Cookbook author Paula Shoyer shares her theory on holiday cooking – and some delightful fall recipes.
By AMY SPIROSticky toffee pudding(photo credit: MICHAEL BENNETT KRESS)
Most families have holiday traditions that revolve around food. Paula Shoyer is no different: the cookbook author always makes cinnamon buns… for tashlich. “Not that we throw them in the river!” she quickly interjects. “Everybody comes to my house before or after tashlich,” the Rosh Hashana afternoon ceremony where Jews symbolically cast their sins in to water, she said. “We go to the creek down my block and I always make cinnamon buns, and then we take bread and we throw the bread in the creek.”For Shoyer, author of The Kosher Baker and The Holiday Kosher Baker, Rosh Hashana is about keeping family traditions, while Succot is all about experimenting in the kitchen.“I have a theory that for holidays like Rosh Hashana, Thanksgiving or Passover you should have traditional family dishes you serve every year, so your kids have something that you associate with that holiday,” she said. “For Rosh Hashana I like to do more traditional – it’ll be an interesting brisket, but I’ll do brisket, turkey, tzimmes, kasha varnishkes... I want to have traditional Jewish dishes that will help people remember their grandmother’s and great grandmother’s kitchen,” she said. “On Succot I tend to be a little bit more creative.”Her creativity is held back slightly, however, by the practical needs of the holiday.“On Succot there is only so much you can carry back and forth [to the succa],” she said. “On a typical Shabbat I’d make three or four vegetable side dishes, but I’m just not going to do that on Succot.”Instead, she said, she’ll make big one-pot dishes, that include protein, carbs and vegetables.“I tend to make things like veal osso bucco, chicken with barley, Moroccan stews,” she said. “I feel like you have to keep it simple otherwise it just takes so much time.”And though she’s known for her desserts and baking, Shoyer – an environmental lawyer turned French-trained pastry chef – has spent the past year working on an upcoming Passover cookbook featuring savory dishes, to be published in February 2015.“Everywhere I go on my tour, people will say ‘We love your dessert recipes, do you cook too?’” she recounts. So when her publisher called about writing a savory Passover cookbook, she jumped at the opportunity.Still, she said, there was a serious adjustment from writing about baking to cooking.
