Can you come over and make me breakfast? Please?
Ethnic cooking of all sorts can run the gamut from sublime to disgusting. It all depends on what they have to work with. Just stay away from Romanian-Jewish food.
Zero Mostel: “Romanian-Jewish cooking has killed more Jews than Hitler.”
It is. Last year my wife and I had a cheese, wine and matza party, just teh two of us. We bough a bottle of cava and a variety of cheeses (brie, Camembert, Boursin, Gorgonzola, gouda), and went to town. It seems that matza is a serviceable replacement for Ritz crackers as far as cheese is concerned.
Oh, and we don’t eat matza brei. We eat burmuelos, which are better.
I suspect there is a small subset of Jewish (mostly women) who use the old stereotype to their advantage. Hey, “everybody knows” Jewish food is bland, boring, and terrible, so don’t expect any “good cooking from me buster” (which means the person making the food doesn’t have to work very hard). Hell, I even saw Judge Judy use that stereotype to explain her crappy cooking (and use it to sorta help decide a case to boot - I hate that bitch, but I digress).
Take any “group” and you can find a fraction of that group that uses stereotypes to their advantage. And, ironically, they probably help to keep the stereotype alive.
I notice that the original article doesn’t mention, say chicken soup (or bagels, latkes, hamantashen, etc.) as ‘Jewish’ food, even though I’m sure chicken soup was a huge part of his great-great-grandmother’s culinary arsenal. Why? Because chicken soup is so easy to make tasty, that everybody eats it all the time, so the author doesn’t consider it ‘Jewish’. Likewise, I’m sure he thinks bagels are just ‘food’ not ‘crazy Jewish food we only eat out of tradition’.
So, I might more accurately phrase his question as “Why are the the traditional Jewish foods that we don’t eat so much anymore so bad compared to the ones we still eat?”
Put that way, it’s not that big of a mystery, is it?
(I’m not disputing that brisket, kugel, etc can be made tastily, just pointing out his logical problem).
No experience with “Jewish food” as such, but most dishes mentioned in this thread, or some variation on them, are found on Ukrainian tables. Whether or not they are good is a direct result of whether the person who does the cooking has any talent for the job. A few, like the herring, just seem to be things you either immediately like or never do. My wife loves the stuff, I don’t care for it.
You are confusing Jews and Israelis - a common Israeli mistake.
Part of the problem might be that he’s talking about Jewish food “that we grew up eating”. Mid-twentieth-century American cooking was simply awful. It wasn’t just Jews cooking with packaged soup mixes and canned foods then, it was everybody. That was the modern way to cook. Hamburger Helper, which is not Jewish food, was introduced and became popular in the 70’s. I don’t think that’s anybody’s idea of world-class food these days. He’s seeing these classic Jewish dishes through a mid-twentieth-century-American interpretation.
Bland food was another mid-twentieth-century-American culinary trend. My parents are not Jewish, but they grew up in the mid-twentieth century, and they like bland food. When my mom made stir-fries when I was growing up, soy sauce was “too strong” a flavoring for it. She preferred it with just corn oil for flavoring. I wish I were kidding or making this up, but I’m not.
Radiation from nuclear testing is the best explanation I can come up with of why people would have chosen to cook that way.
You could probably say some of the same things about some traditional non-Jewish American foods. Say, green bean casserole at Thanksgiving. Most Americans do not eat that on a regular basis, only at holidays. A lot of iterations of that are also bland and heavy.
You must live somewhere in civilization. In the Bay Area, it is nearly impossible to get. It appears from my visit to the Jewish Museum in SF that the reason for this was no discrimination, thus no Jewish neighborhoods, thus no centers of Jewish food. For bagels I need to go to Noah’s. since the other places that used to make decent bagels got taken over by those who think that the purpose of a bagel is to put ham and cheese on it, so the closer to bread the better. Pastrami? No decent delis, Columbus brand that I get at Costco is the best I can find. Whitefish, sable? Forget it. Gefilte fish from jars, but just try to find the red horseradish I grew up with. And you can’t get the right cheese to make blintzes, so I’m stuck with Golden, which isn’t even in all the stores nowadays.
All these horrible foods are delicious if done right, even borscht which I love even though I hate beets with a passion. (And try to find that around here.)
The Donald may be a twit, but the deli in the Trump Plaza in Atlantic City had a whitefish salad you could die for.
Or, as Al Hirshfeld said to SJ Pereleman as they sat overlooking the glory of Macao in “Westward Ha!”
I’d trade it all for a hot pastrami sandwich.
Yeah, my ancestors in Pinsk wouldn’t have known couscous or that weird Middle Eastern food if they fell over it.
BTW, if my grandmother had Liptons Onion Soup mix in her apartment, I never saw it.
And then the Mollie Stone’s in Palo Alto has the unmitigated gall to claim that they have the best selection of kosher food west of New Jersey. We have more kosher food selection than they do at Giant Eagle here in Pittsburgh. Mr. Neville and I were so happy to see all the kosher food when we moved here from the Bay Area in 07. Last I checked, Pittsburgh was west of New Jersey.
Forget the dark side and their cookies. Come to Pittsburgh, we have red horseradish.
All I know about Jewish cooking is the stuff I had at Jerry’s Deli in the San Fernando Valley.
I had some pretty tasty stuff there!
No, my point is that Israeli Jews, including Ashkenazim, who are given the option of choosing any Jewish cuisine in the world, by and large choose *not *to eat Polish Jewish food. That has to mean something.
I’ll have to pay that place a visit. I’m settling for barely acceptable these days.
When I retire we’re moving back East where red horseradish is not an issue. When I was growing up the Waldbaums in Bayside had all sorts of wonderful appetizing we had for breakfast Sundays. When I lived in Princeton there was a top-notch bagel place down US 1 in Lawrenceville. So thanks, but I’m not moving to the Wild West. 
Well-l-l-l, but to be fair, it’s not quite a level playing field. There is a certain unavoidable amount of regional/cultural bias helping to maintain Sephardic and related Middle Eastern culinary traditions as the dominant cuisine where you are.
If the Holy Land had been located instead on the Lithuanian-Polish border and a Jewish state had been established there in the mid-twentieth century, probably most of its inhabitants by now would be eating primarily Eastern European Jewish food.
Even the descendants of Sephardim. Falafel would just be this weird thing that some people’s grannies make. :eek:
Like traditional American food, Polish-Jewish/Russian-Jewish foods are the foods of a hardworking agricultural peasantry. Unless you actually farm by hand in the freezing cold for a living, it’s not a healthy diet.
You shouldn’t eat potato pierogies fried in chicken fat every day any more than you should eat cheese grits and crawdads fried in bacon grease every day. That has nothing to do with whether it is tasty. You don’t see Americans adopting Southern peasant food as their daily diet either, because without doing 4000-5000 calories of work daily, it would kill you. Yet properly prepared Southern peasant food is universally acknowledged as delicious. Likewise properly prepared Ashkenazi cuisine is in my experience, universally acknowledged as delicious by Jews and non-Jews alike. “being delicious” and “being a suitable diet for a leisure class in a mediaterranean climate” are two quite different things.
I’ll bet that the vast majority of Americans would find the traditional and traditionally-prepared peasant foods of every culture in the world to be off-putting. Peasants couldn’t afford any waste at all, so they made a virtue of every piece of the animal. Modern American middle-class cuisine shuns these foods, not just organ meats, but the sauces and pastes and fats and “high” foods that aren’t within miles of anything you’d find at a Chili’s.
When immigrants got here, social “reformers” tried to teach them how to budget for foods and eat “nutritiously”. That meant that the “best” food would be something found in a New England boiled dinner or drenched in a “white” sauce. That ethic lasted for the entire 20th century, except in small urban enclaves. The past decade or so is the first time that different foods are making it into the middle-class mainstream. They still have a long way to go.
Nostalgia for foods that are not considered good by food-critic types is not unique to Jews. Lots of Americans eat Kraft macaroni and cheese because of nostalgia (I understand Canadians do this, too, but they call theirs Kraft Dinner). It’s not that there is not better macaroni and cheese available in the US and Canada. There is. It’s not that only people who can’t afford anything better eat Kraft macaroni and cheese, either. It’s the kind of nostalgia you get from comfort food.
Brisket made with Lipton onion soup mix, like Kraft macaroni and cheese, is easier to make than some other ways of making brisket. This is especially true if you’re not the most skilled cook.
I’m pretty sure there is no cuisine in the world that cannot be made badly. Not everybody is a skilled cook. If you get your examples of a particular cuisine mostly from restaurants, there’s a selection effect going on there- the worst cooks usually don’t get hired to cook at restaurants. If you’re getting most of your examples of a cuisine in a family setting, there’s no such filter against bad cooks there. There’s no test of cooking skills before you can decide to have a family. Who does the cooking in a family, especially in the past, might have had more to do with things like traditional gender roles than with who is the more skilled cook. Just because traditional gender roles may say that women should do the cooking, doesn’t mean that all women are going to be skilled at cooking.
I have heard, although I do not have the studies to cite at the moment, that this is one possible explanation for the obesity epidemic: that rural eating patters (high carbs, high calorie) that were suitable to an agricultural life with high daily caloric expenditures have not adapted fast enough to urban lifestyles that require less caloric loads.
I’m not Jewish but I just made a pot of matzoh ball soup from a package, added chicken and frozen mixed veg. It’s considered by some around here rather exotic! I think it’s just a nice change, and since it’s going to be in the teens tonight after being 80 for a week, might as well use up the ‘winter’ food.
"We are now living in modern mid-20th Century American suburbia! We must eat modern mid-20th Century American suburban food! Oddball spices and flavorings, unusual ingredients, scratch-made items, that’s from [(choose one according to your background):(the old country with the old people)//(back on the farm with the hicks)]. We did not fight two World Wars and a Depression so we would still have to work like peasants to make a meal, when there’s factories that can provide everything mostly processed already!"
And of course these posts are an opportunity to refer to the Gallery of Regrettable Food over at James Lileks’ site, full of examples of what passed for culinary excitement in mid-20th century American suburbia…