Rating: 
Summary: Certainly a very interesting book
Review: This is not a book that you just open when you are ready to start cooking. This is a book that you spend Sunday morning in bed reading for two or three hours before you start cooking. It gets you in the mood. The photos of the vanished Jewish communities of Europe and the Middle East put these recipes into the context of archeology. You feel like you are going on a dig while reading about the evolution, migration, and diaspora dispersal of these favorite family recipes, some of which survived the very cultures that they were created in.
It made me want to cook, which I almost never do....
Rating: 
Summary: History, Culture, Pictures and Food
Review: This is not a book that you just open when you are ready to start cooking. This is a book that you spend Sunday morning in bed reading for two or three hours before you start cooking. It gets you in the mood. The photos of the vanished Jewish communities of Europe and the Middle East put these recipes into the context of archeology. You feel like you are going on a dig while reading about the evolution, migration, and diaspora dispersal of these favorite family recipes, some of which survived the very cultures that they were created in.
It made me want to cook, which I almost never do....
Rating:
Summary: Best of the Best
Review: This wonderful cookbook/history book has become the favourite one on my bookshelf (of 250 volumes). The recipes are clear and the explanations are detailed and well thought out. When I reach for this book, Claudia Roden is with me in my kitchen, talking to me, guiding me like a loving sister.
Rating: 
Summary: Lack of balance ruins the book
Review: Why did Claudia Roden decide to write a book called "The Book of Jewish Food"? She would have been better off writing "The Book of Sephardi Jewish Food", because that's clearly her interest. The Ashkenazi section is about a third of the size of the Sephardi. It's true that the Sephardim and Mizrachim have very diverse and interesting cuisines that are often unknown in the West, and that Ashkenazi food is often seen as staid peasant cooking. But if Sephardi food is what you're interested in, write a book on that. Her disinterest in Ashkenazi cooking is reflected in the recipes. For example, for gefilte fish she only gives the English recipe. Only in England is gefilte fish made with saltwater fish such as hake. Everywhere else, it's still made with freshwater fish such as pike and whitefish. If Ms. Roden had done as much research on Ashkenazi cooking as she did on Sephardi, she would have discovered that there is richness and depth to it too. The Sephardi recipes are very good and the historical information interesting, but I can't rate this book more than 2 stars simply because what it claims to be and what it is are so very different.
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