July 2024: Leslie Dannin Rosenthal edits a Jewish community cookbook

And other reasons to feel hope.

Happy July. This Thursday, we celebrate July 4th. Last Thursday night’s Presidential debate was polarizing on so many levels. Many of us experienced emotional fireworks in the wake of it. If you are obsessing about who is going to be elected President in November, we at Sweet Lab hope you are also able to find ways to write, read for pleasure and decompress. I’ve double-downed on my commitment to write every day this summer and love these lines from Jami Attenberg’s recent newsletter, Craft Talk:

And there is also this encroaching sense of the world that feels like its own kind of giant, ominous deadline. So we must fight for our time, fight for our right to write, create, make our art. This is a thing that is important to claim for ourselves.

One of the things I love to do in this newsletter is promote writers’ work. Maya Brosnick, news editor of the University of Rochester’s newspaper Campus Times, is interning for Sweet Lab this summer. Last week, she spoke with longtime Sweet Lab writer Leslie Dannin Rosenthal, who edited and published the cookbook, Greater MetroWest at the Table. Leslie, a lawyer and activist, is also the author of That Cake (Grande Dame Literary), This Daily Practice Became an Unexpected Comfort During Coronavirus (Kveller), That Time My Jewish Grandma Befriended Cassius Clay in Miami (Kveller), Snack Plate (Grande Dame Literary) and Entertaining Fish (Eat, Darling, Eat). Read Maya’s story about Leslie below.

In celebration of their 100 year anniversary, the Jewish Federation of Greater Metrowest New Jersey published Greater MetroWest at the Table, a cookbook full of recipes submitted by their community. The cookbook is the result of almost two years of work, co-led by Leslie Dannin Rosenthal and Debbie Platt Janoff.

Rosenthal is an accomplished cook and has amassed a large collection of cookbooks, but Greater MetroWest at the Table is the first cookbook she has edited.  The process started in 2022 with a call for community members to submit their favorite recipes to be considered for the book by a committee. “We put out a call for recipes on social media, in Jewish newspapers, by email, and to all of the partner agencies of the federation”  Rosenthal said. That call returned more than 300 recipes, and more than 300 people then volunteered to test them. Most recipes were tested twice.

“We weren’t looking for strictly traditional Ashkenazi Jewish recipes,” said Rosenthal.  “We were looking for anybody's favorite recipe that they like to make.” This resulted in a wide variety of dishes. “My favorite recipe in the book, and the most surprising because you would not expect it in a Jewish cookbook, is the recipe for tuna tartare,” said Rosenthal. “It’s delicious, it’s relatively easy, [and] it looks pretty.” 

Other recipes include Catalan Romesco sauce, roasted cauliflower with fresh herb dressing, Jamaican rice & beans, shakshuka, Sephardic frittata, Za'atar roasted carrots with labneh, knubel borscht, Middle Eastern chicken with tahini, turkey chili (with chocolate chips!), jambalaya, p’tcha (chicken feet gelatin) pumpkin chocolate chip muffins, rainbow challah, carrot cake, Skor bar trifle, apple sweet potato bake, and Rosenthal’s own green goddess potato salad. 

After selecting the recipes they would use (about 120), the committee made sure that the recipes and the stories associated with them were clear. “It was more about writing the recipes with the home cook in mind,” said Rosenthal.  “If I’m standing with this recipe trying to make it, what am I going to wonder about?”

After the recipes were complete and grouped together, the photographs taken, and the mockups printed, it was time for the cookbook to be published. “It was one of these things where it was truly a joy. It sometimes felt a little time crunchy, but it really has been tremendous fun,” said Rosenthal.  “To be able to hold it now in my hands and look at it, share it with people, it’s so exciting.” The cookbook is a celebration of the Metrowest Jewish community created by that community, something emphasized by the easy submission and volunteering process throughout its production. “We just really wanted it to be something the community produced,” said Rosenthal.

More than a year into the cookbook’s production, war broke out in Israel and Gaza. Despite the seeming insignificance of publishing a cookbook in the middle of a war, working to produce a celebration of her community was something Rosenthal held on to.  “This was such a relief to have,” Rosenthal  said.  “Something happy and creative and productive, and part of a shared effort, something positive.  It was just a wonderful thing to have in our lives at this time.”

Last week we led a terrific writing retreat on the Jersey Shore. It was a pleasure to work closely with other writers “in real life” and read and edit their work, as they revised it three days in a row. Mornings were spent writing and walking along the ocean. Afternoons we discussed work, snacked on Sees California Brittle and Wally’s crumb cake, soaked in the hot tub and swam in the bay. The weather was sunny and glorious, the writing beautiful and thought-provoking. We laughed a lot and ate well. Thank you to the fabulous writers who leaned into their work and each other.

Elizabeth Anderson, The Party (Making crab dip in college and yearning for Mom)

Ilene Goldman Tomato Soup for the Soul (Eating tomato soup with baby in hospital)

Lisa Greene, Where’s My Knife? (Mom with health issues wants to make lemon curd)

Leslie Dannin Rosenthal, Entertaining Fish (Mom’s recipe for dishwasher salmon)

We’ve launched a bimonthly, online book club. We will discuss how a book is structured and why it works. We’ll meet via Zoom on two Thursday nights, from 6-7 p.m, on August 1 and October 10. The discussions will be recorded so if you miss one, we will send it to you. We’ll read Leslie Jamison’s memoir Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story for August 1 and Percival Everett’s novel James for October 10. If there are books you want to discuss and unpack, tell us!

Elizabeth Anderson, The Party (Eat, Darling, Eat)

Lisa Greene, Making a Jewish Ritual for my Divorce (Reform Judaism)

Stephen King, On Impact: After an accident, learning to write again (nonfiction, The New Yorker)

Amichai Lau-Lavie, The Pride March Doesn’t Have a Place for Me (nonfiction, NYT)

Molly McCloskey, The Detroit Pistons Were My Father’s Second Family (nonfiction, The New Yorker)

Fiona McFarlane, Hostel, Demolition (fiction, The New Yorker), Lucy (fiction, Zoetrope-All Story)