THE INDEPENDENT: Britons have a reputation for their cosmopolitan culinary tastes, and rightly so. Many Indian dishes, albeit anglicised versions, have been assimilated into the national cuisine. Going for a Chinese or an Italian has long since passed from the exotic into the quotidian. Even supermarkets sell sushi. Yet Jewish cuisine, possibly the most varied in the world, has taken its time to catch on here in the UK with non-Jews. Chicken soup is seen as too simple for gastronomes, and dumplings and chopped liver are too stodgy or rich for the health-conscious. Now, though, its moment may have come.
As Jewish and Middle Eastern food writer Claudia Roden points out, Jewish cuisine has been influenced by every nook and cranny in which the Jewish diaspora has found itself. Her guide, The Book of Jewish Food, contains more than 1,000 recipes. "So many people who aren't Jewish tell me they cook all the time out of my book," she says this week, while preparing a New Year's dinner for 30. "It has everything from Italian to Indian and a huge variety of vegetable dishes."
Denise Phillips runs a Jewish cookery school in north London, and specialises in combining the kosher traditions of her 5,000-year-old religion with modern cooking techniques and trends. "Jewish cooking is the ultimate in fusion cooking," she says. "Jews have travelled all over the world fleeing persecution. What they've taken with them are their classic dishes, and they have merged them with whatever is indigenous to produce a cuisine that adheres to kosher."
The standard dishes often thought of as Jewish food, though narrow in their interpretation, are the favourites of the Ashkenazi communities who originated in the German Rhineland and have been migrating eastwards over the past thousand years, to settle in Hungary, Poland and Russia, and spreading as far afield as the United States, South Africa and Australia. Eighty per cent of the international Jewish community is Ashkenazi. New York, more than anywhere else, is thought of as home to the salt beef sandwich. Beyond the Bagel: Modern Jewish Dishes Are an Amazing Mix of Flavours and Cultures >>> By Sophie Morris | October 2, 2008
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