Gil Marks Quotes

I tend to avoid cakes made with matzo meal instead of flour. Also, most prepared dessert products and mixes. Sometimes the packaging they come in tastes better than the product.

- Gil Marks

The knish is a classic example of peasant food evolving into comfort food and even sophisticated fare.

- Gil Marks

Each Passover, I prepare all sorts of fancy desserts for my family and friends, often experimenting with adaptations of sophisticated modern fare.

- Gil Marks

Throughout history, particularly in the last 2,000 years, Jews have been key in adapting local foods to Jewish sensibilities and dietary laws and then spreading them.

- Gil Marks

Judaism is not, per se, a religion in the sense most Americans think of. Even if you don't adhere to the various precepts, you're still a Jew.

- Gil Marks

People remember the different variations of stuffed cabbage based on their mothers and grandmothers. It's not just about food. Eating something as traditional as this is a cultural experience, one that is spiritual and nostalgic. It manages to transcend time; it's food for the soul.

- Gil Marks

A Jewish food is one that is almost sanctified, either by its repeated use or use within the holidays or rituals. So food that may have not been Jewish at one point can become Jewish within the cultural context.

- Gil Marks

Preparing foods from other Jewish communities is broadening. It's interesting to sample the foods of other Jewish communities and see what they developed.

- Gil Marks

I never serve a dessert on Passover that I would not serve the rest of the year.

- Gil Marks

To me, that aspect of life that most touches the everyday and celebrations is food.

- Gil Marks

I have been collecting recipes and information for over 20 years, but three years ago, my editor said to me, 'You're a walking encyclopedia of food, so why don't you do an encyclopedia?'

- Gil Marks

Passover is the most widely observed of all the Jewish holidays, and the Passover Seder... is the most practiced of all the Jewish rituals.

- Gil Marks

We can all be defined by food.

- Gil Marks

If I'm doing an olive oil tasting, I would do a very lean bread: an Italian style or pita bread. You want the flavor of the oil to shine; you don't want the bread or anything else to mask it.

- Gil Marks

The kosher community tends to follow often several years behind the general societal trends.

- Gil Marks

One of the keys to Jewish culinary history is that the Jewish role was not so much innovation but transition and transformation.

- Gil Marks

Throughout history, Hanukkah was a relatively minor festival, but it's become very popular in America due to its proximity to Christmas.

- Gil Marks

There is a biblical injunction to tell your children, but the sages who created the Seder several thousand years ago understood that it had to be more than just speaking: that in order for something to connect so emotionally in human beings, it had to be relived.

- Gil Marks

My family is notorious for its sweet tooth.

- Gil Marks

In Judaism, almost every ritual entails either food or the absence of food. Yom Kippur, for instance, is the absence of food. Part of it is Talmudic, part of it is custom. So much of Judaism was bound up in dietary laws. So everything you ate - the very act itself - was part of religion.

- Gil Marks

Food is sort of like the Jewish sense of humor, a defense mechanism. It is one of the things that helped the Jews survive through 2,000 years of an often very harsh Diaspora.

- Gil Marks

The more things you make from scratch, the less expensive and usually healthier and tastier.

- Gil Marks

The processing and preparation of food can transform a kosher item into a non-kosher item.

- Gil Marks

Most of the traditional foods we eat on Jewish holidays start out with a seasonal reason as to why we eat them, and later a religious significance is tacked on.

- Gil Marks

The key to Judaism's survival is the emotional attachment to the religion.

- Gil Marks

Although I generally avoid the cloyingly sweet wines, I have used them for poaching fruit.

- Gil Marks

Food is never static; culture is never static.

- Gil Marks

In the New York metropolitan area, you can find Jews from just about every Jewish cultural community in the world.

- Gil Marks

Sephardic Jews were always known as good cooks.

- Gil Marks

Every year, my father comes by and samples the chremslach - like quality control - and tells me how they taste just like his mother's.

- Gil Marks

Every holiday has unique fare and symbolic foods, but none as much as Rosh Hashana.

- Gil Marks

I don't understand a mentality that will accept eating something that doesn't taste good just because it's low-fat or is made with matzo or whatever.

- Gil Marks

Judaism is not just a religion but a people, and the food and customs of one part of the people is connected to the other part of the people. They are part of a larger story.

- Gil Marks