Holiday menu of discovery

YOU can't cook just anything for Rosh Hashana. There are rules to follow, traditions to uphold. And I wasn't familiar with any of them: I grew up in Tornado Alley, in a Quaker boarding school in northern Iowa. But here I was, in Southern California, setting about to prepare a Rosh Hashana dinner for my Jewish boyfriend. What to cook became a theology lesson as well as a culinary one.

The food traditionally served for the Jewish New Year is highly symbolic, reflecting abundance, a sweet harvest and leadership. Celebrating Rosh Hashana is when "you become a community again, especially after the summer," said Joan Nathan, cookbook author and host of the PBS series "Jewish Cooking in America."

"People who keep kosher every day of the year don't always want to eat matzo ball soup," said a rabbi friend of mine. "You want to eat real food."

I was vastly relieved. Earlier that morning, when I'd asked my boyfriend, David, what his family had cooked for Rosh Hashana, he'd paused, said, "Apples dipped in honey, of course," and then uttered the dreaded word "brisket."

Now there's nothing wrong with a good brisket, but it was still pretty hot in Los Angeles, and the thought of braising a piece of beef for three hours was not, frankly, very appealing. I also wouldn't admit that I couldn't think of a theologically and culturally correct menu that didn't include brisket and matzo ball soup.

And brisket was a sensitive issue. David and I had gotten into a few rather heated debates about it the year before, when I had refused to believe that, as a former chef, he could nevertheless argue that the only way to make a good brisket was to use onion soup mix and ketchup. He would shrug, insisting that it tasted better anyway, and that would be that. No brisket.

Rethinking the menu

MAYBE it was because so many of the traditional dishes from Northern Europe -- tzimmes (a thick vegetable casserole), a roast chicken, the brisket -- seemed rather heavy in the lingering heat of early fall, I couldn't at first settle on a menu.

But after leafing through cookbooks and reveling at farmers market stalls filled with Medjool dates, fresh figs, pluots and dragon fruit, it dawned on me: Exotic fruits are a traditional Rosh Hashana food. Why not go Sephardic? Just because David's tradition was Ashkenazi didn't mean I couldn't veer from that.