Jewish Cooking from the Orient

The Sephardic cooking lovefest continues at the NYTimes. This time it's the cooking of Syrian, Egyptian and Lebanese Jews. Always delicious, always labor intensive. From the article:

Ms. Hasson is famous in the community for her typically Lebanese fruit preserves, like tiny apples cooked in sugar syrup, jellied quince paste and finely shredded and candied spaghetti squash, all traditional sweets for the first month of the Jewish year, which began at sundown on Sept. 22. “In Beirut, we all lived together, and the women cooked together all day long,” she said. “Everyone would sit down and help with the stuffing and the folding, someone would make a bowl of tabbouleh, and that way no one was alone doing all the work.”

The tradition of women sitting together in a kitchen cooking and gossiping may dissipate with modernity, but it's still kept up in these pockets of isolated ethnic communities. I always think what a shame it is when all that detail-oriented food is gobbled up in less time than it took to make. But the joy of making that food resides in the process, not necesarily the consuming of it. And these Brooklyn women have no problem toiling away in kitchens with $11 million pricetags.