Jewish Cuisine Quotes

I could live on challah bread, the Jewish kosher bread, quite happily.

I'm a cultural Jew, I was raised with it, so I'm still into it, like gefilte fish with kugel.

Judaism is not just a religion but a people, and the food and customs of one part of the people is connected to the other part of the people. They are part of a larger story.

I like my fried chicken, my pizza, my peaches and my gefilte fish.

Everything my mother made had to cook for 80 hours, and when she made matzoh balls she didn't know fluffy. Everything sank.

Heaven is a bowl of creamed herring and onions. Ditto whitefish salad. But the real object of my desire for all things gilled is gefilte fish.

My maternal grandmother, a.k.a. Nanny, wasn't much of a cook. As a kid I remember her making only a handful of things, mostly dishes with Ashkenazi Jewish origins like kasha and bowties (which, for the record, only my dad liked).

A Jewish food is one that is almost sanctified, either by its repeated use or use within the holidays or rituals. So food that may have not been Jewish at one point can become Jewish within the cultural context.

The knish is a classic example of peasant food evolving into comfort food and even sophisticated fare.

The one thing my mother did make was what was known at the time as lox and onions and eggs. Now, no one makes it with lox; they make it with nova. That was my mother's specialty, which she cooked on New Year's Day for the Rose Bowl games, which we had a party for every year. It took her about an hour to make scrambled eggs.

If anything betrays my Ashkenazi Jewish heritage - besides the Casper-the-friendly-ghost-like skin tone - it's my love of fishy fish.

Throughout history, particularly in the last 2,000 years, Jews have been key in adapting local foods to Jewish sensibilities and dietary laws and then spreading them.

Romanian-Yiddish cooking has killed more Jews than Hitler

Anytime someone orders a pastrami sandwich on white bread, somewhere a Jew dies.

Every year, my father comes by and samples the chremslach - like quality control - and tells me how they taste just like his mother's.

Anytime a person goes into a delicatessen and orders a pastrami on white bread, somewhere a Jew dies.

Of course I love cooking Eastern European food because I'm a Jew, but I also love making roast chicken. I love making Hungarian goulash. There are a lot of egg noodles in my cooking.

I grew up in a typical Ashkenazi household. My bubbe actually lived with us. She'd make us the traditional colorless, beige, heavy foods: chicken soup, kreplach, gefilte fish, tzimmes.

I'm not the bake-sale-mom type - though once in a while, I'll make challah French toast for my sons.

It's some chopped liver. That's Jewish soul food.

The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup.

When I was a little kid, it was not uncommon for a cousin or an uncle, before they would even say 'Hello,' to gush, 'You know, your mother's brisket is just incredible; it's so good.' That was an inspiration for creating a love song in that well-worn terrain of the relationship between a Jewish boy and his mother.

My parents genuinely loved Vienna, and in later years I learned from them why the city exerted a powerful hold on them and other Jews. My parents loved the dialect of Vienna, its cultural sophistication, and artistic values.

Sephardic Jews were always known as good cooks.

I've liked being Jewish in America - there's a secular version of Jewishness there that's more about bagels and jokes than going to synagogues.