Inside the Jewish Bakery: Recipes and Memories from the Golden Age of Jewish Baking - Tapa dura

"This is a book of enormous importance both as social history and for its traditional recipes. Stanley Ginsberg and Norman Berg have managed to artfully entwine bread and Jewish cultural identity like the very challah that has become its popular symbol. I learned many things I hadn't previously known and wanted to capture in my own loaves the tears I felt welling in my eyes as I was reminded, through their words, that bread is always more than just bread." -- Peter Reinhart "author of The Bread Baker's Apprentice"

More than a collection of recipes, Inside the Jewish Bakery chronicles the history and traditions—as well as the distinctive baked goods—of Ashkenazic Jewry in Eastern Europe and America. Drawing on sources as diverse as the Talmud, Sholom Aleichem and the yizkor books that memorialize communities destroyed in the Holocaust, the authors have crafted an engaging “edible history” that endows their recipes with a powerful sense of time and place.