Joan Nathan

It was years ago that Charles Fenyvesi first told me about this extraordinary layered honey torte. Jenny was deported to Auschwitz, where she died. Mr. Fenyvesi's mother experimented for twenty years until she came up with the following formula. Here is the recipe, a tribute to Hungarian Jewry and to Mr. Fenyvesi's late cousin Jenny.

Jewish chicken soup is usually served with thin egg noodles or with matzah balls. The zucchini is my, not MGM's addition.

This is definitely American — with dark brown sugar and pecans! Your guests will love it.

In my family we always inaugurate the Jewish New Year with our first apple dessert of the fall season. The tradition in Andra's home is to begin the year with a round challah and to end it with a cake topped with concentric circles of sliced apples. This dessert is very similar to Jewish apple cake, a Polish dessert that was very popular in church cookbooks throughout Maryland. I believe it is called Jewish because it is an oil-based rather than a butter-based cake. Andra's version is particularly easy, attractive, and delicious.

Taiglach (little pieces of fried dough dredged in honey) are eaten for celebratory occasions like Rosh Hashanah, Sukkot, Simchat Torah, Chanukah, Purim, weddings, and births. Ceciarchiata means "chickpeas" or "little bits" in Italian. This festive taiglach is similar in nature to the French croquembouche, though it's a crown, not a mountain. It is a spectacular centerpiece with its clusters of dough and nuts, and is totally addictive.

"One thing I cannot get out of my head" said Ben Moskovitz, owner of Star Bakery in Oak Park, Michigan. "Was the food better growing up in Czechoslovakia or were the people hungrier there? My mother made a honey cake for the holiday, and it was so delicious. Honey was too expensive for us, so my mother burned the sugar to make it brown. Here I use pure honey, but I still think my mother's cake was better and I know I am wrong. The taste of hers is still in my mouth." Mr. Moskovitz's European honey cake follows, with a few of my American additions. Other European Jewish bakers interviewed for this book also bake with white rye flour and cake flour when we would use all-purpose flour. I have included both choices.

This is one of those recipes that has pretty much disappeared in the United States, but those who remember it rave about it. A fluden, which comes from fladni or fladen, "flat cake" in German, is just that, a flat, double-or often multilayered flaky pastry filled with poppy seeds, apples and raisins, or cheese. It was originally common to southern Germany and Alsace-Lorraine, later spreading east to Hungary, Romania, and other Eastern European countries. Often flavored with honey, it was eaten in the fall at Rosh Hashanah or Sukkot and is symbolic, like strudel, of an abundant yield. I have tasted apple two-layered fluden at Jewish bakeries and restaurants in Paris, Budapest, Tel Aviv, and Vienna, sometimes made with a butter crust, sometimes with an oil-based one. But only in Paris have I tasted the delicious fig rendition, a French fig bar, from Finkelsztajn's Bakery. (Figs, my father used to tell me, were often eaten in Germany as the new fruit on the second day of Rosh Hashanah.) This recipe is a perfect example of the constant flux of Jewish foods. Today, with the huge population of Tunisian Jews in Paris, it is no wonder that the Finkelsztajn family spike their fig filling with bou'ha, a Jewish Tunisian fig liqueur used for kiddush, the blessing over the wine on the Sabbath. You can, of course, use kirsch or any other fruit liqueur instead.

This Parisian version of a Bialystoker tsibele (onion) pletzel, also called onion zemmel, onion pampalik, or onion board, is very similar to an Italian focaccia. Try this flat bread sprinkled with rosemary, and you will see how very close it is.

A Greek man answered an ad we ran in The New York Times for a baker. He said he baked Lindy's cheesecakes. "You get me the ingredients I want—pure cream cheese, eggs, and heavy cream and I'll make you Lindy's cheesecake." He was a gem. He baked Lindy's cheesecake for our restaurant. Miriam Perlof, founder, the Country Club Restaurant and Pastry Diner, Philadelphia

This is a colorful variation on the classic potato latke.

Sephardic Jews from Turkey, Greece, Morocco, and other countries of the Mediterranean region say seven special blessings over seven different symbolic foods at their Rosh Hashanah dinner. Five of these blessings are over vegetables — apples (candied or dipped in sugar or honey), leeks, beet greens or spinach, dates, and zucchini or squash. These blessings symbolize their hopes for the New Year. Many of these Jews trace their ancestors back to Spain, which is called Sepharad in the Bible. Over the centuries, the Sephardic Jews took advantage of the abundance of vegetables available in the Mediterranean countries, often throughout the year. Among these vegetables are sweet potatoes and squash, great favorites of my family. The special blessing you can say over your sweet potatoes and squash at the beginning of your Rosh Hashanah dinner goes like this: Yehi ratzon mi-le-faneha Adonai Eloheinu ve-lo-hei avoteinu she-tik-rah ro-a gezar dinenu ve-yi-karehu lefa-neha za-hee-yo-teinu. May it be thy will, Lord our God and God of our fathers, that you should tear up any evil decree and let only our merits be read before You.

If you like light, airy matzah balls, you'll like this recipe. It's my son David's favorite, especially when his grandmother makes the matzah balls.

This is an updated version of the chremslach passed down in my own family. I have never had a seder without it. A heavier version stuffed with cranberries appeared in many early American Jewish cookbooks as Kentucky grimslech.

The first American Jewish recipe I found for fricassee, a kind of ragout — usually made with chicken, browned lightly with onions in fat and then simmered in the drippings — came from a section on Jewish recipes in Jennie June's American Cookery Book of 1866. Jennie June Croley was one of the first American newspaper women and founder of the Sorosis Club. In her only cookbook she included a chapter on Jewish "receipts," which probably came to her from her Jewish friend, Genie H. Rosenfeld. "These are all original and reliable, -- the contribution of a superior Jewish housekeeper in New York," she wrote. Mrs. Rosenfeld was the wife of the dramatist, Sydney Rosenfeld, who was also the first editor of Puck. This nineteenth-century recipe cooks well today. The slow sautéing of the onions along with the nutmeg, mace, and thyme enhances the taste of the chicken. Serve it with rice.

When I first heard about Ari Weinzweig's delicatessen in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I couldn't believe it. A deli in the home of my alma mater. It's not really a deli but more of an international food emporium like New York's Zabar's with a definite Jewish touch. Mr. Weinzweig, a drop-out Ph.D. candidate, has taken an academic and appetizing interest in updating Jewish recipes like mushroom and barley soup, going back in history to the nineteenth-century Eastern European version similar to that served at New York's Second Avenue Deli.