New Cookbook Celebrates Friday Night Dinners with Delicious Recipes from Around the World
Come sundown on Friday nights, Jews and their families and friends come together to celebrate with food, wine, bread, and community. It’s the start of Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, the ritual that occurs once a week. For some, this dinner is just a festive meal. For others, it is part of their religious observance. For most, Shabbat is a time to celebrate, recharge, and share with those you care for.
Food writer and recipe developer Faith Kramer shares recipes and flavors from around the world in her new cookbook, 52 SHABBATS: FRIDAY NIGHT DINNERS INSPIRED BY A GLOBAL JEWISH KITCHEN. Whether you are a longtime host of weekly Shabbat dinners or just looking for new meal ideas, the recipes in this cookbook will spice up your Friday night meal.
52 Shabbats let’s home cooks create global-flavored meals for Friday night and other dinners using seasonings from Libya and Ethiopia; sauces from Morocco, Lebanon, and Yemen; and herbs, spices, and more from the Middle and Near East. Faith transforms traditional favorites. Pomegranate molasses brings a sweet-tart taste to brisket; falafel makes a crispy crust for a pizza; baked potatoes are stuffed with ground turkey, cumin, cinnamon, cloves, and other spices; roasted chicken is enhanced by fresh herbs or shawarma seasoning, and a spicy beef stew with dried fruit becomes the filling for tamales, to name just a few.
“No matter what your Friday night custom is (or even if you don’t really have one), embracing this weekly Shabbat ritual brings an element of understanding as the activities and food can connect us, through history, geography, and tradition, to Jewish communities and ways other than our own,” Faith says.
Recipes are divided into chapters based on the seasons along with chapters on side dishes and accompaniments, desserts, and fundamentals. Faith outlines recipe pairing in a mix-and-match friendly format, incorporating easy substitutions throughout the book making Shabbat meals accessible for any lifestyle.
“The Friday night Shabbat dinner is the Jewish way of saying welcome to the weekend. I invite you to celebrate with family and friends whenever you can. It’s your Friday night. Celebrate.”
Check out two of the recipes from 52 Shabbats:
Roasted Salmon with Citrus-Honey Sauce
About the Author Faith Kramer is a food writer and recipe developer concentrating on the foodways, history, and customs of the Jewish diaspora. She has written hundreds of posts about Jewish customs and food, travel, and global ingredients with accompanying recipes. As a columnist for the j., the Jewish News of Northern California, she writes articles twice a month on food and cooking along with original recipes. Faith has taught numerous cooking classes, presented programs on Jewish customs, celebrations, and holidays, and led food-related walking tours that explore the economic, geographic, and political underpinnings of the food as well as how to use international ingredients in other contexts. A frequent contributor to other Jewish food-related projects, her work can be found in Laura Silver’s Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food (Brandeis University Press) and Molly O’Neill’s One Big Table cookbook (Simon and Schuster), plus many others. Faith lives with her family in the San Francisco Bay Area. Visit FaithKramer.com for links to more of her writing about Jewish customs and food, travel and global ingredients and recipes.
