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New York Jewish Week by way of JTA — Padma Lakshmi’s “Style the Nation,” the acclaimed meals docuseries, returned to Hulu this week — with schmaltz and pickles.
In a particular, four-part vacation version, Lakshmi highlights conventional vacation meals from areas across the US — she visits Los Angeles to have fun the Korean New 12 months, Miami to study Cuban Christmas and Cape Cod to study meals traditions of the Wampanoag Nation, and to deconstruct the vacation narrative of Thanksgiving.
To study Hanukkah? Lakshmi solely wanted to journey across the nook from her East Village house. Within the episode, titled “Blissful Challah Days,” she visits the Decrease East Aspect, the place a whole lot of hundreds of Jews lived after immigrating from Jap Europe across the flip of the twentieth century.
The episode is a New York Jewish meals lover’s dream. Lakshmi — the writer, mannequin and meals mogul who’s been nominated for 11 Emmys for her internet hosting/judging work on Bravo’s “Prime Chef” (her Jewish co-host Gail Simmons has been nominated for 2) — makes her first cease at Russ and Daughters appetizing store on Houston Road, a Decrease East Aspect landmark since 1914. The store is run by Josh Russ Tupper and Niki Russ Federman, great-grandchildren of the shop’s authentic proprietor, Joel Russ.
At Russ and Daughters, Lakshmi learns to make latkes and samples most of the retailer’s signature Ashkenazi choices: caviar, schmaltz, herring and liver. Lakshmi subsequent visits the Tenement Museum, the Pickle Guys — an Essex Road mainstay since 2010 — and New York’s Central Synagogue, the place she discusses the historical past of Hanukkah with Rabbi Ari Lorge.
After talking with Ruth Zimbler, a Holocaust survivor, she learns how you can make holishkes (stuffed cabbage) with the creators of the artisanal gefilte-fish model Gefilteria. She additionally brings her daughter Krishna alongside to share a brisket and kugel meal with Deb Perelman, the meals blogger behind Smitten Kitchen.
The episode tells viewers the Yiddish title for every of the meals Lakshmi tastes, and celebrates the liberty Jewish communities should follow their faith in America. All through, Lakshmi compares the Jewish immigrant and household expertise along with her personal expertise immigrating to the US from India as a toddler.
Lakshmi additionally takes care to de-emphasize the function Hanukkah has historically performed in Jewish tradition — she is aware of the vacation is just not as religiously vital as Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and even Passover. She tells her non-Jewish viewers members that, opposite to in style gentile perception, the vacation is just not “Jewish Christmas.”
As a substitute, Lakshmi makes use of Hanukkah as a option to discover how Jewish-American tradition got here to be — its resilience, its group, its assimilation, its wrestle, with meals on the core of all of it. She additionally explores her personal relationship to the oil-drenched meals that play an vital symbolic function throughout Hanukkah.
“Personally,” she stated, “I’ve by no means wanted an excuse to eat something fried.”
The “Style the Nation” episode, “Blissful Challah Days,” is streaming now on Hulu.
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