directed to Breads Bakery in the Flatiron district, where the baker Uri Scheft helped engineer an everything croissant with the crunchy, aromatic exterior of an everything bagel (Mr. Scheft also makes the best chocolate babka in Manhattan, and other Ashkenazi treats.)

    The Gefilteria team crossed paths with Theo Peck, who grew up working at Ratners, his familys restaurant on the Lower East Side, and had just opened Pecks, a cafe near his home in Brooklyn. We were looking for someone to use our beet kvass, said Ms. Alpern, referring to a fizzy brew that gave traditional borscht its sweet-sour tang when vinegar was unknown in cold climates. And he was looking for a really good pickle. The Gefilteria duo are branching out into slow-brined pickles and kombucha, using the cool basement space at Pecks as their lab.

    But these cooks and bakers have to tread carefully. It has to look familiar and taste familiar and smell familiar, but also taste delicious, Mr. Peck said.

    Ratners closed in 2004, and is still mourned by many. At Pecks, he makes pickled-beet borscht (with a shot of kvass), house-cured tongue and a tall, golden version of Ratners legendary corn muffins: crunchy, buttery and just a bit gritty. His coarse, rich, Jewish-style chopped liver is served on an onion roll from Orwashers on the Upper East Side (though he hopes someday to recreate the famous onion roll from Rat-ners). But because Mr. Peck is also a trained chef who has worked at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, he also makes a smooth

    chicken-liver terrine with classic French charcuterie spices, topped with a ver-jus gele. They are both part of who I am, he said. How could I ever choose between them?

    The current owners of the original Russ & Daugh-ters, Josh Russ Tupper and Niki Russ Federman, are great-grandchildren of the original Joel Russ, who

    sold herring by the piece on the Lower East Side. They feel a stronger pull of tradition, probably because their family business is robust after 100 years; the two have opened Russ & Daughters Cafe on Orchard Street (where their great-grandfathers pushcart was stationed) a few blocks from the store on East Houston Street. The cafe has the spick-and-span air that makes the store so beloved, but also nudges the boundaries of tradition by serving smoked whitefish chowder with espelette pepper, house-made gin-ger soda with lavender and lime, and matzo roasted with butter and salt.

    We are always conscious that we are taking care of a piece of history Ms. Federman said. But we cant run only on nostalgia.

    In 1914, when the shop opened, Russ & Daughters was one of many such storefronts, but the bagel, the all-beef hot dog and the pastrami sandwich were not yet symbols of the city. At that time, more Jews observed kosher laws (separating milk and meat and eschewing pork and shellfish, among other prohibitions and directives) and different enterprises arose from the different parts of the Jewish diet. The delicatessen grew out of the meat tradition, selling pastrami, beef salami and beef hot dogs (but not sour cream or butter, and there was no cheese on the sandwiches). In dairy restaurants like Ratners, blintzes, potato latkes and farmer cheese were the staples. Appetizing stores like Russ & Daughters and Murrays Sturgeon Shop sold mainly fish, which can be eaten with either dairy or meat.

    And then there were the bakeries.

    Thousands of Jews who settled in New York had lived for generations in the area that eventually became Austria, Hungary, southern Germany, Lithuania, Russia, Poland, Ukraine and Georgia. They transferred those rich baking traditions intact, bringing sour breads, yeast-raised coffee cakes, delicate strudels, butter cookies and all manner of bread rolls including bialys and bagels. Many a New York bagel today is a puffy, sweet monstrosity, made like other industrial breads; quick-risen (instead of slow-fermented), stamped out of molds (instead of hand-rolled), steamed (instead of boiled) and then misted with sugar syrups before baking to achieve an appetizing shine.

    But at last, there are signs of hope. Some older bakeries, like Orwashers and Kossars Bialys, are under new man-

    agement that is returning to less commercial, better-tasting breads. Russ & Daughters tracked down a Jewish baker in Springfield, Mass., who uses an 80-year-old starter from his familys long-closed bakery in the Bronx. Now hes back in New York and baking seriously old-school breads like schissel corn rye, shot through with rich ores of caraway seeds, and an old-fashioned dark pumpernickel baked in-side a thin wrapper of light dough to protect the crust from over-baking.

    Melissa Weller, who was the bread baker at Per Se, Robertas and Babbo, struck out on her own last summer as a bagel specialist at Smorgasburg, the weekly food festival where many food entrepreneurs get their start. She was immedi-ately overwhelmed by demand. These people were literally starved for bagels, she said.

    Ms. Weller is neither Jewish nor a New Yorker, but has made it her mission to create the perfect 21st-century bagel: slow-risen, water-boiled and slow-baked. Her first brilliant hack was putting the onions inside the onion bagel, not on the crust, where they invariably burn and turn bitter. Her latest version involves dehydrating then rehydrating fresh onions and leeks that perfume the dough. (It will eventually appear at a bakery to be opened by the partners in Major Food Group.)

    Black Seeds hand-rolled wood-fired bagels generated lines blocks long when the bakery opened two weeks ago, and

    those arent even New York bagels, but Montreal bagels, a thinner style with fantastically generous coatings of sesame or poppy seeds.

    The toppings reflect the pioneering Mile End style: close to Ashkenazi tradition, but lighter and brighter. Fatty salmon is cured in-house with grated beets and salt, local Bens Cream Cheese blended with horseradish, and a crisp disk of watermelon radish on top provides the perfect crunch.

    Laura Silver, the Brooklyn-born author of Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food, said knishes arrived here via Knyszyn, a town outside the now-Polish city of Bialystok, where Jews made up more than half the population before World War II. Old-country knishes are fat baked dough rounds, stuffed with potatoes or kasha. Today, many young New Yorkers know only the square, flat, deep-fried knish that traditionalists abhor.

    I see myself a defender of all knishes, Ms. Silver said, noting that handmade knishes are being served at many updated Jewish delis. I believe we are entering a golden age, where the round and square can coexist.

    find featued recipes at nyt cooking: Smoked Whitefish Salad With Crme Frache and Capers| Scallion Cream Cheese, Bagel Shop Style | Chocolate Babka Bread Pudding

    We are always conscious that we are taking

    care of a piece of history...But we cant run only on nostalgia.

    BELOW: Theo Peck in his cafe Peck, located in Brooklyn