I think one of the things that makes food completely fascinating is, it is an actual cultural art form that changes without us noticing it, in pretty substantial ways. At the James Beard Foundation, you know, we are an organization dedicated to a man who lived his life and wrote most of his work about food from 1940 to 1980, which doesn't seem like it's that long ago. But when you look at the books, when you look at his recipes, they don't really resonate today. It's not how we eat any more. You don't take a stick of butter and a gallon of cream and and put it in a dish, and certainly not a kosher dish if there's meat involved. But when I think of it, Ashkenazi food, I feel that same way. It is a nostalgic cuisine. Again, it has a place and there are elements that I think have almost gone mainstream. And I think that the duty for us is to mark those elements as having come from someplace else. So when you see rugelach at a Starbucks or bagels at the airport, I think it's up to the food historians and the cultural "foodies" to note that those have those are not a generic, neutral gastronomic event, but actually come from this long history and tradition of Ashkenazi cuisine, whether or not they remain marked, or that would even be desirable if they did,

I'm not so sure. We're living in a funny food moment where a kind of craft approach, let's age and and hone and make things that people forgot you could even make. And I'm thinking of artisanal beers and I'm thinking of fermentation and I'm thinking of all sorts of things. So those things have become more part of mainstream than you might have ever thought. There is a certain nostalgia built into them. But but they resonate today with that nostalgia of another time. And I think that's part of their appeal. But trends come and go, and themes was that celebration and holiday foods became normal. So Friday night dinner became every night dinner. So Challach became the bread of breakfast on Monday, not just the sort of ritual bread of Friday. And you see a lot of that in the history and the diaries and the notes of new immigrants, because this was really a land of plenty and food was plentiful and cheap and you could celebrate every day. And that's not just unique to the Jews who arrived. So it might even be one of the things that, you know, ultimately led to its decrease in popularity, is that it became everything. And you do now find Challah everywhere and you do now find bagels everywhere. And you find, to some extent, pastrami everywhere. And so the mainstreaming of Ashkenazi food is almost the sort of natural progression of that lifecycle.

But in order for it to be reclaimed, let's say, I think it would need to be separated and de-mainstreamed in some way. One thing I would think about the future is who's got the fast casual Ashkenazi food concept? I don't know what that is and I don't know that that's even desirable. Might be fast to start, but slow afterwards, because "heavy" weighs you down. But it's hard for me to imagine, again, a "distinct approach Ashkenazi food", that becomes very common, without being marked as "of a moment of a time, of a community, of a class". That said, I think within the context of what is American food, if we look for the things that have Ashkenazi resonances, those continue and those spread and rugelach is the perfect thing. I saw Martha Stewart, you know, give suggestion 20 years ago to give rugelach as Christmas gifts. It's a shanda in some ways, if you want to take it to its full extreme. But that could be the ultimate honor for a particular food that was once maligned and once sort of earmarked as "other", and perhaps even undesirable. So it depends on your perspective.

And I know that what I'm saying could seem almost sad or certainly make one wistful for a time when things were different,

but I actually think that if a large part of what has become known to be American cuisine has its roots, in fact, in Ashkenazi food, then that to me is a type of success. That's what the Jews wanted when they came. And that's what they got in some ways, to make themselves so woven into the fabric of this new country and this new culture that they wouldn't be a distinction from it.

I have a direct and sort of deep personal connection to Ashkenazi food. The food that formed me was Ashkenazi food. My father was from an Orthodox family in Brooklyn. My mother was from a Jewish family in New Jersey. And the food that she cooked, certainly even when she was... I mean, we were not an observant family, but the sort of spectrum of food fit very nicely into a sort of New York Ashkenazi Jewish ethos. And so when I think about, you know, what my cuisine is, what I have an authentic right to claim, it's roast chicken and matzo ball soup and and breaded fish and Jewish spaghetti, which was a family thing that we thought was a much more widely-known dish. And all these sorts of things resonate with those flavours and those textures and those warm, fuzzy feelings. And I've done a lot to try to make that food in a way that counteracts the more common narrative that it was overcooked and dry and tasteless and horrible and the food was better in the army than it was at home and all those sorts of things, which were probably true. I mean, I'm famous for saying, not just among the Jewish community, that just because your grandmother cooked it doesn't mean she was a good cook. And I know we have a sort of pride, those sorts of stories, in a funny way, that everything was supposed to have been better then, and better by someone like our grandmother who made it. I don't believe that to be true. There are a lot of bad cooks out there in the world in every culture.

But I've always thought one of my missions was to make Ashkenazi Jewish food that sort of brought the information of a trained and educated food person to the palate, and to the technique, and to the kitchen, so to speak, and then translated that to the table. And I think it's important that when we remember the things that we are, or even when we try to sort of draw a circle around what is Ashkenazi food, that we don't lose sight of quality of flavor, of textures, and taste - all the things that that we've come to prize in sort of fine food. I think one of the challenges of all Jewish food is that they are more directly connected to the cuisines of the areas in which the Jews found themselves than they are to each other. And the things that have come to mark Ashkenazi Jewish food, certainly from the perspective of Americans, is New York City at a certain time, in a certain place of history, that was dominant for all the sorts of socio-political reasons that were true at that time, and that continue to radiate out of that moment. I think of food as a language. And by that I mean, not that that we say the name of a dish and that means something to you. But I actually think that there is a way that we communicate through food that is very different from the way that we communicate through other things, whether it's words or art or music or what have you.

And so when we're thinking at the Beard Foundation of programmes that we can do, or other sort of programmes that we participate in, I participate, I in personally, I think there's a rich opportunity to use Ashkenazi Jewish food as a shared language to help communicate some things. And perhaps that might be the value that that we have in preserving it as a complete object in some ways. But in the New York context, there is a resonance of Jewishness that is part of the fabric of the city. There's something that hooks people who have any reference to it, that makes it fun. I think we are all at this moment where food has become such an element of our culture, of contemporary. It's not just a pastime. We feed ourselves. we watch food, we consume it in the media, we consume it in social media, we consume it in stories over dinner - all sorts of ways. And and I think that need to consume new and interesting and authentic things makes an opportunity for so much food to be part of that conversation, to broaden the vocabulary of the language of food, let's say. Ashkenazi Jewish food adds to that, and gives those who have a relationship with it something to say, a point of view to add to that conversation, to inform that language. You know, whether it's going to change the way people eat, I don't know. I'm not hopeful, but I hope it doesn't disappear.