Photo courtesy of Forward
From Four Birts Staff
April 8, 2024
Two months before Passover 2016, Yiddish cooking show co-host Eve Johonowitz and I interviewed renowned violinist Itzhak Perlman to learn about his favorite Passover recipes. I started dreaming. The goal was to select his two of them and show the viewer how to prepare them.
Given Perlman’s busy concert and teaching schedule, it was doubtful whether anything would happen with this.
we were wrong. Two weeks later, his secretary called back and said there was an opening the following week between courses he was teaching at the Juilliard School. When I hung up, I literally screamed. The following Tuesday, Eve and I, accompanied by videographer Nochem, transported the Forverts’ video equipment to the prestigious music school and were ushered into an empty classroom. Fifteen minutes later, the virtuoso was sitting in front of us.
“Would it be okay if I interviewed you in Yiddish?” I asked.
“far away? ” he asked, using a Yiddish expression meaning “why not?”
Knowing that I didn’t have much time, I quickly got to work on the nitty gritty. “What Passover food did you eat as a child?” Eve asked.
Perlman smiled and began praising her late mother’s amazing cooking skills. Both of his parents immigrated to Israel from Poland, so many of her dishes were related to Polish Jewish culinary traditions. Perlman himself was born in Tel Aviv in 1945.
The violinist talked about the many dishes his mother would prepare during the week of Passover. One was latkes fried in schmaltz (chicken fat), and of course I decided to omit the sour cream accompaniment. According to the laws of kashruth, meat and dairy ingredients were never served together.
There was also another development. Most of Radtke’s recipes call for grated raw potatoes to be fried in a thin layer, but his mother boiled the potatoes first. Then she mashed them with egg yolks to make thick patties and fried them.
Here Perlman shared memories of her mother’s Passover latkes before we rushed home to prepare.
Latke’s recipe is just one of many that Perlman has raved about. his mother’s matzo balls (knee Derekin Yiddish) she was similarly “great” Criskus (potato dumplings), also known as. Krizerek, It was prepared from raw grated potatoes and cooked in boiling water. “Gevezun vie a Yiddish gnocchi” (It was like Jewish gnocchi),” he said with a laugh.
In the second video, we selected recipes that viewers could easily make themselves. It’s a flavorful spread that Perlman’s mother made from mashed her potatoes, eggs, charred onions, and, of course, schmaltz. He said it tastes like heaven when spread on matzah.
Watch him recall all this with shameless excitement.
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