MasterChef for the Jews
YOU’VE heard of MasterChef even if you didn’t watch it. Well, here comes “BesterChef”, the show that will offer aspiring cooks the chance to do with Jewish food what Julia, Poh and the rest did with half-a-dozen different cuisines and dozens of recipes.
I’ve developed the concept for BesterChef because, for all of MasterChef’s attractions, there was something missing. No sublime chopped liver. No perfectly seasoned gefilte fish. And no marks out of 10 for the fluffiest, melt-in-your-mouth matzah balls.
One of the program’s pleasures was admiring how judge George Calombaris celebrated his Greek heritage, and his love for the food he had learnt to prepare in his immigrant mother’s kitchen. Apart from the professional chefs in the Jewish community who could tell similar stories, I’m sure we have a great many amateurs who fancy themselves, if only they were given the chance.
So here’s the chance. The title BesterChef is derived from the Yinglish “Der Bester Chef” — “The Best Chef”. It couldn’t be pure Yiddish, because that would have been MaisterKucher, or even the less catchy MaisterHoiptkucher.
And, after all, BesterChef is an unabashed attempt to cash in on Channel Ten’s immensely popular program, as well as the even more immensely popular role that food plays in being Jewish. Not to mention its profound religious and cultural significance as a key component of Judaism and Jewish civilisation.
But that’s another column, and the subject of libraries of books. This column, to quote MasterChef, is only about “taste, texture and presentation”.
One difference between BesterChef and MasterChef will be that contestants will know in advance the seven categories of dishes they’ll have to prepare. To stretch the contestants, however, the judges will ask for Ashkenazi and Sephardi equivalents of the same dish, as set out in Claudia Roden’s definitive and indispensable guide, The Book of Jewish Food.
Roden’s exquisitely written and evocative history, not only of food, but of Jewish communities over the centuries that produced it and recipes for it, is a constant joy to pick up, consult and savour. But brilliant though it is, Roden’s is only one guide among many.
As a very amateur cook, with no pretensions or aspirations, I like collecting these volumes because, I suspect, I prefer reading about food more than actually cooking it. In my collection, three that perform consistently in addition to Roden’s -— i.e. whose recipes work -— are the Lubavitch classic The Spice and Spirit of Kosher Jewish Cooking (Bloch, NY, 1977), Shmulik’s Jewish Kitchen (Modan, Israel, 1994) and Gil Marks’ very readable The World of Jewish Cooking (Simon and Schuster, 1996).
As with cookbooks generally, which in many bookshops take up the largest amount of shelf space and mostly outsell all other publishing categories, Jewish cookbooks, hardcover and online, are a proliferating growth industry. Israel, of course, has added a new dimension of Jewish cookbook publishing, with its own breed of TV chefs, newspaper food critics, and burgeoning foodie culture.
Which brings me, arbitrarily and whimsically to what I call “The Magnificent Seven” tests I’m proposing for BesterChef:
* chicken soup and matzah balls/
lokshen/kreplach
* gefilte fish
* chopped liver
* roast chicken with tsimmes and vegetables
* cholent/chamin — vegetarian and meat
* honey cake/sponge cake/strudel
* compote
Bring it on. And here comes the judge. Me.
The mavens and the foodies may scoff at such a list. Too predictable. Too boring. Too heavy. Not complex enough. Hardly challenging for a real chef. Perhaps. But the gap between the average and the excellent in each of these familiar dishes is vast, as anybody who has tasted that difference can tell you.
However much MasterChef was about “taste, texture and presentation”,¬† however much it boosted the food industry and made “Plate up!” part of the vernacular in schoolyards, and however much it benefited from not humiliating the contestants but encouraging them. Its appeal was also a reflection of a deeper change — a more mature multicultural Australia.
This is something that Australian Jews, who themselves come from varying backgrounds, and reflect many different food cultures, can readily understand. As ever, Roden has explained it well: “Dishes are important because they are a link with the past, a celebration of roots, a symbol of continuity.” Don’t we know it.
Sam Lipski is the chief executive of The Pratt Foundation and a former editor-in-chief of The AJN.