A New Yiddish Cooking Show! Every Other Week! Est Gesunterheit!

Look out, Emeril Lagasse and Rachael Ray.  You've got competition from Rukhl and Eve.  And in Yiddish, no less.

The Forverts, the original Yiddish daily newspaper, is embracing new programming and new technology to present a bi-weekly series of cooking shows on YouTube.

The video episodes, running under ten minutes, are being posted under the title "Eat in Good Health," or Est Gesunterheit.  The hosts are Rukhl Schaechter and Eve Jochnowitz.

Schaechter is a writer for the Forward.  Jochnowitz a Yiddish instructor at the Congress for Jewish Culture, is cooking and foodways teacher at Living Traditions Klezkamp and instructor in Jewish Culinary History at The New School University. 

She worked for several years as a cook and baker in New York and is currently completing her dissertation, a culinary ethnography of Russian Jewish immigrants in New York City, in the Department of Performance Studies, New York University . She is the author of, “Holy Rolling: Making Sense of Baking Matzo,”in Jews of Brooklyn; “Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army,” in Remembering the Lower East Side; and “Flavors of Memory: Jewish Food as Culinary Tourism in Poland,”in Culinary Tourism. Eve is the Chocolate Lady.

In the first show, Schaechter and Jochnowitz talk their way in Yiddish through the preparation of varenikes mit vanschel, or sour cherry dumplings.  English subtitles translate their folksy patter as they work their way through preparing the dough and the sour cherry sauce, singing Yiddish songs about varenikes (no kidding!) as they go.  Enjoy!