Ron Finley plants vegetable gardens in South Central LA -- in abandoned lots, traffic medians, along the curbs. Why? For fun, for defiance, for beauty and to offer some alternative to fast food in a community where "the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys."

I already own (and love) Shabbat and Portico.

But I am OBSESSED with the rest and must acquire them immediately.

Top of my list is Love Japan because LOOK AT THIS BEAUITFUL BOWL OF MATZO BALL RAMEN!!!!!

We hear a lot about Jewish people in Europe and MENA, but we do not hear a lot about Jewish culture as it blends with East Asian cultures, and that’s a shame. Not just because it erases the centuries of Jewish populations there, but also because there are plenty of people of mixed decent. People who may not have come directly from Jewish communities in East Asia, but people who have a Japanese Father and a Jewish Mother, for example. Or people in intercultural marriages. These are all real and valuable members of the Jewish community, and we should be celebrating them more. This cookbook focuses on Jewish Japanese American cuisine and I am delighted to learn more as soon as possible. The people who wrote this book run the restaurant Shalom Japan, which is the most adorable name I’ve ever heard. Everything about this book excites and delights me.

And of course, after that, I’m most interested in “Kugels and Collards” (as if you had any doubts about that after the #kugel discourse, if you were following me then).

This is actually written in conjunction with an organization of the same name devoted to preserving the food and culture of Jews in South Carolina!

I’m especially excited to read this one, because I have recently acquired the book Kosher Soul by the fantastic, inimitable Michael J. Twitty, which famously explores faith and food in African American Jewish culture. I’m excited to see how Jewish soul food and traditions in South Carolina specifically compare and contrast with Twitty’s writings.

I’m also excited for all the other books on this list!

A while ago, someone inboxed me privately to ask what I recommended for people to read in order to learn more about Jewish culture. I wrote out a long list of historical resources attempting to cover all the intricate details and historic pressure points that molded Jewish culture into what it is today. After a while I wrote back a second message that was much shorter. I said:

Actually, no. Scratch everything I just said. Read that other stuff if you want to know Jewish history.

But if you want to know Jewish culture? Cookbooks.

Read every Jewish cookbook you can find.

Even if you don’t cook, Jewish cookbooks contain our culture in a tangible form. They often explain not only the physical processes by which we make our meals, but also the culture and conditions that give rise to them. The food is often linked to specific times and places and events in diaspora. Or they explain the biblical root or the meaning behind the holidays associated with a given food.

I cannot speak for all Jews. No one can. But in my personal observation and experience—outside of actual religious tradition—food has often been the primary means of passing Jewish culture and history from generation to generation.

It is a way to commune with our ancestors. I made a recipe for chicken soup or stuffed cabbage and I know that my great grandmother and her own mother in their little Hungarian shtetl. I’ll never know the relatives of theirs who died in the Holocaust and I’ll never meet the cousins I should have had if they were allowed to live. But I can make the same food and know that their mother also made it for them. I have dishes I make that connect me to my lost ancestors in France and Mongolia and Russia and Latvia and Lithuania and, yes, Israel—where my relatives have lived continuously since the Roman occupation even after the expulsions. (They were Levites and Cohens and caretakers of synagogues and tradition and we have a pretty detailed family tree of their presence going back quite a long time. No idea how they managed to stay/hide for so long. That info is lost to history.)

I think there’s a strong tendency—aided by modern recipe bloggers—to view anything besides the actual recipe and procedures as fluff. There is an urge for many people to press “jump to recipe” and just start cooking. And I get that. We are all busy and when we want to make dinner we just want to make dinner.

But if your goal isn’t just to make dinner. If your goal is to actually develop an understanding of and empathy for Jewish people and our culture, then that’s my advice:

I come from a long line of people who raised hogs, smoked them in the earth as technique inherited from indigenous kin (who - more broadly - introduced the west to the method: more on that here!) and seasoned them beautifully.

so pork specifically meant a lot to my family... but it is also undeniably tied to hereditary health problems...

so here's a story on how we departed from that, what tradition even is, and what it means to me now ft the humble black eyed pea, for EATER!

some of my favorite panels:

In J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Gollum has been captured by Frodo and Sam and has been tasked with leading the two hobbits into Mordor. At one point in their journey, Gollum catches some rabbits for their dinner, and Sam asks Gollum to go find some bay, sage, and thyme with which to season their meal. When Gollum refuses, Sam says that he'll punish Gollum if he doesn't go, then says, "And I'd make him [Gollum] look for turnips and carrots, and taters too, if it was the time o' the year." Gollum refuses again, saying that he "won't grub for roots and carrotses and—taters. What's taters, precious, eh, what's taters?" (Two Towers, p. 262; all page references in this blog are to the Houghton Mifflin second edition, 1965) (Sam's iconic line "Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew" is not found in Tolkien's original; it's from the 2002 screenplay adaptation by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Stephen Sinclair, and Peter Jackson, although Sam does say "po—ta—toes" in both the book and the film.)

Although it's possible that Gollum at one time did know what potatoes are and then forgot during his long, lonely sojourn under the Misty Mountains, I think it's more likely that he was unfamiliar with them in the first place, given that he seems to know what carrots are. Gollum's ignorance of potatoes suggests that that vegetable was not part of his community's diet by the time he found the One Ring and went into exile. Five and a half centuries later, however, Sam knows about potatoes, and notes that his own father, the Gaffer, takes great pride in his potato crop. (p. 263) This shift in hobbit foodways therefore is one of several parallels between the history of Tolkien's fictional Shire and the history of England.

The Shire as Samwise Gamgee knows it is an idyll of pre-industrial—but not medieval—England, a place of peace and bounty where one can find well-tilled fields, fat livestock, hand-crafted ales down the pub, and cozy homes that are warmed by fires in the hearth. That Sam's Shire is pre-industrial but not medieval is shown by the introduction of heavy industry by Saruman's henchmen, who convert Ted Sandyman's mill into a factory complete with a brick chimney that "[pours] out black smoke into the evening air" (Return of the King, p. 283), and who force the conversion of the Shire from a self-sufficient, self-governing little country into one that is run by foreign overlords who take almost everything produced therein for themselves.

Gollum, by contrast, never lived in the Shire, and if we posit that Sam's Shire is pre-industrial and therefore roughly equivalent to eighteenth-century England, we can posit that Gollum's home along the banks of the Anduin was medieval and roughly equivalent to thirteenth-century England, or perhaps to thirteenth-century Northern Europe. Carrots had been known to Europeans since antiquity, but potatoes were only introduced in the sixteenth century, so a historical foodways parallelism between Sam's time and Gollum's could reasonably include the later introduction of potatoes into a culture that already had carrots.

Where, then, did the hobbits' potatoes come from? Potatoes in our world are native to the Andes Mountains. Presumably Middle-earth's potatoes are native to a similarly mountainous area, and Tolkien notes that the ancestors of the hobbits—the Stoors, Fallohides, and Harfoots—originally lived along the Anduin, east of the mountains, but that starting in 1050 of the Third Age (TA) they began crossing the Misty Mountains and traveling westward. The Harfoots were the first to move westward, followed by the Fallohides, who took a northerly route before crossing the mountains. The Stoors went south, crossing at Redhorn Pass near the peak of Caradhras. Unlike the Fallohides and the Harfoots, the Stoors returned to the Gladden Fields along the banks of the Anduin in TA 1356, and it is from this community of Stoors that Gollum was descended. (The Shire was founded about 250 years later, in TA 1601, and the action of Lord of the Rings takes place in TA 3018–19.)

There are several possible reasons why the Stoors of Gollum's community did not have potatoes, despite their having crossed and then re-crossed the Misty Mountains in their early history. One possible reason is that in Middle-earth, potatoes are native to the northern part of the Misty Mountains where the Fallohides crossed, but not to the southerly part of the mountains where the Stoors made their crossings, such that the Fallohides encountered potatoes but the Stoors did not. A second possible reason is that the Stoors did find potatoes in their sojourns through the mountains but did not think them edible, while the Fallohides found them to be both edible and worthy of bringing with them to their new home as a new food crop.

A third possibility is that hobbits did not have potatoes until well after the Shire had been settled and that they were brought in from outside. Tolkien does note that dwarves were known to use the road that crossed the Shire from east to west on their way to and from their mines in the Ered Luin (Blue Mountains) to the west of the Shire. (The Fellowship of the Ring, p. 52) Dwarves, for all their hardihood, do not live on love and fresh air, and so perhaps they brought potatoes with them and traded them with the Shire-hobbits or, more likely, with the hobbits of Bree, who were more open to interactions with people of other races, and then the Bree-hobbits brought them into the Shire from there. If Bree were the point of entry for the potato, then traveling Men also might have introduced them when they passed through Bree. Having the potato be introduced from outside centuries after the settlement of the Shire would be a closer parallel to what happened in our own world, where the potato came to England from a faraway land a thousand years after England had been colonized by the migrating Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.

Ultimately, though, Tolkien doesn't tell us where potatoes come from in Middle-earth, nor does he tell us when or how they arrived in the Shire (although he does tell us when pipe-weed came to be cultivated; priorities, I guess). We can only make assumptions about the Middle-earth-ish history of this "rare good ballast for an empty belly" (Two Towers, p. 263) through the conversation Sam has with Gollum, and through the parallels between European history and foodways and those of the Shire.