Tradition! Meet the women preserving the recipes every Jewish cook needs

Back in 2006, a group of seven Jewish women in Sydney, Australia, came together to write a cookbook for charity. They’d meet on a Monday morning to share ideas and try out recipes, and before long they had a name – Monday Morning Cooking Club (MMCC) – and a shared mission: to collect, document and celebrate traditional Jewish recipes from the older generation. What started out as a small, local project quickly expanded to cover the whole country – and soon went global, with Jews from all over the world sharing their much-loved family recipes, along with the treasured memories and stories associated with them.

Twenty years later, much has changed – in MMCC and the wider world. MMCC is now made up of just three members – Lisa Goldberg (their “chief pot-stirrer”), Natanya Eskin and Merelyn Chalmers – and their weekly meet-ups are a thing of the past. Yet their fifth cookbook, A Year of Jewish Cooking: Recipes we can’t live without, is still grounded in their founding principles: preserving Jewish recipes for future generations and their not-for-profit status, with all proceeds from the sale of this book, like their others, going to charity.

When I connect with Goldberg and Eskin over a video call, they tell me that unlike their other books, which were created for a general audience, A Year of Jewish Cooking was developed with a very specific audience in mind: the next generation of Jewish cooks. Their aim, Goldberg explains, was to create a “guidebook for the next generation on Jewish tradition”, with Eskin adding that they wanted it to be “a complete book that they could follow for the whole year, and have everything that they needed”.

Challah and dips – including chopped liver, egg and onion and avocado – from A Year of Jewish Cooking (Photo: Alan Benson)[Missing Credit]

With this goal in mind, A Year of Jewish Cooking is packed full of the (mostly) Ashkenazi classics Jewish cooks turn to again and again, from challah and cholent, to brisket and bagels, kugel and kreplach. A Year of Jewish Cooking is, they explain, “part best of”. Alongside completely new recipes developed especially for the book, it also contains classic MMCC recipes – tweaked and perfected – which have “resonated” with them over the years. “We can’t say they’re the best recipes from all our amazing recipes,” Goldberg says, “but they are the ones that the three of us have been cooking over and over, and that really have found a place in our own homes.”

With an astonishing 450-odd recipes in their archives, this process was far from easy. “It was sort of like picking your favourite child,” Goldberg says. “We had all become so attached to so many different recipes, and at some point we had to let some of them go.” Later, explaining their process, Eskin tells me: “If you really wanted a recipe, you had to fight for it. You had to make it over and over again, and take it and show the others how good it was. And if that’s how you felt about it, then you would do that. Otherwise, you’d let it go.”

MMCC's roasted apple cake – which took a year to develop (Photo: Alan Benson)[Missing Credit]

Of the new recipes, the one they’re proudest of is their roasted apple cake, which came from Goldberg and Eskin’s desire to create “the best apple cake we’d ever had”. The process took about a year of back and forth, with Goldberg explaining “we researched, we cooked, researched, cooked, and I would make a cake and drop it over to Natanya, and she would do the same, and over the months we’d get excited – this is it! – and she’d go ‘na’ or the other way around.” Eventually, they landed on a recipe they both loved. “The joy of joys is when you find that’s the one; it’s just unbelievable,” she says.

The sharing of old traditions, and making of new ones, really sits at the heart of this book and the MMCC project overall, and is something both women can talk about from experience. “My family never had egg and onion on our table, it was always just egg salad made with mayonnaise,” Eskin tells me. “But since Lisa introduced egg and onion way, way back, one of our very first recipes 20 years ago, it’s now entrenched and is truly a family tradition,” she says. Without missing a beat, Goldberg jumps in adding: “The same... the avocado dip that Natanya shared, it was never part of my Shabbat, and now I don’t have a Shabbat without it. We’ve sort of done a little swap, it’s quite beautiful, actually.”

Chocolate 'challah and butter' pudding from A Year of Jewish Cooking (Photo: Alan Benson)[Missing Credit]

This is one of the reasons why A Year of Jewish Cooking has so much to offer not just the younger generation of Jews, but more seasoned cooks too. As a fan of a British-style baked dessert, the chocolate “challah and butter” pudding immediately caught my eye, as did the conversely light and refreshing-sounding parev passionfruit semifreddo. Likewise, the peri-peri chicken livers, Turkish spiced snapper and glazed Roman lamb shoulder all offered something new and intriguing, and are dishes I could imagine working into my repertoire or regular recipes.

Aside from buying the book and making new traditions of your own, Goldberg and Eskin’s “dream” is that Jews around the world will join the MMCC community and take up the mantle. “We want people to take inspiration from what we’ve done and do it for themselves – look into their own family recipes, write them down, video people making them, and make sure they’re preserved forever,” Goldberg says. “Even the three of us, we’ve all got stories of people we haven’t taken the time to do this with, and now they’ve gone and the recipes have gone with them, and we can never get them back.”

Salmon crumble recipe from A Year of Jewish Cooking (Photo: Alan Benson)[Missing Credit]

As for the future of MMCC, despite saying in the introduction to A Year of Jewish Cooking that they needed to write “just one more book”, when I ask if this is definitely their final bow, Goldberg admits: “I’ve got a folder on Google Drive called MMCC six, and when we had recipes we really loved that didn’t fit in this book, I’d joke with the girl: OK, that’s going in the six folder! So maybe. Who knows?”

As she says this, I can’t help thinking back to earlier in our conversation when she told me: “We really felt that, particularly the younger generation, they need Monday Morning Cooking Club. I mean, I need the recipes, so if I need them, the next generation really needs them.”

I’m not a betting woman, but I’d wager the MMCC story is far from over.

A Year of Jewish Cooking: Recipes we can’t live without by Monday Morning Cooking Club is on sale now, Simon & Schuster

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Tradition! Meet the women preserving the recipes every Jewish cook needs

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