![]() ![]() "It was an age when I was thinking about who am I as a Jew and who am I as a southerner. In their choice of foods, these women celebrated all their traditions, but traditions as filtered through the ingredients, culinary habits and life styles of Jews living far from the close-knit urban communities of the North.įerris has always been interested in food, but it wasn't until she was a teenager brooding on questions of identity at a school where she was one of only two Jewish kids that she included food in the equation. In time Ferris would see these foods as markers of culture and identity that reflected not only the two women's different ages, backgrounds and inclinations, but also those of her parents' African American longtime housekeeper, Ritchie Lee King. And Ferris took it at face value that her mother, Huddy Horowitz Cohen, seldom prepared traditional southern dishes, but nevertheless frequently served southern fried chicken and corn bread made by her housekeeper at sabbath meals and traditional foods (matzoh ball soup, brisket, tzimmes, potato latkes) for Jewish holiday meals. The food on her mother's and grandmother's tables emerged from all these diverse influences.īut as a child, she didn't understand the seeming contradictions: she didn't ask why her father's mother, Luba Tooter Cohen, always had tins of Brer Rabbit molasses cookies, or why she made Chinese/American chicken chow mein once a month and black-eyed peas cooked with a small piece of fatback on New Year's Day. ![]() Her mother's family, also of Eastern European origin, had settled in Connecticut. Her parents, who belonged to a local Reform congregation, had mixed backgrounds: her father was a southerner whose family had come to Arkansas from Russia via New York City. And game."įerris grew up in a Jewish home in Blytheville, Ark. And really relies on fresh fruits and vegetables. "There's a scale of seasonings that's based on whether the person cooking is leaning toward the southern or Jewish route. "Southern Jews cook and flavor their food in ways very much influenced by regional taste," Ferris says. Beans are generally green, and tzimmes is loaded with carrots. Sweet noodle kugel is usually studded with raisins or apples, not peaches. Gefilte fish is made from carp, whitefish and pike. But for many American Jews, there's a disconnect. Consider these dishes from Marcie Cohen Ferris's menu for a Jewish High Holiday meal: gefilte fish made from red snapper, red matzoh ball soup with beef brisket, noodle kugel with peaches, butter beans, yam tzimmes.
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