Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, is one of my favourite holidays. It’s a hopeful time, with optimism for a sweet year ahead infusing many of the traditions surrounding it, including of course, the food. Round golden challah studded with raisins, apples dipped in honey and jewel-like pomegranate arils scattered over dishes all evoke wishes for sweetness and abundance in the year to come.
The holiday has special meaning for me because my first taste of Jewish food was apples and honey, eaten many years before I converted. In Grade 1, my friend — the only Jewish student in our class — brought in this traditional combination to teach us about Rosh Hashanah. I loved apples dipped in honey so much that I ate them as a snack for weeks afterward. This symbolic pairing has become a reminder of my own path to becoming Jewish.
Local apples and honey will be on my holiday table, along with other classics like round challah, my Auntie Elaine’s pickled salmon and apple cake from the bestselling Jewish Canadian cookbook Second Helpings, Please!. But I will also add recipes that nod to tradition while taking it in a new direction. This year’s table will include a salad of apples on a bed of labneh, topped with honey, sizzled herbs, pecans and flaky salt.
Curious to know about how Rosh Hashanah is being celebrated in other Canadian households, I spoke with five Jewish chefs, restaurant owners and cookbook authors from Calgary, Toronto and Montreal about the dishes they return to year after year, and how they are keeping family traditions alive by making them their own.
Micah Siva adds whimsy to her vegetarian table
Micah Siva is the author of the award-winning cookbook Nosh: Plant-Forward Recipes Celebrating Modern Jewish Cuisine. She grew up in Calgary, which is home to a small Jewish community of roughly 6,000, where holiday preparations meant cooking alongside her mother and her maternal grandmother.
“We always made kreplach around the high holidays. That’s something that my grandmother and my mom and I would do together,” said Siva.
Since becoming vegetarian around 12, Siva has held on to family food traditions all while adapting them to fit within her own plant-centred diet. She still makes kreplach, for example, but fills the dumplings with potatoes instead of ground meat.
Dessert recipes were also passed down through her family. One of Siva’s favourites was a honey cake made with dark, robust buckwheat honey. She continues to make it today, staying faithful to the original recipe.
For Siva, carrying on a tradition doesn’t necessarily mean preserving every detail. “I don’t feel as married to it, because I just feel like the fact that I’m hosting or participating in the holiday carries on the tradition,” she said.
There’s one particularly playful substitution on her New Year’s table that illustrates her philosophy. Instead of the fish head sometimes served at Rosh Hashanah as a wish to be like a “head,” or a leader, rather than a “tail,” or a follower, in the year to come, Siva serves the heads of Swedish fish candy.
Shauna Godfrey remembers her Bubbe Rose through honey cake
Chef Shauna Godfrey grew up in Toronto and now owns both Maven and Rose’s Pantry in Harbord Village. The dishes she serves at her restaurant and pantry are inspired by her own family recipes and traditions, especially those her Bubbe Rose passed down.
Godfrey has fond memories of celebrating the first night of Rosh Hashanah with her bubbe, whose honey cake is still the epitome of the dessert for her. “She used darker honey, sometimes buckwheat honey in it, and I loved it. And she would make an apple cake too, but the honey cake was sort of the real highlight for me,” Godfrey said.
In recent years, that cake has taken on an even deeper significance. Godfrey’s last family dinner with her bubbe was a Rosh Hashanah meal that ended with everyone taking home one of her grandmother’s honey cakes. She passed away just a couple of days afterward. “It just became even more important and special,” Godfrey said of the holiday.
Now that she is busy running her businesses, Godfrey’s contributions to her own holiday table are often based on what she has to spare at the restaurant: often a loaf of challah or, if she’s lucky, some honey cake.
Jake Greenberg adds extra seats to his table
Jake Greenberg, co-owner of café and Jewish deli Chez Greenberg in Montreal’s Mile End, grew up celebrating Rosh Hashanah with his large extended family and an enormous table of food.
His mom, whom Greenberg describes as “unbelievable” in the kitchen, cooks a feast for the holiday, serving multiple appetizers — “salade cuite, baba ganoush, hummus, pickle spears, chopped liver, gefilte fish, everything,” Greenberg said — followed by matzah ball soup and a variety of main courses.
This sense of abundance extends to the guestlist. Although he hasn’t told his mother yet, Greenberg plans to invite some of his staff over to his family table this year. As an owner of a restaurant that features many classic Jewish dishes, he wants the people who work there to understand the culture behind the food they prepare. “A lot of my cooks are not Jewish,” Greenberg said. “They don’t actually know what the experience is all about.”
The restaurant’s focus on smoking fish has roots in Greenberg’s family’s celebrations. His dad would smoke his own salmon, and at Rosh Hashanah, the family even gave another holiday staple the smoker treatment. “We would cold smoke the gefilte fish,” Greenberg said, “and then we would eat it with the chrain.”
Lev Levine turns their dad’s gefilte fish into a salmon specialty
For Lev Levine, the owner of Toronto smoked-fish shop Lox and Schmear, Rosh Hashanah was a time when their parents would pull out all the stops. Preparing for the extended family gathering took days, with Levine’s mom cooking most of the meal and their dad pitching in by peeling potatoes and taking charge of one particular dish.
“My dad made the best gefilte fish,” said Levine. “Coming home from school the days leading up to Rosh Hashanah, I would be like, ‘Why does our house stink of fish?’”
Levine now makes gefilte fish at Lox and Schmear for the holidays, but puts a spin on the tradition: “I do a fully salmon one, because my focus is salmon here.”
Since opening Lox and Schmear, Levine has also come to see the shop as more than just a place to buy smoked fish. Being a Jewish-owned business, they said, brings a sense of responsibility for making Jewish foods available both for people seeking familiar tastes and for those encountering them for the first time.
Sam Davis takes on the role of family food archivist
Primrose Bagel Company founder Sam Davis outside his Toronto shop. (Pat Ozols)
Sam Davis founded Primrose Bagel Company in Toronto after going to culinary school and working at restaurants in the city. His respect for tradition shows up in both how he makes bagels and how he approaches food in Rosh Hashanah celebrations.
Davis describes both his bubbe and his aunt as wizards in the kitchen who fed their family with love. For Rosh Hashanah, his Aunt Gitu would make chicken soup with homemade lokshen. “She would make these crepes and then slice them, like, fettuccine-style, but they were so thin that you could see through the sheet,” he said.
His family table has expanded over the years to include new culinary traditions. When his dad married into a Moroccan Jewish family, Sephardic dishes joined the Ashkenazi foods he grew up eating.
When Davis cooks for his family’s New Year celebrations today, he often makes potato kugel, a dish he remembers being on every holiday table at his grandparents’ house. As he gets older, keeping those traditions alive has become even more important. “Now that my grandparents aren’t there to sort of hold up that Ashkenazi side,” said Davis, “I sort of see myself as the family archivist.”