Quotes from Gil Marks

To me, that aspect of life that most touches the everyday and celebrations is food.

Throughout history, Hanukkah was a relatively minor festival, but it's become very popular in America due to its proximity to Christmas.

Food is sort of like the Jewish sense of humor, a defense mechanism. It is one of the things that helped the Jews survive through 2, 000 years of an often very harsh Diaspora.

The key to Judaism's survival is the emotional attachment to the religion.

Every holiday has unique fare and symbolic foods, but none as much as Rosh Hashana.

Preparing foods from other Jewish communities is broadening. It's interesting to sample the foods of other Jewish communities and see what they developed.

We can all be defined by food.

I never serve a dessert on Passover that I would not serve the rest of the year.

I don't understand a mentality that will accept eating something that doesn't taste good just because it's low-fat or is made with matzo or whatever.

I tend to avoid cakes made with matzo meal instead of flour. Also, most prepared dessert products and mixes. Sometimes the packaging they come in tastes better than the product.

If I'm doing an olive oil tasting, I would do a very lean bread: an Italian style or pita bread. You want the flavor of the oil to shine; you don't want the bread or anything else to mask it.

Every year, my father comes by and samples the chremslach - like quality control - and tells me how they taste just like his mother's.

Passover is the most widely observed of all the Jewish holidays, and the Passover Seder... is the most practiced of all the Jewish rituals.

Although I generally avoid the cloyingly sweet wines, I have used them for poaching fruit.

I have been collecting recipes and information for over 20 years, but three years ago, my editor said to me, 'You're a walking encyclopedia of food, so why don't you do an encyclopedia?'

The more things you make from scratch, the less expensive and usually healthier and tastier.

My family is notorious for its sweet tooth.

A Jewish food is one that is almost sanctified, either by its repeated use or use within the holidays or rituals. So food that may have not been Jewish at one point can become Jewish within the cultural context.

Most of the traditional foods we eat on Jewish holidays start out with a seasonal reason as to why we eat them, and later a religious significance is tacked on.

One of the keys to Jewish culinary history is that the Jewish role was not so much innovation but transition and transformation.

Sephardic Jews were always known as good cooks.

The kosher community tends to follow often several years behind the general societal trends.

In Judaism, almost every ritual entails either food or the absence of food. Yom Kippur, for instance, is the absence of food. Part of it is Talmudic, part of it is custom. So much of Judaism was bound up in dietary laws. So everything you ate - the very act itself - was part of religion.

Judaism is not just a religion but a people, and the food and customs of one part of the people is connected to the other part of the people. They are part of a larger story.