Micah Siva is a woman after my stomach. Despite her seemingly prominent presence online, I wasn’t familiar with this Jewish food expert until her newly-released Nosh (Collective Book Studio, 2024) came across my desk.
Nosh by Micah Siva
One probably wouldn’t expect a book called Nosh to be a compilation of “Plant-Forward Recipes,” as the subhead begins. But there’s no false advertising here. The rest of the subhead, “Celebrating Modern Jewish Cuisine,” is exactly what this book is about.
So you will have recipes for potato kugel, cholent, brisket and shawarma but, to put it in kosher terms, you won’t have to wait one or three or six hours to indulge an ice cream sundae.
Classics are the main reason I started salivating as I perused Nosh. Being a vegetarian doesn’t mean I don’t crave comfort food. I’ll happily eat a veggie Reuben every night of the week. What I don’t want a whole lot of are processed meat substitutes. They are nowhere to be found in Nosh!
In fact, despite having a recipe for something called “Vegan Gefilte Fish,” Nosh doesn’t feel like a substitutes book.
While good for a treat, overly processed plant-based foods are not particularly healthy, so Siva doesn’t use them.
Instead, substitutes are extracted from whole ingredients, such as cashew nut. And while Siva offers guidance on how to make certain recipes parve, many of her recipes include cheese, milk and eggs.
Something else I love about this book? How Siva weaves in the stories of her grandmothers and how their recipes continue to nurture her connection to them and to her Jewish identity.
It reminded me of a sweet novel I recently finished, Mrs. Quinn’s Rise to Fame.
In her mid-70s, the eponymous Mrs. Quinn enters a “Great British Bake Off”-like contest. Most of her bakes come from grease-stained recipe cards from her mother, who died at a young age. Others are connected to important events or people from the time Mrs. Quinn herself was younger. (There’s another very emotional recipe book thread that I won’t spoil for anyone who might read it.) Baking becomes a kind of time travel, as it does for so many of us, especially at holiday times.
Nosh has that reflective tone, but it is also very now. Its flavors and colors are a riot of Jewish food from across the world. There’s no Ashkenazi or Sephardic supremacy. Eastern European pickles are celebrated alongside a Moroccan-style tagine.
Keep your eye open for kosher-for-Passover recipes from Nosh as we get closer to the holiday.
Shana Goldberg may be reached at [email protected]
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