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Oct/093
Oct/093
Food for the Soul: Traditional Jewish Wisdom for Healthy Eating
Review
“Chana Rubin provides kosher and sound dietary advice in bite-size tasty nuggets. This book gives excellent science-based nutritional counsel in a way that improves your health while enriching your soul. I heartily recommend it.” –Meir Stampfer, MD, Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health
Food for the Soul is a most welcome compilation of thoughtful nutrition, dietary information and epresentative recipes geared owards a Jewish …
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11:43 pm on October 27th, 2009
The first part of this book, which is not exactly a cookbook, discusses food and the Jewish philosophy as related to eating. Then there is a long discussion of healthy diet (One of my non-Jewish friends out and out told me she thought traditional Jewish cuisine was probably one of the most unhealthy she’d ever run across. I thought about pot-roasted brisket or noodle kugel, laden with butter and eggs, and well, I didn’t exactly jump up and protest.)
So who is this book directed to? I suppose it is aimed at anyone eating a glatt-kosher diet with traditional recipes from Bubbe (grandma) and who hasn’t found a way to update these traditional foods.
Jewish cooking has kind of a split personality these days; the Eastern European foods come out of a diet of deprivation in a cold climate (or as a friend puts it, where cabbage boiled in duck fat is considered a green, leafy vegetable.) But more recently, Jewish cookbooks have added the Mediterranean/Middle Eastern foods and healthier foods of the Sephardic Jews, who eat chick peas, cous-cous, lentils, and more vegetables in general. The biggest culprits of fat-laden dishes may be pareve (non-meat or milk) and “milchig” or dairy-based dishes. When creating a menu, the foods are either meat-containing and neutral, or dairy-containing and neutral, which means no meat lasagna with cheese or pizza-with-pepperoni, by the way.
Some updated recipes in the back include Sephardic red lentil soup (rather like Turkish red lentil soup) and matzoh brei with asparagus (fried soaked flat cracker-like bread; matzoh can be used as a pasta substitute during Passover.) Also a matzoh lasagna. Hints are given on how to reduce fats and salt in traditional foods.
This is a thoughtful book, probably aimed at those who live in a community where traditional Kosher cooking rules supreme and where change must be weighed against a strong tradition going back for hundreds of years.
12:41 am on October 28th, 2009
This information-packed, soft-cover book provides nutrition basics and over 100 of Rubin’s personal favorite recipes, while addressing nutrition and health from a Jewish perspective. No photographs or illustrations here, but much food for thought.
Selected chapters open with quotations from the likes of Kook, the late Lubavitcher Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, the Bible or Rashi, with the occasional Chinese proverb thrown in. The 17 chapters have names like “Diet and Health,” “Eating for Optimum Health,” “Fat Facts” and “Childhood Obesity,” with sub-headings, such as “Health in the Jewish tradition,” “Food as a vehicle to holiness,” “A healthy relationship with food,” “Lifestyle changes that can help you lose weight,” “Using the discipline of kashrut” and more.
Rubin extols the advantages of a colorful diet, providing a food palette that details the benefits of each hue. Many chapters end with a succinct “bottom line” summary that I chose to read first, for a quick preview of what the chapter holds and her halakhic observations are fascinating, even to the non-observant reader.
A recipe and menu section at the back of the book provide practical, easy-to-implement suggestions and some recipes offer sophisticated new twists to old favorites, like Doron’s Banana Walnut Cupcakes contributed by chef Doron Degen who trained in Canada and now resides in Beersheba. His secret is to gently sauté the mashed bananas with cinnamon, unsweetened cocoa and some brown sugar before adding them to the batter.
The only problem I had with the book was in locating recipes. I tried the recipe for granola – I’ll never use packaged again – but had difficulty finding it a second time, because I didn’t remember that, in the index, it’s listed under “C” – for Chana’s Granola.
The aptly named “Food for the Soul,” if properly digested, is a great hors d’oeuvre, before choosing recipes for your family from Rubin’s or other cookbooks.
By Gilah Kahn-Hoffman, The Jerusalem Report, September 15, 2008
2:15 am on October 28th, 2009
Although not Jewish, I found this cookbook to be interesting and educational in covering many aspects of health and nutrition. The plus, for me, is the great recipes and the section on planning ahead. I live in a vacation area and have many drop-in guests. Not only can I be prepared but am able to offer foods healthier and more tasty than my guests have been eating in their travels to be here and still have time to visit.