In the Kitchen with Amelia Saltsman
Mealplan from the archives
Over the years in LA, when we did farm to table home delivery, we came back again and again to Amelia Saltsman to find inspiration for our farm boxes. Her tome, The Seasonal Jewish Kitchen, has become a Narrative Food favorite over the years.
When we read Amelia's recipes, we feel as if we are side by side with her at the Santa Monica Farmer's Market, with her in-depth knowledge of the Southern California seasons, climate and food cycles. We also love this book because the recipes are just so irresistible, making use of fresh fruit and vegetables alike in bright, colorful preparations that make our mouths water. The book has so many delicious ideas for holiday — and every day meals — no matter your faith.
Here are a few that we featured in our boxes — quince might not be easy to find right now, but most of the other ingredients are straightforward.
RECIPES
Also, while digging up the recipes, I found this lovely memory Amelia shared with us for one of our box inserts:
MY DEFINING SUMMER by Amelia Saltsman
When I was ten years old, my mother, my baby sister, and I spent the summer in Israel. It was my mother’s first visit back to her natal family since she left with my father eleven years prior for the United States. Not only was it my first visit to Israel, it was the first time I met my grandparents and most of my extended family.
Those three months were packed with new and strange experiences, sights, aromas, and flavors. Until that moment, I had been a burger-loving kid who took baloney-and-miracle-whip sandwiches in her lunchbox and thought all cakes were frosted-two-layer and apple pie was very sweet and cinnamon-y.
I had no way of knowing then that the summer of ’61 would be the formative moment in defining how I think about and cook food. Those childhood taste memories are as vivid today as if I just experienced them yesterday: Sweet butter (not salty margarine) and the yeasty scent of the crescent rolls my aunt picked up fresh every morning from the tiny bakeshop on the corner (vs mass-produced white bread); the scents of hay, mulch, and smoke in the avocado orchard at my family’s farm in the moshav where we grilled thin minute-steaks vibrant with pungent spice to stuff into pita; and watching in wonder as my Romanian grandmother stretched dough impossibly thin to encase a tart-sweet apple filling that she baked in a tabletop oven. And, no surprise here, I shopped with my grandmothers and aunts for fruits and vegetables at the shuk.
One of my aunts would take me to a popular café in Tel Aviv that served “banana splits.” As I recall, they had neither bananas nor marshmallow crème and were not served in low-slung boats. What made the dessert memorable was the counterpoint of tart sorbets and vanilla and bitter chocolate ice creams. They were piled into tall glasses with a bit of fruit and toasted nuts and laced with raspberry and chocolate sauces. The combination may not sound unusual today, but to me back then, it was a sensory revolution. Today, whenever I cook or develop a new recipe—be it savory or sweet, I still always seek that same sense of contrasting flavors, textures, colors, and temperatures that make one’s taste buds sing.