WAS YOUR MOTHER A SHITEREIN COOK?

Nationally known food writer Sharon Boorstin didn’t even know what that Yiddish expression meant until she wrote her new memoir/cookbook…

Let Us Eat Cake: Adventures in Food and Friendship

Sharon’s mother, Fanny Horowitz Silver, explained that a shiterein cook is one like herself, her own mother—and all the Jewish women she’s ever known. They’re women who cook by feel, by gut instinct:

“You throw in a little of this, a little of that. Who needs a recipe?”

In her touching, amusing and nostalgic book, Sharon explores how the connections between women are strengthened through cooking and food. She recalls growing up in a food-obsessed Jewish family in Seattle in the fifties and early sixties where she bonded with her grandma Ann, who spoke only Yiddish, by helping her make blintzes.

As teenagers, Sharon and her girlfriends dated Jewish boys and kept their reputations as “good girls,” all the while baking cakes and chocolate-chip cookies, practice, they thought, for the day they’d become housewives like their mothers. As adults, however, Sharon’s generation of Jewish women ended up not only running households and having kids, but having careers. Still, they have made time to pass down their Jewish food traditions to their daughters.

Sharon was inspired to write the book when she was cleaning out an old desk and discovered a notebook of recipes that she’d gathered from family and friends when she was a newlywed. It led her to reexamine her relationships with those women and to reconnect with some she hadn’t seen in years.

Sharon Boorstin was the restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and her articles appear in Bon Appetit, Food Arts, More and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications. Along the way in her career as a food writer, she has bonded with other female food professionals including Barbara Lazaroff (Mrs. Wolfgang) Puck, the Too Hot Tamales and Julia Child. In Let Us Eat Cake, Boorstin conveys their food memories along with her own. Many are Jewish women whose Jewish upbringing contributed to their passion for food.

With dozens of nostalgic photos and delicious recipes—including Italian chopped liver and Wolfgang Puck’s matzoh—from memorable times in Sharon’s life and the lives of other women, Let Us Eat Cake: Adventures in Food and Friendship will inspire Jewish women to remember and cherish their own experiences with food and friends – and their Jewish mothers and grandmothers.