Building His Own Tradition, Jake Cohen Blends His Ashkenazi Flavors With His Husband’s Mizrahi Family Recipes (2024)

On January 1, 2015 Jake Cohen and Alex Shapiro both swiped right. A week after their first date, they were already seeing one another nearly every day. That spring, they faced one of their first big hurdles as a couple. Both families — Jake’s Ashkenazi and Alex’s Mizrahi — wanted them at their Seder tables. In Jake’s family, the annual invitation to Seder comes with a heaping side of Jewish guilt and expectation from his mother. “If you’re in the state of New York, there’s no reason you should miss Seder,” says Jake, who is the author of the new cookbook “Jew-ish: Reinvented Recipes from a Modern Mensch.”

But, Jake broke with tradition. That first year, the couple split their time, spending one night with Jake’s family and the other with Alex’s. The next year, they faced the same challenges of guilt and expectations. But, again, one night was celebrated with Jake’s family eating his aunt Susi’s famed braised brisket and his great-aunt Lotte’s meringues, and one was spent with Alex’s Persian family eating beet kubbeh a soup of dumplings wrapped in rice for the holiday, and tahdig, a prized dish of crispy rice. The Persian Seder was a revelation for Jake. “It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced and yet still so Jewish,” he explains on the Schmaltzy podcast.

As Jake and Alex’s relationship grew, Jake started to immerse himself in the Iraqi and Iranian cooking of Alex’s family. Alex’s mother Robina sent him a Persian rice cooker and a copy of the “Food of Life: Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking and Ceremonies,” by Najmieh Batmanglij, a bible of the cuisine. And Jake started to ask various members of Alex’s family for the recipes they were best known for including Robina’s ghormeh sabzi, an herb-laden stew with beef and kidney beans. At the time, Jake hadn’t met Alex’s great-aunt Doris yet, but he was already asking around for her recipe for hadji bada, or Iraqi almond cookies that are Alex’s favorite sweet.

The following year for Passover, to keep the peace, Alex declared that he and Jake would host a Seder for both families. For Jake, it was daunting. “It’s so many people, it’s such different traditions, it’s such big personalities. There are enough big personalities just within one family,” he says. He felt the future of their Seders hung in the balance, but he agreed to go along with the plan.

Having learned Alex’s family recipes, Jake prepared all of the signature dishes from both families — braised brisket and tahdig. It was also the night Jake met Doris. She walked into the room and handed him a small piece of folded paper. On it, was her recipe for hajdi bada. Thankfully, the blended Seder worked. “That Seder, we became one family,” Jake explains on Schmaltzy.

Finally, by 2019, Jake was not only ready to welcome both sides of the family to the table, but to blend them. He prepared ghormeh sabzi from Alex’s tradition, but with a brisket, nodding to his own family. Jake adds: “It’s just the perfect representation of this crazy Jewish family my husband and I have built.”