Kosher by Design: Picture Perfect Food for the Holidays & Every Day | Susie Fishbein

Kosher by Design: Picture Perfect Food for the Holidays & Every Day | Susie Fishbein | excellent

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Kosher by Design: ...

	Kosher by Design: Picture Perfect Food for the Holidays & Every Day Susie Fishbein Mesorah Publications, Limited, 2003 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 23 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

My current favorite cookbook!

Wonderful recipes, great menu plans, and amazing photos! The bread machine challah recipe is the best I have ever tried.

This would be a thoughtful hostess, housewarming, or bridal shower gift as well.

excellent

one of the best cookbooks ever - great recipes that taste amazing and look pretty. all levels of difficulty. recomend to everyone.

Excellent cookbook, with some minor issues

I don't own this cookbook myself--my boyfriend's mother does, and I cook out of it sometimes when I'm at their home for Shabbat and I'm doing the cooking. I don't think it would be practical for day to day cooking for me at the moment: I'm a graduate student, and I don't think I would be able to eat my way through six servings of pomegranate chicken before it spoiled. However, for family cooking, I think this book is excellent and everything I've made out of it has been met with great enthusiasm.

Some of the recipes are more intensive than I would want to cook on a daily basis, but just as many of them come together very quickly--the artichoke chicken, for example, or the emerald soup, both of which seem very sophisticated once they're finished and plated for how absurdly easy they come together. I tend to prep everything before I start to cook something--that probably helps. Still, just yesterday I cooked a batch of challah and a three course meal out of this cookbook at the same time without too much difficultly and believe me, that's saying something.

I'd give it five stars, but I think the organization's a little odd and hinders the book's usefulness in several respects--they've got holiday menu ideas, for instance, scattered throughout the cookbook, with very little relation to where the actual recipes for the menu are, so I really wish they'd have just grouped the holiday menu ideas all together in the front rather than speckling them in at random (I can just see myself getting irritated when looking for a menu for Purim, for instance, and not remembering whether it's in with the pastry or in with the appetizers) Sometimes Fishbein recommends what holiday an item might be good for, or what side dishes might go well with an entree, or what wine might be complimentary, and sometimes she doesn't. I wish she did this more often; I'm an experienced enough cook that I usually have a good sense of what will compliment and what would clash, but I could see that being very helpful, and I'm not very experienced at matching wine to a meal, something I'm occasionally asked to do when I'm cooking for others.

Still, I think this cookbook is a very good addition to any family kitchen, kosher or not: the recipes are modern and tasty enough to satisfy any family, Jewish or kosher or not. It's one I'll definitely be interested in picking up for myself when I'm cooking for more than just myself on a regular basis.

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Not really one for us goyim

Reading Kosher By Design brings home a subtle distinction between Jewish food and Kosher food. The latter is the traditional food of Jews as was prepared in their ancestral homelands; the former is food prepared according to Jewish law. This is important, because Kosher By Design is about the latter. As a foodie who was raised Catholic and now identifies as atheist, this is going to color my perceptions of the book substantially.

Most of the recipes in this book are the sorts of things that can be easily found (and, if necessary, trivially modified) in mainstream cookbooks. To call them homey would be a bit of an understatement -- many of these recipes are the sorts of things that would be passed along on scraps of paper between friends. Many of them have a whiff of Sandra Lee about them, using some premade convenience foods here and there (as other reviews have pointed out, this occasionally compromises kosher observance). There is of course a decent amount of Jewish food in there -- there couldn't not be -- though most of it is American Ashkenazic, with a bit of a lack of diversity; even a few token Sephardic or Mizrachi dishes would be a good idea, especially given the author's emphasis on dish presentation. The layout of the book... well, it's not that it's unattractive, it just looks a bit dated, like it was published in 1983 and not 2003.

So, fundamentally, this cookbook has little to recommend it to anyone who doesn't keep a kosher kitchen -- with one big exception. It has very good coverage of all the important Jewish holidays, so for someone who wants to know more about Jewish observances, this is actually pretty good for that purpose. But to a more general audience... well, let's put it this way. If you happen not to have a diabetic in your family or circle of friends, you'll have little use for a diabetic cookbook, as virtually everything in there is a modification of something you can find elsewhere in an unmodified form. This book is much the same thing, which is not to say you might not find a few recipes you'd like despite not having a kosher kitchen, but it's definitely a look-before-buy proposition for a goyish buyer. It's not a bad book; it's just rather specialized.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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