By Deborah Ashin, JTNews Correspondent
Who would expect a Hadassah meeting to be X-rated? Get a group of Jewish women together to talk about food, and it can happen.
“Women bond over food the way men bond over sports,” author Sharon Boorstin told over 100 women at this year’s kickoff event for Hadassah’s Seattle Chapter. This is exactly what happened when Boorstin, who wrote Let Us Eat Cake: Adventures in Food and Friendship, asked the audience to share food memories.
When one woman described how her mother always compared the correct stiffness for a particular kind of pastry dough to a part of the male anatomy, it brought down the house.
Then there was the story of a dinner guest — a friend visiting from college — who exclaimed to the hostess, “You have the largest breasts!” He was of course referring to her roasted chicken, although in this case the meaning could have been taken at several levels.
Boorstin, the former Sharon Silver, grew up in Seattle but now lives in Beverly Hills. She shared stories and read from her book during her presentation at the brunch at the Mercerwood Shore Club on Mercer Island. Boorstin now works as a restaurant critic and travel writer, and collaborates with her husband Paul on feature films and television movies.
Although she didn’t start out writing a Jewish book, Boorstin said it was inevitable that her combination memoir and cookbook would take on the flavor of her heritage.
Describing how cooking has changed from being a chore for women in the ‘50s to pleasure for later generations, Boorstin’s inspiration for the book came when she rediscovered an old notebook of recipes she collected from her mother, relatives and girlfriends when she got married 30 years ago. She not only reconnected with the recipe writers, but also began to explore how the power of cooking and food establishes bonds between women.
Boorstin also discovered how so many of her memories reflect Jewish traditions and connections. As she travels to promote the book, Boorstin especially enjoys hearing how her book sparks other women’s food memories.
One of her favorites is how someone found a tin of 10-year-old cookies while cleaning out the refrigerator of a recently deceased friend. His mother had died 10 years earlier but he had kept the cookies all those years. Unable to thrown them away, the friend saved the cookies, and a year later at the unveiling; friends tossed the rock-like cookies on his grave.
Boorstin concluded her speech with the story behind the recipe in her book for the “Husband-Catcher Cake.”
“A friend’s college roommate got the recipe from her grandmother, who said, ‘Men can get sex from any woman, but not a good chocolate cake. And this one is good enough to get you a husband!’” she explained.
Boorstin’s presentation launched the first meeting for Seattle Hadassah’s new president Jacquie Bayley, who has an ambitious goal of adding 200 members over the next two years. Twenty new members were recognized at the brunch, which concluded with a sampling of various cakes.