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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thanks for spending part of your day with us. With the Jewish High Holidays coming up, we figured some of you might be in need of some recipes to bring to your Rosh Hashanah celebrations or to your Yom Kippur breakfast gatherings, breakfast gatherings, but you don't need to be Jewish to partake of that most noble of Jewish food traditions. I'm talking about the nosh, both the verb and the noun. Not quite a meal, more than grabbing a bite. Noshing is a vibe, you might nosh in a bagel with a schmear or pita chips with hearty dips, soups, salad sandwiches, all noshable.

According to cookbook author Jake Cohen, a nosh is a snack served up as an act of love, whether the nosher is hungry or not. Jake Cohen hailing from Bayside Queens and a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, joins us to talk about his latest cookbook called, I Could Nosh: Classic Jew-ish Recipes Revamped for Everyday. Jake, welcome back to the show.

Jake Cohen: Hi. I love how you pronounce the title of the book. I feel like that's the thread that's happening is everyone's saying, "I could nosh."

Alison Stewart: I could nosh, little shoulder.

Jake Cohen: We love.

Alison Stewart: Shoulder got to go up. Hey, listeners, we'd like to get you in on this conversation. What does nosh mean to you? What goes into the act of noshing? What are your favorite nosh foods? Give us a call, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. You can call us up, join us on the radio, or you can always text to us if that's more convenient. Social media is available as well @AllOfItWNYC, the subject for the next 30 minutes is noshing. Let's start with your definition of nosh for you. It has a lot to do with the feeder as well. The person supplying the food. What are the factors that are important to go into the word nosh for you?

Jake Cohen: I really define it as grandma hospitality. What I mean by that is you want to nourish those you love, both yourself, your family, your friends. To me, it's the first thing you think about when someone comes over to your house, you always offer something to drink. Are you thirsty? Can I get you a glass of water? Whatever. This is that next extension of it. Are you hungry? Can I heat you up something? You want a little something sweet? When I think of those types of foods, it's not just a snack, but it's things that you just always have on hand to be ready to feed those you love.

It is the soups that you keep in the freezer so you could quickly defrost one, it is the chicken salad to make someone a sandwich. It's the sweets that you keep out on the counter to cut someone a little slice with a cup of coffee. That is the vibe of this book, and that is the vibe of reclaiming that grandma hospitality.

Alison Stewart: How is noshing bound up in broader Jewish identity when you think about that?

Jake Cohen: I think so clearly about Jewish food with the ritual it's attached to. When we think of all of these rituals, the Jewish New Year, so many of those foods are rooted in symbolism, adding sweetness and even something like the Sabbath every Friday where we're adding this extra layer of food is the connective tissue that builds community. It's what separates a gathering into a meal, into true intention of connection with those around you. When I think of the real usage of noshing and making sure that someone's fed when they come over, it is so rooted in our value systems.

It's not unique to just Jewish people, which is why this is a book for everyone. One of my favorite things is I share so many anecdotes about my family and my friends and my relationship. I have people from from all different backgrounds who see themselves and their family into our mishegoss.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: We're going to just do all the Yiddish words, we're we're going to just throw them all.

Jake Cohen: Yes, you know. Get your Duolingo out. We are ready.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Jake Cohen. The name of the book is, I Could Nosh: Classic Jew-ish Recipes Revamped for Everyday. Let's talk about that everyday part of it. When you think about the everydayness of it, how do you take some of these important foods, the part and part of tradition and angle them towards everyday?

Jake Cohen: That's something that I'm so passionate about because when I think of Jewish food as a whole, its representation in media, its actual practice of being cooked by Jews, it really is just relegated to the high holidays around Passover, around Rosh Hashanah, Hanukkah, but really these are foods that are so integral to nostalgia, and to family, and to my ideal comfort foods that I really think that they should be part of our everyday routine. What I wanted to do was create a system that empowers you to incorporate it in the same way you're like, "Oh, what am I going to make Tuesday night for dinner?" Instead of opening up your Italian cookbook or your Indian cookbook, you're going to open up your Jewish cookbook and maybe cholent's on the menu.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] Can I tell you, when I was out on medical leave, someone sent me a box from Katz's Deli.

Jake Cohen: Of course, as they should. That's what you do when someone is healing.

Alison Stewart: Doug. Thank you. Chef's Kiss.

Jake Cohen: It's my power move. I send that exact same box for Hanukkah to all of my closest friends and family. You send someone a meal, it's the same thing. Someone passes for a Shiva, the first thing I do, someone's sick, I'll go, I'm the type of person that gets on my bike with a couple of quarts of chicken soup and drops it off.

Alison Stewart: There you go. At the start of the book, you have 10 commandments of kitchen life. There's one my eyes went straight to number six, embrace the pivot. What is an example of embracing the pivot?

Jake Cohen: Not everything goes as planned. I think there is the real classic ones where, "All right, I burned something." [laughter] Then there are the other things where I want to make this recipe but my husband went to the store and got the wrong thing or I thought I had enough of X, but I actually don't." Then there are some recipes where it's just not going to happen. Like some baked goods, yes, you don't have any flour, you're not going to be able to make this. For a lot of these recipes, I really want people to take this as a starting point where they can start to really play with it, have fun, use different vegetables, play around with the different grains.

I typically call out in the head notes when you can start to like experiment. People think I'm going to get so protective of my recipes. Yes, when you switch up everything in the challah and it comes out terrible because you didn't listen, that's one thing. For something like a brisket where someone messaged and is like, "Hey, I really want to add in small potatoes to your brisket recipe." Go with God. Oh my God, that sounds delicious. Great. Embrace it.

Alison Stewart: When was a moment that you realized, early on your career, to embrace the pivot because you're formally trained and we talked to JJ Johnson at the top of this and he was describing how everything was very Eurocentric and it had to be everybody learns the same thing. You learn to make it one way.

Jake Cohen: Of course.

Alison Stewart: What was the day or the epiphany moment you had that you're like, "I could do this differently or I could change this up, or maybe you were forced to? [laughs]

Jake Cohen: Actually, I have two great answers to that. The first one is, actually, my great-grandmother's apple cake, which the recipes in this book. I wrote about it when I worked at Saveur Magazine and it was pretty much like they needed something and I was at the bottom of the masthead at the time and they're like, "All right, let's throw the Jewish kid a Rosh Hashanah story. It was my first time writing about family and Jewish food and it was so different. Again, my background was traditional French culinary training. I worked at Daniel, which at the time was a three Michelin-starred French restaurant and ABC kitchen. It was all like fine dining, Eurocentric and this was the first time where I was really diving into my representation of what comfort food is, what my family values around cooking are.

It was the first time where I really felt like myself, like I was adding to the conversation. I think there's so much noise in media, in the food world of what we think is going to be popular or what we think people want to cook when really it's like, "I want to just be sharing my perspective based on, this is the hand I've been dealt of my upbringing and how it has dictated the way I think about food, the way I think about gathering, the way I think about hospitality." When we think about embracing the pivot, when we shot my first cookbook, it was right before lockdown and I never got an author photo. I became known for this author photo of me with a background with laser beams holding up a challah, and that was done in Florida with a white sheet that my sister-in-law took the photo.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's funny.

Jake Cohen: I edited it, and we just made it happen because that's what you got to do.

Alison Stewart: Embrace the pivot. Another one of your commandments is curate your oil collection. What are oils I should have in my collection?

Jake Cohen: First off, a good extra virgin olive oil. I typically have two, something that's super fancy for drizzling finishing and then a big bottle for cooking, frying, baking. Almost all of my baking recipes have olive oil in it. I think it is my favorite fat to bake with. I think it's the secret that people don't think about because if you get a really nice fruity olive oil, it has a bit of acidity. I find that it works really well with the leaveners for a super fluffy cake versus a traditional oil. However, that being said, I always have vegetable oil on hand. I always have avocado oil and I love sunflower safflower as other alternatives for frying or neutral oil.

Alison Stewart: Because you have to think about the heat.

Jake Cohen: Exactly. Like deep frying, you're not going to use olive oil. You're going to use something. I love avocado and grapeseed for deep frying.

Alison Stewart: Someone just texted to us, "Hi, how are you? Eat was my great-grandmother's greeting any every time we visited her." [laughs]

Jake Cohen: That's it. We need to reclaim that. I think that we are so afraid to invite people into our homes, in our kitchens, where it's like, "Let's meet out, let's go for coffee." I find more and more that the greatest connections, both professional, personal, have all happened by me welcoming people into my home. I think it's super intimate, and it's something that we are a little afraid of as a society that I want to try to break.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a call. Risa is calling in from Westchester. Hi, Risa. You're on the air with Jake Cohen.

Risa: Hi. Thank you. First-time caller. I was relating that when it was my wedding, I was supposed to have an outdoor ceremony, but it was pouring rain, and in order to comfort me, everyone was saying, "Oh, it's because you're a nosher and that's why it's raining." [laughter] 41 years later, still married to a wonderful guy, and, yes, I still love to nosh and always have something in the freezer-

Jake Cohen: There we go.

Risa: -something ready to give to someone. I embrace the fact that I'm a nosher.

Jake Cohen: I love it.

Alison Stewart: Such a good story. Thank you for calling in, Risa, call again. Let's talk to Mary calling in from Teaneck, New Jersey. Hi, Mary.

Mary: Hi. How are you?

Alison Stewart: Doing great. What's your nosh story?

Mary: My mom took care of my daughter when I went to work many years ago. She was just a little infant. I went to work when she was six months old. I came in after work to pick my daughter up, and there's my daughter standing holding a potato chip. I said to my mother, "Mom, what are you thinking about?" She says, "Well, a girl's got to know how to nosh."

Jake Cohen: Love it. As she does.

Mary: Now flash forward many, many years, my daughter is almost the mother of two, the other one is coming in a few weeks, but my granddaughter is very much nosher.

Jake Cohen: I love it.

Mary: Noshing is love.

Jake Cohen: Noshing is love.

Alison Stewart: There's your T-shirt.

Jake Cohen: That's it. I'm going to get a lower back tattoo that says, "Noshing is love."

Alison Stewart: [laughs] We're talking to Jake Cohen. The name of the book is I Could Nosh: Classic Jew-ish Recipes Revamped for Every Day. Listeners, let's hear your noshing story. What does a nosh mean to you? What goes into the act of noshing? Do you have a favorite food you like to nosh on? Give us a call, 212-433 WNYC, 212-433-9692. You can call in and join us on air, or you can text to us at that number. Our social media is available as well @AllOfItWNYC. There are some clever section titles, Jake. Holla Back, Nosh Pit, Nothing To Schmier But Schmier Itself. What is one that didn't make it that you still love?

Jake Cohen: Oh, that's a great question. I think the schmier one was there were a couple of options I think I ended up going with. What did I go with? Schmeer Factor.

Alison Stewart: Schmear Factor.

Jake Cohen: I think it was Schmeer Factor, but I was originally Nothing To Schmier But Schmeer Itself. There were a couple of options. I had a whole bunch. A lot of them are references to my favorite food elements of TV shows. The cake one is my favorite. It's who serves coffee without a piece of cake? It's from Seinfeld. There's this really great episode where George's mother is screaming in the car. She's like, "We're sitting there like idiots, drinking coffee without a piece of cake." Because that's what you do. Someone's there, you're giving them some coffee. You have to have something sweet out. It's so ingrained culturally that you don't think about it, but it's part of the way that we interact with our community.

Alison Stewart: The producer of this segment, they made the apple cake from your cookbook. What is the secret to it? Because it was delicious.

Jake Cohen: I will say I already brought it up a little bit, but it's the olive oil. It is really, really great. I wanted to offer a ton of recipes. I am not personally kosher. However, I want to create recipes that are really going to be able to be used by the entire community, whether you are kosher or anything in between. I really got into parve baking, which means cutting dairy out, which I already was doing because it's 2023. Who has dairy anymore? It was a beautiful challenge. I love a baking challenge. To find out ways to create moisture and texture in cakes without any dairy, it was actually really fun, so to create an applesauce and olive oil-based cake that's super moist and stays good for days, which is great because you got to keep it out on the counter in case someone stops by.

Alison Stewart: Exactly. Dairy friends, dairy lovers, we do have a segment for you next. Don't worry. We'll be talking to you soon.

Jake Cohen: Oh, I got schmears in the book, too. There's plenty of dairy.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] When you're talking about challah, you take it beyond-- It's beautiful as is. Zach also made a challah, it was delicious, but you think about other things we can do with challah.

Jake Cohen: Completely.

Alison Stewart: What are some other options?

Jake Cohen: It goes into one of the things I talked about in my intro. We're so focused on what's next. You make a good challah. What's next? To me, I was like, "Let's double down on this yeasted dough, which is already such a feat to master." The idea is, once you do that, you can either split your dough and make two challahs for any occasion, or you can make one challah, and you can use half to wrap hot dogs and make what's called Moses in the blanket. In America, we just say pig in a blanket, even though we use beef hot dogs, but it is the best. The best appetizer, the best snack, and you can cut them up into pieces, or I love--

You know you're going to have an entire hot dog by the end of it, so you might as well just have the whole thing. The one that's the most popular, I would say, is the challah monkey bread. I've made so many things for so many occasions, but when you flip out a fresh thing of monkey bread, and it's covered in this powdered sugar, vanilla glaze, and it's caramel-coated and warm, people go crazy.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Alicia calling in from East Brunswick. Hi, Alicia. Thanks for calling in.

Alicia: Hi. So glad to be talking to you guys about one of my favorite subjects, food. It's connected so much to my family and our celebrations. I remember my mother-in-law, after my son was born, was more concerned about the nosh spread we were going to have for his bris than even the naming or the rabbi, anything like that. Same thing with my baby daughter's naming.

Jake Cohen: I love it. ,

Alicia: Which deli are we getting this from? Which bakery? Are you doing dairy? Are you doing meat? Oh, you shouldn't do meat that early. It was the whole thing.

Jake Cohen: She's not wrong.

Alicia: No, she's definitely not wrong. We made sure we got it from the best locations because we didn't want to embarrass her.

Jake Cohen: [laughs] Iconic.

Alison Stewart: Thanks for calling in. Deb from Teaneck has quite a story. It says here a wee little nosh story. Hi, Deb.

Deb: Hi, Alison. Glad you're back. Glad you're feeling good and that people sent you all the noshes. [laughter] My sister and I grew up much like Jake. Food was everything, and my sister has taken it to the Nth degree, whereby she's always asking everybody if they're hungry and making sure they're fed. Now, all of our kids are 29, 33. They were on a road trip at one point, maybe about 10 years ago. My sister says, who's hungry? And out of her purse pulls a cooked baked sweet potato. It's become the stuff of family legend.

[laughter]

Jake Cohen: But that's everything.

Alison Stewart: Why?

Jake Cohen: Why not? Lamalo.

Alison Stewart: Why did she have a sweet potato in her purse? [laughs]

Deb: We just don't know. She had it in the fridge. She threw it in just in case, and she offered it up.

Alison Stewart: That is somebody you want in an emergency.

Jake Cohen: That's it.

Alison Stewart: Has a potato in the purse anytime somebody's hungry. Deb, thank you for calling in. We're talking to Jake Cohen. The name of the book is I Could Nosh: Classic Jew-ish Recipes Revamped for Every Day. You are serious, though, in the book about your pantry?

Jake Cohen: Yes.

Alison Stewart: That there are certain things you have to have in your pantry to be nosh successful?

Jake Cohen: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What are three things you really think people need to have in their pantry?

Jake Cohen: In the fridge, what I always have is a jar of pickled onions. It's super easy and quick. It's a red onion, vinegar, salt, sugar and sumac. Sumac is this incredible spice that I think everyone should have in their pantry itself. It's a dried berry. You can find it in most grocery stores now or whenever you go for, Persian kebab, they typically have little packets. What my mother-in-law taught me is you just take all those packets, and you put them in your purse, and you take them home, and then you have a never-ending supply of sumac. I would say pickled onions, compound butters. I have this roasted garlic butter, and I use it for everything.

I use it for garlic knots in the book, as well as also just whenever you need to zhuzh up something, it adds such incredible flavor. Lastly, I have this master spice rub, and what I wanted to do was recreate, kind of gives the vibes of the 11 Madison Park duck that they used to do before they went vegan, which was covered in coriander seeds. I just love coriander. You just use your pepper mill to coarsely grind black pepper and coriander, and you make this combination of old dried spices that I'm sure you have in your pantry. It's the perfect thing to just sprinkle on chicken, on vegetables, on whatever you need.

Alison Stewart: That's smart. All right. This is a great text we got.

Jake Cohen: All right.

Alison Stewart: Says, "I'm Asian and not remotely Jewish, but somehow understand and relate to every single element of Jake Cohen's worldview."

Jake Cohen: That's it. That's what I love because there's nothing more that I love as a consumer of cookbooks and content, or even just television and movies of seeing worlds that are so far away from mine and yet we are the same because our outlooks on family, on community are so similar. That's the beautiful thing about what food can do as a connector. It's why I am on this campaign that Jewish food isn't just for Jews. That we all should be celebrating it.

Alison Stewart: She said it earlier, and it's been kind of sticking with me. That idea of people always wanting to go out rather than bringing people into their homes and into their orbits. Do you have any thoughts on why that is and what we can do to turn that ship around? Not that we don't love our restaurants. We talked about them all day yesterday, but that idea of coming back to the home a little bit.

Jake Cohen: The fact that you just said coming back to the home, I think one of the things that has come up is there's been this demonization around home making which it's this interesting like push and pull because you obviously, it's like everyone wants to build a career and they want to enjoy a city and create a community and take in the culture of where they are. Yet at the same time, there is a true art into turning a house into a home and creating space where you can gather both small and large. Sometimes people are like, "Oh, well I don't have a table." It's like when my husband and I moved in together, I had to throw out my table so he can move in his piano because he's also a classical pianist.

We made it work. We got a crank-up coffee table, we got dinner trays. Whatever it takes to make it happen. Nothing has to be fancy. You could do everything on paper plates.

Alison Stewart: Nobody's going to judge you. I think-

Jake Cohen: No one's going to judge you.

Alison Stewart: -we've all gotten so used to people having comments and posting, like, "Everybody's so judgy." Nobody's judging you really. You're right in your home. If they are, they're your real friends. [laughs]

Jake Cohen: Exactly. What you really have to be doing is curating an experience. That's the most important thing, is creating a vibe in which someone feels loved. Because that's the only thing that they're going to remember. They're not going to remember what kind of dish they ate off of. They're going to remember how they felt.

Alison Stewart: All right. Someone's got another name, another chapter, potential chapter. Take a trip to Nashville.

Jake Cohen: Take a trip to Nashville. I love that. I'm not going to lie. You were the first one to come up with, I saw a Nash Hashanah and I was like, "Oh my God. How did I think of that? Oh my God."

Alison Stewart: [laughs] Plenty of knishes to see.

Jake Cohen: Oh, love that.

Alison Stewart: Oh, they're coming in. The texts are coming in. [laughs]

Jake Cohen: One of the things I've been signing cookbooks is Best Knishes.

Alison Stewart: Excellent. Speaking of book signings before I let you go, I think it was on your website, you have some heavy hitters.

Jake Cohen: I try.

Alison Stewart: You will be in conversation with. Shout out a couple of your events in the area.

Jake Cohen: Oh, tonight. Oh my God, I cannot believe it's here. Tonight, Streicker Center at Temple Emanu-El on 65th and 5th, I'm in conversation with Isaac Mizrahi, who's become such an incredible friend.

Alison Stewart: As one does.

Jake Cohen: Another gay Jew we love. Tomorrow, Jersey, I'm coming to Words Bookstore in Maplewood with my dear friend, Taffy Akner, the writer of Fleishman Is In Trouble.

Alison Stewart: Of course.

Jake Cohen: Icon. Then Friday, this is the craziest thing. I'm doing a book signing at Acme Smoked Fish in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the best locks in the city. We're all going to need it for Rosh Hashanah and Papa Bagels is going to be there baking fresh challah egg bagels for the first time.

Alison Stewart: You've got quite a week ahead of you. The name of the book is I Could Nosh: Classic Jew-ish Recipes Revamped for Everyday. Everybody who called in and shared their stories and their puns through text, thank you so much. Jake, have a great week.

Jake Cohen: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It.

 

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