Having A (Matzah) Ball

Every year, households across Louisiana celebrate the eight-day festival of Passover. On this week's show, we’re bringing in the experts to help us explore Jewish food traditions old and new. 

We speak with Joyce Goldstein, author of The New Mediterranean Jewish Table, about sephardic recipes of the Jewish diaspora. In compiling her book, Joyce set out to demystify the diverse traditions of Jewish cooking in the Mediterranean region.

Next, we check in with a kosher experimentalist, food blogger Elizabeth Kurtz. Driven by a lack of kosher options for inventive palettes, Elizabeth is carving out new ways to follow the laws of kashrut in her latest book, Celebrate: Food, Family, Shabbos.

Longtime New Orleanians will certainly remember local Jewish food authority, Mildred Covert. For years, Mildred wrote regularly columns for the Times-Picayune, exploring the ways to eat Creole and Cajun while keeping kosher. We honor her life and memory at Passover time with an archived interview.

We also hear about Elissa Altman’s unique upbringing. In her second memoir Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw, Elissa explores how tradition, religion, and the forbidden impacted her childhood growing up in Queens, New York. 

Finally, we hear about a clandestine Passover seder for the Jewish chefs of New Orleans, organized by Chef Daniel Esses of Three Muses. Daniel fills us in on his own continually evolving seder traditions.