Cookbook Club

Cookbook Review: Kugels & Collards

By: Amber Chase
Kugels & Collards Barnett and Harvey cover

A favorite pastime with my mother is visiting local antique stores and rummaging through treasures and relics. During these excursions, we often come across church-wide cookbooks, typically hand-bound books with quick drawn illustrations and recipes attributed to different congregant members, and we recognize them as sacred snapshots of a community. Kugels & Collards: Stories of Food, Family, and Tradition in Jewish South Carolina (© 2023 Rachel Gordin Barnett and Lyssa Kligman Harvey) holds this same communal intimacy. 

The foreword opens with a quote from Michael Twitty, “Food is an archive, a keeper of secrets.” And truly, Rachel Gordin Barnett and Lyssa Kligman Harvey have laced together a historical and delicious compendium of southern Jewish recipes spanning generations throughout North and South Carolina. There’s something delicate and hallowed about making a recipe that was found tucked away in an attic, the last remnant of a beloved family member’s handwriting. A deep sense of pride in having a recipe coined by your own name, i.e. “Ethel Glover’s Squash Casserole” or “Debby Harrison’s Boreka.” It’s a transcendent act of preservation to hold and share recipes that have survived decades past our oldest relatives, and, for many, this is how tradition, culture, and family heritage endure. 

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Date Published: 09.10.23

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