Joan Nathan

The trick to pickling today is to find fresh herring or fresh salted herring. Once you've pickled it, use the herring in any favorite recipe, or just mix it as I do, with sour cream, red onion, and dill, to break the fast of Yom Kippur. It will keep for weeks.

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

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.

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 calledSepharadin 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.

The followingtsimmeswith beets, turnips, carrots, and meat came from Vilna to Brooklyn earlier in this century. When I make this for my family I do not tell the children that it includes beets and turnips. For some unknown reason they never ask me how the dish became so red. They love it.

This is one of those recipes that has pretty much disappeared in the United States, but those who remember it rave about it. Afluden, which comes fromfladniorfladen在德国,“平蛋糕”,只是,一个平面,窦ble-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-layeredfluden在犹太面包房和餐厅在巴黎,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 withbou'ha, a Jewish Tunisian fig liqueur used forkiddush, the blessing over the wine on the Sabbath. You can, of course, use kirsch or any other fruit liqueur instead.

The New Prospect Café, a health-oriented restaurant and catering company in Park Slope, Brooklyn, includes these curried sweet potato fritters on their Hanukkah menu. Add some fresh grated ginger to the pancakes for an Asian touch. Sweet potatoes need the flour to give the pancakes body.

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.

Call them galettes sucrees, mandelbrot, or biscotti — I love these Moroccan cookies, made by Rosette Toledano of Netanya, who, as her daughter says, "puts her heart in her cooking."

My grandmother made a great Friday night dinner in her two-story limestone in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. She might as well have run a restaurant. There was lots and lots and lots of stuff—kreplach, gribenes, gefilte fish, blintzes, homemade noodles, roast chicken, glazed carrots, egg barley with dried Polish mushrooms. In 1918 during an influenza epidemic my grandmother was 20 years old with two children. First her husband died and two days later her mother died. With eight younger siblings and two of her own, she took care of ten kids in the family. Then an aunt caught the flu and died leaving eight or nine children. My grandmother then married her uncle and raised 18 kids. The secret to her roast chicken was to cook it long enough to render the fat from the chicken and make it crispy.—Eddie Schoenfeld, New York restaurateur

Haman's pockets, orHamantaschen,were brought to this country by Jews from the eastern part of Germany and Eastern Europe.Hamantaschenare so popular here that at many academic institutions there is an annualHamantaschenversus latke debate. The filling for the followingHamantaschenrecipe comes from theTaste of History: Recipes Old and Newput out by Philadelphia's Historic Spanish and Portuguese Congregation, Kahal Kadosh Midveh Israel, founded in 1740. With the filling I used my own butter cookie dough, which everyone in my family loves. Although adults like fruit or poppy-seed fillings, my children do not, and they fill the dough with chocolate chips and even make aHamantaschenwith chocolate chips and peanut butter. I'll stick to this prune filling and leave the chocolate-chipHamantaschento them. Regional Variation: A similar and equally deliciousHamantaschenfilling comes from Natchez, Mississippi. Naturally, it includes pecans rather than walnuts.

(Southern German and Alsatian Italian Plum Torte) This torte is served traditionally at the high holidays in early fall, when small blue Italian plums are in season. In southern Germany and Alsace the pie was made fromzwetsche, a local variety of these plums. My aunt Lisl always used to make amurbeteigcrust (a short-crust butter cookie dought) for this tart, and sliced each Italian plum into four crescent shapes. She lined the tart with breadcrumbs and then apricot preserves, which protected the dough during baking, leading to a crispy crust. She went light on the cinnamon, a spice she felt was overused in this country. (I agree with her.) My aunt's results, simple to prepare, were simply delicious.

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.

This is an updated version of thechremslachpassed 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 Kentuckygrimslech.

At Hanukkah I always made potato pancakes at the last minute so we tried my recipe but added zucchini to change the color. I wrang out the hand-grated potatoes in a tea towel and got rid of as much of the liquid as possible but retained the starch. I always add scallions, onions, and eggs but no filler. Rochelle Rose, mother of the proprietors of Mrs. Simpson's Restaurant This recipe was created at the first of Mrs. Rose's sons' restaurants, 209 1/2, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. This recipe appeared in the "You Asked for It" column inGourmetmagazine in 1977.

Hungarian Jewish food is a perfect example of acculturation. Take this piquant cucumber salad, which can be made with one of the three different kinds of paprika — mild, sharp, or sweet. Taken there by the Turks who discovered it in the New World, paprika has been cultivated in Hungary since the sixteenth century.

In 1925 Wolff Brothers of Paterson, New Jersey, published a Yiddish English cook book with recipes culled from a kasha cooking contest run in all the Jewish newspapers throughout the country. "Recipes of thousands of Jewish dishes were sent us," they wrote modestly, "but we selected only the very best among them and these are listed here." The recipes included buckwheat blintzes, vegetarian buckwheat cutlets, and "a tasteful grits soup" made from their Health Food (merely unroasted buckwheat groats), green peas, and potatoes. Thevarnishkerecipe was basically a kreplach-type noodle stuffed with kasha, buckwheat groats, andgribenes. Packaged bow-tie noodles,large and small, quickly replaced the flat homemade egg noodles in the American version ofkasha varnishkes. The trick to a goodkasha varnishkeis to toast the whole-grain buckwheat groat well over a high heat for 2 to 4 minutes until you start smelling the aroma of the kasha. This will seal the groats so that there is a nutty, crunchy taste to them, a good foil to the soft taste of the noodles. When I make mine - a favorite in my family - I add fresh parsley and sometimes coriander. Although traditionalists use bow-tie noodles for this, try rigatoni, shells, or any other kind of noodle you like.

My children like to visit my Aunt Lisl's daughter-in-law, Dorothy, the way I used to visit Aunt Lisl. Dorothy doesn't make butter cookies, but she does make brownies which she serves at Hanukkah and every Friday night, a perfect ending to a meat meal. The children help make the brownies and then take a few extra home in aluminum foil. They love them—without the nuts.

This Parisian version of a Bialystokertsibele(onion)pletzel, also called onionzemmel, onionpampalik, or onion board, is very similar to an Italianfocaccia. Try this flat bread sprinkled with rosemary, and you will see how very close it is.