Passover will never be the same with the release of social media star Jake Cohen’s latest project; a cookbook celebrating his unique take on Jewish recipes.
Pumpkin-spice babka shakshuka alla vodka. Challah panzanella. According to Jake Cohen, these recipes qualify as “Jew-ish”. This month Cohen, 27, a food writer and gregarious social media star with a devoted following on Instagram and TikTok, unleashes the notion on the world in Jew-ish: A Cookbook: Reinvented Recipes From a Modern Mensch (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Published just in time for Passover, which begins on Saturday evening, it’s Cohen’s uniquely millennial interpretation of Jewish cuisine, including the Ashkenazi dishes he grew up with, the Persian and Iraqi-Jewish recipes he learned from his in-laws and the foods that simply capture his imagination.
Some of the recipes may seem unorthodox, but they reflect a larger reality: many secular Jews connect most meaningfully to their heritage through food. The tone is as earnest as it is tongue-in-cheek.
For Cohen, a habit of hosting Friday-night dinner with his husband gave rise to an eclectic repertoire of recipes and rituals. He writes: “It was about taking a moment at the end of the week to pause and actively exercise gratitude, to strengthen and build our community, and to simultaneously do the one thing we enjoy most — eat.”
Read the article by Gabriella Gershenson in The Australian (from The Wall Street Journal).