The Celebration Season

One of the best meals I ever had was just before Rosh Hashana (which this year begins Sunday evening) a year ago at a backyard barbecue while in production for a television series on American Jewish cooking. I was visiting Israel-born caterer Hava Volman and her husband, Greek-Israeli sculptor Artemis Schwebel, at their row house in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn.

The dinner with Volman and Schwebel was just one visit in more than 80 days of shooting for the series. For filming, I visited chefs, home cooks, markets, kosher butchers and many more places and people as we traveled the country exploring the culture and history of Jewish food in America.

This has been a year of cross-cultural culinary exploration for me. I learned in Miami, for example, that Cuban Jews originally from Poland make a holiday mandelbrot with guava; and I learned from Volman about the flavor explosions inspired by the food of Israel.

"This food is part of my history. It is part of what I am," Volman said. "When I came to America, I needed to use these ingredients to help find my own identity."

The fall holidays provide a wide spectrum of Jewish customs to explore--all linked with food. A few days before the fast of Yom Kippur (Sept. 29), for example, we visited Crown Heights in Brooklyn to watch the custom of kapparot. We saw members of ultra-orthodox families swinging a live fowl around a child's head three times, repeating the following words in Hebrew, "This fowl is my substitute, this is my surrogate, this is my atonement."

The ancient custom of kapparot replaces the Temple Yom Kippur sacrifice in which a goat, bearing the sins of the nations, was sent out into the wilderness to die. Like so many other traditions, kapparot came to replace a tradition lost with the destruction of the temple in AD 70. After the chickens were swung, they were slaughtered and given to the poor.

The fall holidays are an especially busy and rich time for Jews all over the world, coinciding with the ancient harvest time. In the ancient world, the fall harvest culminated in Sukkot (which starts the evening of Oct. 4), one of three pilgrimage periods when Jews brought fall crops to the temple in Jerusalem. One of these very important crops is the pomegranate, considered the new fruit of the fall in the Middle East and often served in huge bowls. Volman used its juice as a splash on her eggplant salad, a sine qua non in Israeli homes.