http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/28/dining/everything-new-is-old-again.html 2014-12-08 03:47:24 The New Golden Age of Jewish-American Deli Food At this moment in New York, the cutting edge of cuisine is the beet-heavy, cabbage-friendly diet of 19th-century Jews in Eastern Europe. === Artisanal gefilte fish. Slow-fermented bagels. Organic chopped liver. Sustainable schmaltz. These aren’t punch lines to a fresh crop of Jewish jokes. They are real foods that recently arrived on New York City’s food scene. And they are proof of a sudden and strong movement among young cooks, mostly Jewish-Americans, to embrace and redeem the foods of their forebears. That’s why, at this moment in 21st-century New York, the cutting edge of cuisine is the beet-heavy, cabbage-friendly, herring-loving diet of 19th-century Jews in Eastern Europe. “It turns out that our ancestors knew what they were doing,” said Jeffrey Yoskowitz, an owner of The wave that began with Gefilteria, the The chefs and artisans behind these new enterprises are embracing the quickly disappearing foods of their grandparents — blintzes and babka, kasha and knishes — and jolting them back to strength with an infusion of modern culinary ideas. Those foods became punch lines in the 1970s, when the health consequences of a steady diet of meat, salt, bread and cream became apparent, and when strong, smelly foods like garlic dill pickles and herring with raw onion seemed dated, even embarrassing. “Food rejection was part of the assimilation process,” said Devra Ferst, editor of the food blog But now, as the values of the food revolution (fresh, local, sustainable, seasonal) have inspired a whole generation of young Jewish-Americans, they have found ways to bring the two camps together. “Kosher food didn’t reflect our generation or our tastes,” said Mr. Yoskowitz; he and his partner, Liz Alpern, are 29. “And modern food didn’t reflect our history.” There are new artisanal Jewish delis in Atlanta ( Their goal is preservation, closely followed by improvisation. They are learning to smoke fish, ferment pickles and bake pumpernickel bread in the ways their ancestors did. They are holding Noah Arenstein, a part-time lawyer, started Scharf & Zoyer (Yiddish for sharp and sour) to make crazed versions of deli sandwiches, like fried chicken skin and dill crème fraîche between slices of noodle kugel and a “Korean lox spread” of cream cheese, lox, gochujang and scallions. When he was looking for an aromatic bread for a tuna salad sandwich, he was directed to The Gefilteria team crossed paths with Theo Peck, who grew up working at Ratner’s, his family’s restaurant on the Lower East Side, and had just opened Peck’s, a cafe near his home in Brooklyn. “We were looking for someone to use our beet kvass,” said Ms. Alpern, referring to a fizzy brew that gave traditional borscht its sweet-sour tang when vinegar was unknown in cold climates. “And he was looking for a really good pickle.” The Gefilteria duo are branching out into slow-brined pickles and kombucha, using the cool basement space at Peck’s as their lab. But these cooks and bakers have to tread carefully. “It has to look familiar and taste familiar and smell familiar, but also taste delicious,” Mr. Peck said. Ratner’s closed in 2004, and is still mourned by many. At Peck’s, he makes pickled-beet borscht (with a shot of kvass), house-cured tongue and a tall, golden version of Ratner’s legendary corn muffins: crunchy, buttery and just a bit gritty. His coarse, rich, Jewish-style chopped liver is served on an onion roll from The current owners of the original “We are always conscious that we are taking care of a piece of history” Ms. Federman said. “But we can’t run only on nostalgia.” In 1914, when the shop opened, Russ & Daughters was one of many such storefronts, but the bagel, the all-beef hot dog and the pastrami sandwich were not yet symbols of the city. At that time, more Jews observed kosher laws (separating milk and meat and eschewing pork and shellfish, among other prohibitions and directives) and different enterprises arose from the different parts of the Jewish diet. The delicatessen grew out of the meat tradition, selling pastrami, beef salami and beef hot dogs (but not sour cream or butter, and there was no cheese on the sandwiches). In dairy restaurants like Ratner’s, blintzes, potato latkes and farmer cheese were the staples. “Appetizing” stores like Russ & Daughters and Murray’s Sturgeon Shop sold mainly fish, which can be eaten with either dairy or meat. And then there were the bakeries. Thousands of Jews who settled in New York had lived for generations in the area that eventually became Austria, Hungary, southern Germany, Lithuania, Russia, Poland, Ukraine and Georgia. They transferred those rich baking traditions intact, bringing sour breads, yeast-raised coffee cakes, delicate strudels, butter cookies and all manner of bread rolls including bialys and bagels. Many a “New York bagel” today is a puffy, sweet monstrosity, made like other industrial breads; quick-risen (instead of slow-fermented), stamped out of molds (instead of hand-rolled), steamed (instead of boiled) and then misted with sugar syrups before baking to achieve an appetizing shine. But at last, there are signs of hope. Some older bakeries, like Melissa Weller, who was the bread baker at Per Se, Roberta’s and Babbo, struck out on her own last summer as a bagel specialist at Ms. Weller is neither Jewish nor a New Yorker, but has made it her mission to create the perfect 21st-century bagel: slow-risen, water-boiled and slow-baked. Her first brilliant hack was putting the onions inside the onion bagel, not on the crust, where they invariably burn and turn bitter. Her latest version involves dehydrating then rehydrating fresh onions and leeks that perfume the dough. (It will eventually appear at a bakery to be opened by the partners in Black Seed’s hand-rolled wood-fired bagels generated lines blocks long when the bakery opened two weeks ago, and those aren’t even New York bagels, but Montreal bagels, a thinner style with fantastically generous coatings of sesame or poppy seeds. The toppings reflect the pioneering Mile End style: close to Ashkenazi tradition, but lighter and brighter. Fatty salmon is cured in-house with grated beets and salt, local Laura Silver, the Brooklyn-born author of “Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food,” said knishes arrived here via Knyszyn, a town outside the now-Polish city of Bialystok, where Jews made up more than half the population before World War II. Old-country knishes are fat baked dough rounds, stuffed with potatoes or kasha. Today, many young New Yorkers know only the square, flat, deep-fried knish that traditionalists abhor. “I see myself a defender of all knishes,” Ms. Silver said, noting that handmade knishes are being served at many updated Jewish delis. “I believe we are entering a golden age, where the round and square can coexist.” Recipes: More recipes are at