A cookbook is hatched

From Art Spiegelman to Miri Eisen, 50 Jewish personalities from 11 different countries contributed recipes, anecdotes and history to ‘One Egg Is a Fortune’

By AMY SPIRO
Judy Kempler and Pnina Jacobson (photo credit: Courtesy)
Judy Kempler and Pnina Jacobson
(photo credit: Courtesy)
If you’ve ever had a hankering to make Neshama Carlebach’s recipe for Bin-Bin Chicken, or Alan Dershowitz’s Salt ‘n’ Pepper Crusted Beef, then this is the book for you.
Fifty Jewish personalities from 11 different countries contributed recipes, anecdotes and history to One Egg Is a Fortune: Memories and Recipes to Share, compiled by Pnina Jacobson and Judy Kempler.
From Olympic swimming gold medalist Lenny Krayzelburg, who recounts how his dad would come and cook breakfast for him when he was training for the 2000 Sydney Olympics, to Lt.-Col. (res.) Miri Eisen, who served as Ehud Olmert’s spokeswoman and tells the tale of the first felafel she ate in Israel after immigrating with her family at age nine, the faces, memories and personalities that make up the book are varied. Krayzelburg shares a recipe for a Russian breakfast omelette while Eisen contributes one for pan-fried fish with saffron-infused tehina sauce.
The book’s contributors demonstrate how food plays a role in all walks of life, from diplomacy to family, art, music and religion.
In the political arena, Dennis Ross, former US Middle East envoy, recounts being served a meal of roast chicken and potatoes by Yasser Arafat in Tunis.
Lord Greville Janner, a retired British MP, tells how, as an 18-year-old serviceman, he was taken to a DP camp in Germany for a remembrance service. In the single-story building that had become the camp’s orphanage, Janner experienced “the most memorable meal of my life.”
“The food was grim: dry brown bread, inedible gruel and tea or juice. The lad beside me taught me my first word of Yiddish: “Ess,” he commanded. “Eat, Gabriel.”
Janner’s experience in the camp motivated his life work: He became the youngest war crimes investigator in the British army and later, as president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, led the fight to gain reparations for Holocaust victims.
Tovah Feldshuh, the Broadway actress best known for portraying Golda Meir in Golda’s Balcony, wrote that chicken soup is her ultimate Jewish penicillin.
“The opening line from the show Golda’s Balcony is, ‘I know you think of me as Mama-le-Golda, who makes chicken soup for her soldiers...,’” she writes.
“Chicken soup is a meal in itself and during the run of Golda’s Balcony in New York, I had my mother’s chicken soup every day. With over six hundred performances, that’s a lot of chicken soup!” Dudu Fisher, the legendary Israeli singer, provided the inspiration for the book’s title with his story of being fed by his grandmother.
“Having survived the Holocaust with virtually nothing to eat, she only wanted to see me as a fat little boy. When I was a small child aged four or five, I wasn’t a big fresser, a Yiddish word for a big eater,” he writes. So to convince him to clear his plate, Fisher’s grandmother would pay him for each food he ate, with a specially designed price list.
“A piece of bread thickly spread with pure butter was worth ten aggarot... a large chunk of yellow cheese was an extra 15 cents; sour cream was a further 25 cents and an egg a fortune.”
Chaim Topol, best known for his role as the beloved Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, shares a story about dining with former Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek, before ending with a joke (and a recipe for fish quenelles with two sauces).
“A rabbi and a priest were having breakfast,” he writes. “The priest ordered bacon and eggs and turned to the rabbi: ‘Rabbi, when are you going to start enjoying some of this delicious bacon?’ ‘At your wedding!’ replied the rabbi.”
One of the highlights of the book is a contribution from Art Spiegelman, the cartoonist renowned for his Pulitzer Prizewinning Maus, a graphic novel that traces the story of his Holocaust survivor parents.
Spiegelman submitted a handwritten and illustrated recipe for kapusniak – a sauerkraut soup.
The book is filled with beautiful fullpage photographs that make for pleasant flipping through, and the anecdotes retold by the contributors make for interesting reading. It isn’t particularly well organized because of its nature of random contributions to a volume rather than a curated tome, so it feels more like a coffee table book than a cookbook.
But the most disappointing thing about One Egg is a Fortune is its unclear intent.
One would expect a book filled with contributions from famous and well-known figures to be a charity project, and according to the editors, it is. “Part of the proceeds” will support “Jewish aged care,” they write. But without a named charity or clear amount of proceeds set out, the reader can’t help but feel a little duped. At press time, there was one mention of a contribution on the book’s website of partial proceeds to the Jewish Centre on Aging in Sydney.