The folks at Tablet Magazine have created an interactive list of Jewish foods that is as addictive as salty pickles, chewy macaroons, or (insert your own guilty nosh). It’s not a roster of the most popular Jewish foods, or the healthiest, or the tastiest. Some are pretty obscure (making their last appearance on Bubbe’s bubbe’s table). Instead they aimed to identify foods with the deepest Jewish significance. Pull up a chair to this table and see how they fared!
According to Tablet, these foods were generated by a people that became many peoples, “a tribe at once bound together by a shared tradition and separated by radically different host countries, cultures, politics, and influences.”
Instead of organizing the dishes chronologically or by originating region, the dishes are presented as they exist in reality: all on the same table. And the photo of that spread wasn’t Photoshopped, instead all 100 dishes were assembled and photographed in one day.
So spin the table (link here), click on each plate, and enjoy the blurbs that accompany each dish. You can also view the dishes in a simple alphabetical list or by contributor. In addition to Tablet writers and editors, contributors include leading chefs and food writers—Ruth Reichl, Eric Ripert, Joan Nathan, Michael Solomonov, Dan Barber, Gail Simmons, Yotam Ottolenghi, Tom Colicchio, Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs, to name just a few.
Tablet is a daily online magazine of Jewish news, ideas, and culture, a project of the not-for-profit Nextbook Inc.
If you follow our contributor Miriam Kresh (here), she writes up a healthy dose of recipes for Green Prophets on how to prepare all sorts of Jewish foods, and Muslim food and Christian food… everyone’s food, inspired by the Middle East.
With that, there’s only one thing left to say: Enjoy! (Add let us know your favorite!)
