Arthur Schwartz's Jewish Home Cooking: Yiddish Recipes Revisited Hardcover - 2008

From the publisher

ARTHUR SCHWARTZ is a Brooklyn-based food critic, writer, and media personality. New York Times Magazine has called him "a walking Google of food and restaurant knowledge." His five previously published cookbooks include the IACP award-winning and James Beard award-nominated Arthur Schwartz's New York City Food.

 THE AUTHOR SCOOP

If you had to boil your book's message down to one sentence, what would it be? Food is more than something to eat; it’s culture – history, politics, geography, agriculture, the human story and experience -- in a mouthful.What's been sitting in the back of your fridge for more than a year?Sicilian tomato extract – estratto in Italian, stratu in Sicilian – extra concentrated tomato paste. It gets better with age.What's the oddest ingredient or meal you've ever had?A meal at a famous food writer’s house: She served chopped liver and challah as an appetizer when half the guests had told her they didn’t eat liver, then pork roast for a main course, but no vegetables, no potatoes, just candied apple rings, then two chocolate desserts, neither of them particularly good. And she is a baking writer!!!!! Oh well, the challah was excellent.Any unusual hobbies?I am a compulsive collector of many things, among them copper cookware (new and antique), New York City restaurant postcards, postcards of Naples and Vesuvius, swizzle sticks, Italian ceramics (mainly new, but I have a few prized antique pieces), gouaches of Naples and Vesuvius, cookbooks (now concentrating on Italian, but naturally I have many, many Jewish, and many, many of other kinds – thousands), storage jars with ground glass stoppers (getting harder to find), Venetian glass candies, silver serving pieces, things made of shells and silver, East Anatolian carpets … I am embarrassed at how long this list is getting, but there’s more.What is your favorite sandwich?Pastrami on rye with mustard, at Katz’s deli on Houston St.

About the author