Sarina's Sephardic Cuisine - part 5 - Video

This post will be a more general one about the app.  There are many recipes that have been circulated among the Syrian Sephardic Community in Brooklyn, NY and Deal, NJ that have been handed down through multiple generations.  However in todays times, our community has largely assimilated into society, and we've taken on a lot of American cuisine.  The fear is that some of the recipes which have been handed down will be lost to history.

Another issue is that there are quite a few recipes that are notoriously difficult to write down. There are no real cookbooks that can demonstrate these recipes in a clear way for anybody to do.  Most of these are handed down from mother to daughter.  My great-grandmother, Esther Salem was illiterate, yet ran a big-time catering operation in her basement for many years. My mother would recount stories of times when my grandmother would drop her off for the afternoon and she'd give my mother some dough to try and shape into kibbe.  While she's struggling with one piece for 15 or 20 minutes, my great-grandmother would make tray after tray of the same thing without much effort.

About 30 years ago, my mother decided to try and write the recipes down on paper as best as she could, so she sat down with her mother, Renee Missry.  They cooked mainly by feel and taste, i.e. they'd taste it and see if it needed a bit more of this or that before proclaiming it a finished product.

However some recipes are art, and you can't make it by reading a recipe. You need to be shown how to do it, so that's where this app comes into play.  We decided that we'd take video of a lot of these hard to make recipes and put it into the app so that the next generation of cooks can learn how to make these recipes rather than buying them at the local supermarket on Kings Highway or Avenue U.  Store-bought kibbe just doesn't have the same flavor as the home-made kind.

For the most part, we think we have accomplished that.  If you'll go to our website, you can see some videos we've taken introducing our app.

We've already put up some videos of some recipes we did on Youtube. You can check out our channel here.