My parents came to this country from Russia when they were children. Their families wanted to put the past behind them. All oldworld traditions, both cultural and religious,were buried in their haste to assimilate as quickly as possible.

Although I grew up in the urban shtetl of Crown Heights in Brooklyn, I did not have any religious upbringing. We were secular Jews; we went to temple occasionally to celebrate family bar mitzvahs and weddings, but that’s about all.

Our family had few culinary traditions. My mother thought cooking a necessary but un-pleasurable task. I was considered a "problem eater," but I suspect that I was really a latent critic of the art of cuisine. However, when we dined in restaurants and, later on, after traveling in Europe, I realized that food could be sublime and satisfying. I was determined to learn how to prepare foods which gave me pleasure. Later, I discovered the joy in cooking for other people. This eventually led to a career in teaching cooking and to owning Square One,my own restaurant in San Francisco.

In 1989, a group of my favorite Square One regulars asked me to make Passover dinner at the restaurant. They didn't want to cook. This presented me with a dilemma: At home we had not celebrated Passover, so I didn't have family food traditions to fall back on. The Jewish food I knew was based on my childhood dining experiences in New York. Plus, Square One was a Mediterranean restaurant, and I did not want to cook an Ashkenazic meal. The most popular food that we served was from the diverse regions of Italy, so I decided that our Passover meal should be Italian. This led me to do a great deal of research on the cuisine of the Italian Jews.

For the next eight years, we offered Italian Passover dinners and our repertoire of recipes grew to include zuppa di asparagi in sapor giallo (asparagus soup with saffron) and pesce freddo alla salsa di noce (cold poached fish with walnut sauce).

These Italian Seders were such a hit that we started researching Sephardic foods of Greece, Turkey, and North Africa.

It was this research and my memories of living with an Italian Jewish family for a brief time that led to my writing Cucina Ebraica: Flavors of the Italian Jewish Kitchen. After Ebraica, I was intrigued to find out what happened with the food of the Sephardic Jews after they fled Spain and Portugal and made their way into the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. Did they keep their culinary traditions? Did they modify their recipes after seeing what others were growing and cooking? This led to my next two publications: Sephardic Flavors: Jewish Cooking of the Mediterranean and Saffron Shores: Jewish Cooking of the Southern Mediterranean.

I soon discovered that working within long established culinary traditions was meaningful and gratifying. I gained respect for those who kept the faith, who knew that you could be independent and creative and still show respect for tradition and the ways of our ancestors. I liked being part of a culinary continuum. My own style of cooking is personal but it is based on tradition.

I love to see how a family's ethnic history is revealed through the foods it cooks for holidays and everyday meals as well. Today, with people working long hours and buying prepared foods, spending less time at the stove and dining table, I worry that we may lose many traditional recipes. As a chef and passionate student of food and culture, I feel an urgency to transcribe diverse family recipes in order to keep them alive. Otherwise these recipes might be lost to us forever.

There is another reason that I love to cook this food. I was an only child, so my family is very important to me. One of the reasons I closed my restaurant was so that I would have more time to spend with my family. I cook for my children, their spouses, and my beloved grandchildren as often as possible. Some of my happiest moments are when we are gathered around the large oval dining table, eating favorite family dishes, with time to talk about what's happening in our lives. It is important that we create our own family traditions so we have meaningful memories.

Jewish Mediterranean food is delicious, and it has become part of my family's repertoire of favorite dishes as we create our own family history and extend our culinary traditions. Today at Passover, my family and I feast on gefilte fish, salmon with sweet-andsour rhubarb sauce, lamb with green onions and green garlic, asparagus with mint, almond sponge torte served with strawberries in blood-orange juice, and, of course, matzah ball soup (my grandchildren made the matzah balls this year, and they were great!).

Joyce Goldstein, a restaurateur and James Beard Award winner for Best Chef, has written several cookbooks, including Cucina Ebraica: Flavors of the Italian Jewish Kitchen and Sephardic Flavors: Jewish Cooking of the Mediterranean.

Like the sound of Joyce Goldstein’s Sephardic cuisine? Our author/chef has provided an Italian Jewish recipe for you to try. 

Warm the olive oil or margarine in a sauté pan over low heat. Add the onion and sauté until very soft and sweet, about 15 minutes. Add the puréed squash, season with salt and pepper, and add the citron or lemon zest and cinnamon, if using.Cook over very low heat, stirring often, until dry, about 10 minutes. Transfer to a warmed serving dish and sprinkle with mint, parsley, or rosemary, if you like.

Excerpted from CUCINA EBRAICA: FLAVORS OF THE ITALIAN JEWISH KITCHEN by Joyce Goldstein. Copyright 1998 by Joyce Goldstein. Published by Chronicle Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Used with permission from Chronicle Books, LLC. Visit ChronicleBooks.com.