Shared by Mitchell Davis
For Mitchell Davis, the Meal Is the Holiday
For Mitchell Davis, the Meal Is the Holiday
Family Journey
“I’ve carried the torch of my mother’s food,” says Mitchell Davis, the chief strategy officer of the James Beard Foundation. He is the cook in the family who siblings and friends call to ask how his mother Sondra made her exceptional chicken soup or formed her feather-weight matzo balls in their kitchen in Toronto. “It allows me to set the tradition,” says Mitchell.
It’s a tradition he started to take ownership of early on. “From the time I was three or four, I was fascinated with cooking,” he says. “I famously used to pretend I was sick to stay home to watch cooking shows.” His mother cooked and entertained often, but struggled with migraines and ultimately lost most of her sight. She relied on Mitchell and his sister Carrie for help. “I did a lot of ‘my mother’s’ cooking especially for the holidays,” he explains.
The holiday parties were always as large as the family’s dining room table, with friends and family totaling 13 or 14 people gathering for the feast. No matter the holiday, the menu included, brisket, challah, chopped liver, matzo ball soup, kasha varnishkes, farfel, sour cream cake, and mandel bread.
“The family recipes are our recipes,” he says, not just his mother’s. The ownership is shared across the generations in the Davis family. In the early aughts, Mitchell set out to document them for a charming book called The Mensch Chef. His mother came to New York and the two cooked together, allowing him to capture her technique. For matzo balls, she preferred heavy, dense ones, but ironically always made the lightest matzo balls. “She said she used the recipe on the box, but when we cooked together,” he says, it was clear that she didn’t.
He wrote down recipes for dishes like Jewish spaghetti, elbow macaroni with tomato sauce, butter, and a bit of sugar, that Mitchell grew up thinking was a dish every Jewish household made. He documented his mother’s chopped liver, which she always insisted on chopping by hand with a mezzaluna in a wooden bowl, and challah, which was wrapped into a turban shape for Rosh Hashanah.
Unlike the books of Joan Nathan and Claudia Roden that Mitchell admires, he didn’t travel to research the roots of these Jewish dishes.
“These were just the recipes from my family,” he explains. “This is what we ate…as a non-observant New York-ish Jewish family,” living in Toronto.
The family repertoire is also one that grew over the years, with new dishes joining the table. The brisket in his book “is not my mother’s. It’s Adam Rapoport’s mother’s recipe,” Mitchell explains, referring to Bon Appetit’s editor-in-chief. He was introduced to her recipe, which uses ketchup, brown sugar, and Worcestershire to make a barbecue sauce, and prepared it for his family. “My whole family liked her brisket better than ours, so it became our family recipe,” he adds. The same is true for the honey and walnut cake he shared with us, which originally came from cookbook author Richard Sax.
The recipe for sweet and sour fish that’s always part of the family table came from a late friend of Mitchell’s and his husband Nate, chef Dano Hutnik. His cooking pulled from the cuisines of Central Europe, Mitchell explains. “A lot of the food he made was familiar tasting…. It tasted like we made it. He used garlic powder and paprika — all the things my family used.”
Sondra passed away before The Mensch Chef came out, but the book has helped carry the torch of her food forward, while leaving space for recipes and family traditions to shift and adapt when something new comes along that everyone enjoys.
This year, for the first time in a while, Mitchell is planning to host a Rosh Hashanah dinner, serving the blend of his mother’s recipes and the more recent additions to the family repertoire. As he says: