Across Hamilton County, the freezers of Jewish households are stuffed to the brim. Whether families were helping cook for the upcoming Jewish food festival or not, the volume of food being prepared required many to volunteer space.<\/p>\n
After Fern Shire’s sweet noodle kugel won first place in her synagogue’s competition in May 2025, there was no question what dish she was going to contribute to the festival, she said. She made three double pans of kugel, each containing about 40 servings for Nosh-a-Nooga, which will start at noon Sept. 7 at Miller Park.<\/p>\n
“People ask me for this recipe,” Shire said. “I don’t usually give it.”<\/p>\n
Shire said all sweet kugels have cottage cheese, cream cheese and sour cream, but she has one secret ingredient that she believes sets her kugel apart. The Chattanooga Times Free Press is not revealing the ingredient out of respect for Shire’s recipe.<\/p>\n
(READ MORE: Food Scene: Mazel tov to Chattanooga’s first Jewish Food Festival)<\/a><\/p>\n Kugel is a traditional Jewish dish that has many different varieties. There are potato kugels and noodle kugels, and noodle kugel can be sweet or savory. Shire follows a family recipe passed down from her aunt, Florence, whom she called Aunt Flo. Aunt Flo used to make the noodle kugel every year for the Jewish High Holy Days, this year in late September.<\/p>\n Shire’s maternal grandparents, Florence’s parents, came to America from Poland before Shire’s mother or Aunt Flo were born.<\/p>\n Shire’s kugel, made with an array of dairy, noodles and sugar, topped with corn flakes and baked, doesn’t have raisins or any other kind of fruit like some other recipes call for, because Aunt Flo never included fruit of any kind.<\/p>\n Shire partially baked the three pans, froze them and will finish baking them in the early morning the day of the festival.<\/p>\n But there are some dishes that cannot be prepared early and will require intense labor in the hours leading up to the festival.<\/p>\n “Edie Weiss is making whitefish salad. Well, they can’t do that (in advance). That can’t go in the freezer. That’s got to be made fresh,” said Vicki Lewis, past president of Mizpah Congregation<\/a>. “And her mother is coming in a few days before to help her, and I heard it was absolutely delicious.”<\/p>\n Whitefish salad requires meticulously combing through the fish, cleaning and deboning, said Ann Treadwell, the chief impact officer at the Jewish Federation.<\/p>\n Rumor of Weiss’ legendary whitefish salad made it’s way to Shire’s ears during the festival last year.<\/p>\n “I said to my husband, when I saw how fast the food went last time, I said, ‘You go and make sure Edie keeps some whitefish salad behind,'” Shire said. “It tasted like it was a lot of work. I mean, it just tasted so good.”<\/p>\n Lewis made chopped liver for the festival, preparing 50 pounds of the p\u00e2t\u00e9-like dish nearly a month in advance. She said she chose to contribute chopped liver because of it’s simplicity.<\/p>\n “I just sort of spur the moment thought, ‘What’s easy?’ So I said chopped liver,” Lewis said. “And then when I found out I had to do 50 pounds it was like, ‘Well, I can do this. How do you eat an elephant? You know, one bite at a time.'”<\/p>\n When Lewis said something to her daughter, Alex Street, about making chopped liver for the festival, Street said she was all in.<\/p>\n “It’s actually been more exciting than I realized it would be, because just as I’ve shared with close friends, it seems like everybody is excited to come and try it,” Street said.<\/p>\n Chopped liver freezes well, so Lewis started preparing, pound by pound, a month in advance. When a reporter visited, Lewis was storing 43 pounds of chopped liver split between two freezers and still had work to do.<\/p>\n (SIGN UP: Start your day right with the Good Day Chattanooga newsletter in your inbox by going to timesfreepress.com\/good)<\/a><\/p>\n A family photo album lying on the kitchen island was open to a page with pictures of Lewis’ mother, Sara Roth Gordon, on her 70th birthday. The recipe was handed down from Lewis’ maternal grandmother, Minnie Roth.<\/p>\n “We were thinking, at the booth, maybe we’ll put some pictures out,” Street said.<\/p>\n Lewis’ maternal grandparents immigrated from Poland and lived in Chicago, where Lewis’ mother was born, before settling in Birmingham and opening a clothing store. Grandma Sara was evident throughout the recipe, down to the choice of mayonnaise. On the counter sat a jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise, the final component in the family recipe for chopped liver.<\/p>\n “There was also a jar of Dukes in the fridge. I started to pull that out, and we determined this recipe is always Hellmann’s,” Street said.<\/p>\n Lewis sifted through her mother’s recipe box, white with blue flowers but yellowed with age, for a card with instructions for chopped liver.<\/p>\n “I don’t think it’s here, but I’m going to look,” she said.<\/p>\n The box belonged to Lewis’ mother and did not contain a written copy of the recipe. In fact, there was not a copy in the house, not even in the Gordon family cookbook. Lewis said her cousin, Nancy, probably has the recipe written down somewhere, but the chopped liver is a certain kind of simple that there isn’t really a need for a written recipe.<\/p>\n (READ MORE: Kennedy: She works every day to draw 6 million Stars of David)<\/a><\/p>\n The first year of the festival was 2024, and challahs, a braided bread made with flour, eggs, yeast, sugar and oil, were the first thing to sell out. But nearly every booth was out of food less than two hours after the event got rolling. Organizers at the Jewish Federation of Greater Chattanooga planned for 250 to 300 people, and nearly 1,000 came through. This year, they’ve doubled, and in some cases tripled, the number of servings.<\/p>\n Every Jewish holiday centers around food, whether that means a meal is shared in celebration or there is fasting involved, joked Michael Dzik, president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Chattanooga. Even though the food festival is not a religious event, it acts as a lens into Jewish culture, Dzik said, and builds bridges between the Jewish community<\/a> and the greater community of Chattanooga.<\/p>\n “The more people are educated to the Jewish community, the more understanding and, hopefully, ability to call out anti-Semitism when it happens, and thankfully, Chattanooga has been pretty fortunate that we haven’t had some of the anti-Semitism events that other communities have,” Treadwell said. “Michael and I both believe a lot of it happens because we do educational, fun things.”<\/p>\n In addition to building bridges between cultures, the event is strengthening tradition and bringing families and people closer together within the Jewish community. There are several young people taking on family recipes, and older generations coming together to teach the younger how to make traditional dishes.<\/p>\n “We’ve seen seen others, and they’re like, ‘We’re just going to fly in, you know, 100 pounds of pastrami from New York,'” Dzik said. “Again, there’s nothing wrong with that, but this has really connected us as a community and it’s allowed … us to connect with the general community as well.”<\/p>\n “Nosh” is the Yiddish word for snack, so the dishes will be sold in snack sizes. Each dish costs a certain number of tickets, and tickets can be purchased for $1 each either in advance on the federation’s website<\/a> or the day of.<\/p>\n The history of each dish, and the cook who made it, will be at each booth. There will also be live music from a Jewish rock and pop artist out of Nashville, Ellie Flier.<\/p>\n Contact religion reporter Kailee Shores at kshores@timesfreepress.com<\/a> or 423-757-6659<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Across Hamilton County, the freezers of Jewish households are stuffed to the brim. Whether families were helping cook…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":127048,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[97,269],"class_list":{"0":"post-127047","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nutrition","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-nutrition"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127047"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127047\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/127048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}