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Variations on this dish are found throughout the Jewish Mediterranean. This is a robust dish best made with strong-tasting fish like fresh tuna or mackerel. Bitter lettuces, garlic and white wine bring out the hearty flavors of the fish while sweet fennel and fresh tomatoes add softening tones.

This one is for garlic lovers only.

This is likely quite old, as my grandmother has written “Spry” instead of “vegetable shortening” or “Crisco”. Spry was a brand of vegetable shortening that was popular from the 1930s - 1960s. I have struggled to interpret the recipe because it is not written in a particularly organized way and is very vague, written haphazardly on both sides. This, too, speaks of this scrap of paper being quite old. My grandmother was an excellent cook, and had an eye for order and organization and I suspect would have written this down differently later in life. Anyway, fruit pie is one of the few desserts I am fairly comfortable with, so in the instructions I will be drawing on my own experience making pies when there are gaps to fill.

Beverly is my mother. My mother was a good cook, but didn’t have much patience for the process nor passion for the result, so there are very few recipes that I have that are distinctly hers. This recipe is one of the rare few, and my grandmother evidently kept a copy in her recipe box. The relish was always on the table for Rosh Hashanah and Thanksgiving, although I myself have not made it lately. It’s a nice alternative to the widely-available weird squiggly canned cranberry sauce, but I will admit that I have a strange affection for the canned stuff, too.

I do not recognize the handwriting on this note, although it strikes me as the writing of someone whose first language was probably Yiddish, written in the Hebrew script who studied the Roman letterset from typewritten or printed text. This means it is most likely the handwriting of either my great Aunt Bessie, my great Aunt Ida (unlikely), or my great grandmother, for whom I am named. I say that Aunt Ida is unlikely because she was brain damaged at the age of 9, probably in a pogrom. My grandfather refused to talk about it. The use of “Spry” in place of the more generic term “vegetable shortening” is a clue that this piece of paper is quite old. Spry was a competitor to the Crisco brand that got its start in the 1930s and peaked in popularity in the 1940s and 1950s. I don’t think the brand survived to the end of the 1960s. My great grandmother died in 1955, so it could be hers.

You'll find variations on this recipe all over the internet. What distinguishes mine is the absence of ginger. I love the flavor of ginger, but sadly ginger does not love me, so I have to leave it out. This recipe is typically written for the grill, but it does equally well under the broiler, so I've written instructions for both, along with how to make the marinade safe for consumption. I sometimes make this for shavuos, because it's a good protein for a dairy meal.

My grandmother always served baked apples for dessert after Shabbas dinner. It's an extremely simple and healthy recipe that can be served hot or cold. We make one apple per person, but you can always make more to refridgerate them for Saturday! She never put any seasoning on the apples since they're quite yummy without any additions, but obviously things like cinnamon-sugar would go well over these. You can use any sort of apple - my grandmother always used red delicious since those were always the nicest apples in our area of the country.

This is an oldie but goodie... a very simple bar cookie recipe that also happens to be pareve and chocolate-free. I have a few friends who are sensitive to chocolate, and I've given a number of them this recipe. It brings back some warm childhood memories for me. The batter pretty much just covers the bottom of the pans - the baking soda makes it rise a bit when in the oven. Even so, the bars aren't all that thick. I get 25 bars out of a pan, so they're more like nibbles