Kugels & Collards authors share their stories with Augusta
As readers of this blog know, Chews and News was founded on the belief that every plate has a story. That’s why I’m so delighted that I had the opportunity to speak with cookbook authors Rachel Gordin Barnett and Lyssa Kligman Harvey, whose book, Kugels & Collards, shares the recipes and history behind Southern Jewish culture.
The Augusta Jewish Museum will host the two women on Sunday, February 22, at 2:00 p.m., at Congregation Children of Israel, as they discuss how family histories can be shared through the lens of food.
Rachel and Lyssa began this storytelling journey in 2018 as a part of a project with Historic Columbia to gather and document Columbia’s Jewish history. They created the Kugels & Collards blog to tell Columbia’s Jewish history through the lens of food and memory. A couple of years later, they were asked to take the blog statewide… as a book. Over the next three years, they gathered roughly 50 stories from across South Carolina.
“It’s a wonderful snapshot, but it’s not the definitive book,” Rachel says, “There are roughly 50 family stories and 80 recipes in the book. This is a story of how local ingredients became a part of the Southern Jewish table.”
“We realized this wasn’t just about traditional Jewish food,” Lyssa adds. “You couldn’t have a Southern Jewish table without the influence of African American women who cooked for Jewish families.”
“Southern cooking is different than keeping a kosher kitchen, which a lot of our grandparents did,” Rachel admits. “So, there was an exchange of cultures, but with kosher collards, for example, there could be no pork, no shellfish.”
Lyssa says this research journey helped the two women and the book’s many readers reflect on the time periods in which they grew up.
“We realized that we were telling the history of South Carolina through the lens of food, and it became an unintentional archive of Jewish history via the table,” Lyssa says. “Our stories transcend location,” Rachel adds. “We have traveled with this book from Ohio to Florida, and from Louisiana to Staten Island. People respond to this because it’s their story. It’s familiar.”
“[Chef] Vivian Howard says food is better with a story, and it is. And [culinary historian] Michael Twitty says food is his flag, and food is our flag,” Lyssa says. “I say I’m Jewish and I’m Southern and I’m a foodie. We want to leave people with the idea of telling their own food story. We want people to savor their story and write down their recipes and give them to their children.”
If you’re able to join the event this Sunday and have a kugel recipe of your own, the authors are encouraging you to bring a kugel to share. If you can't make a kugel, but have a favorite family recipe or have a food story of your own, that’s just as important to bring.
The program is sponsored by the Augusta Jewish Museum, which aims to educate the CSRA about the Jewish community, its traditions, history, and important contributions to the greater community. For more information about AJM and its upcoming programs, visit AugustaJewishMuseum.org, call (706) 426-1542 or email info@augustajewishmuseum.org.
