Nothing speaks to the variety of Jewish opinion as an attempt to create a Jewish community cookbook. As reported in the Connecticut Jewish Ledger, Beth David Synagogue and the JCC New Haven produced their own cookbooks reflecting recipes new and old collected locally.

Beth David Synagogue’s cookbook is the brainchild of 11-year- old Shoshi Benjamin and 12-year-old Noam Benjamin, who concocted and coordinated the book as their bar/bat mitzvah project, the cookbook’s title “Across Time and Many Lands: The Beth David Synagogue Kosher Legacy.”

“We are all so different…from so many different places. People sent in family recipes from places like Morocco, South Africa, Brazil, Chile, New Orleans, Norway, Hungary, Russia, Israel, Greece, Britain…One page in the book has one recipe that comes from Moldavia, another from Turkey, another from what was, at the time, Persia and another from America,” says Benjamin.

…Maya Ungar, for example, reminisced about life in Irkutsk, Siberia, as she imparted her recipe for pelmanin mini pirogis n 10,000 of which were made just before the start of winter by teams of women who would take them from house to house, singing and exchanging them with all the families in the village.

Check out the recipe for Savta Yafa’s kosher Rishte at the bottom.

The Jewish Community Center of New Haven put out the call for people’s favorite recipes-and boy did the community respond:

More than 800 recipes were sent into the JCC for the Center’s first community-wide kosher cookbook in at least 20 years, set to be completed and published in early spring 2007.

“We’re calling it “Taste and Traditions” because we wanted to capture the old and the new,” said Robin Kramer, co-chair of the project along with Barbara Lichtman. “People really dug into their hearts and their closets for these recipes from their mothers and grandmothers.”

Check out the recipe for Spinach, Red Pepper and Feta Quiche at the bottom.

Finally, two Jewish cook-pioneers take the cake (har har har) at the Simply Manischewitz Cook-Off with Root Vegetable Pancakes, a sublime example of kosher, vegetarian-friendly and waste-conscious Jewish cooking.