A great cookbook that will make you feel like you are going down memory lane of your own childhood with your own Nanny. Sweet heartwarming stories and easy to make recipes of Jewish background, this is a great cookbook for all your cookbook lover friends and family. I love how easy the recipes are and that I have most ingredients on hand and if not they are easy to find at my local grocery store without having to go to a specialty shop. If you love streusel coffee cake, roasts, Rubens, kugel you will love this book too. If you are looking for something fancy then this isn't the cookbook for you. Be prepared from some nice home cooked food.

I give this book a 4 out of 5 stars.

I personally am not Jewish, but who cares when it comes to this cookbook. This book is filled with 36 yummy recipes but even better you get to learn about the recipe and about Nama and her family. The stories are fun to read. I did miss having pictures of the dish like in most cookbooks but there were hand drawn illustrations. There are recipes that will tempt everyones tastebuds.



I received this book from the Author or Publisher via Netgalley.com and chose to leave this review.

This delightful cookbook made me miss my Mommom. The stories told from Nama’s kitchen were so heartwarming. I could feel the love of this family, and I could smell the mouthwatering aromas of the recipes shared.

CHEWISH doesn’t contain the photos I so enjoy in a cookbook (I’ll have to guess my dishes look right), but it does contain homey illustrations that seem better suited to Nama than photos would have.

There are only 36 recipes in CHEWISH, but oh what recipes they are! A few examples . . . Crab Meat Dip, Cheese Puffs, Matzo Ball Soup, Standing Rib Roast, Nama Chicken, Noodle Pudding, Nama’s Streusel Coffee Cake, Black Bottom Pie, and Bird’s Nest Cookies.

I knew right away that Nama was most loved by her family, and feeding them seems to have been a true joy of hers. This is not a huge cookbook, but everyone will find something that they love.

Be it the recipes, or the heartwarming stories, CHEWISH will make a sweet addition to any cookbook collection.

I’m not Jewish, but I love a good “grandma” cookbook.

As far as cookbooks go, this wasn’t much. Only 36 recipes. Rather small. But what really sold this book was the loving stories of the food, the preparation, the people, and mostly, the grandmother. I enjoyed reading it very much, and I have enjoyed making some of the recipes. I hope more of them find their way into our menu cycle in our home.

I gratefully received this book as an eARC from the author, publisher, and NetGalley in exchange for my unbiased review.

A delightful read and the recipes are easy to follow. The crab cakes were my first attempt and they were good.

What a wonderful cookbook - you will recognize your own “Nana” in these recipes!
Nana grew up in New York and moved to Sioux City, Iowa in 1919. You will find out that Nana loved rich, good-tasting food with easily-to-find ingredients. She made asparagus rolls with blue cheese and crab dip, matzo ball soup, and black bottom pie.
The author, being Nanas granddaughter has plenty of stories about Nanas family, her cooking disasters, and how delectable the food was!
You will enjoy making Nanas banana bread, crispy chicken, beef tenderloin, Reuben with Thousand Island dressing, brownies and cheesecake!
You will feel like Nana is in the kitchen helping you along!

Delicious! Author is sharing her grandmother gift by sharing the wonderful recipes from her grandma. This book deserve a try from any type of reader. Excellent!

Chewish is filled with wonderful recipes from a Jewish family. From matzo ball soup to a not so kosher crab meat dip. This book has recipies from appetizers to desserts. It purports to have the "world's Best Cheesecake" recipie. I loved the recipies in this book and will make them again and again. I would recommend this to anyone who loves to cook.

I would like to thank Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a review copy in exchange for my honest and unbiased opinion of it.

Sorry, but I think you have to be Jewish to fully enjoy and laugh with this book. It brought back memories and a wistful feeling that my maternal grandmother nor my mother allowed me in the kitchen. They were the Queens there. There are several recipes that I want to try. Yes, I would recommend this book to everyone.

I found the writing fairly entertaining but the recipes were mediocre.

An interesting and sometimes moving books about family, memories and recipes.
The recipes are interesting and already tried on of them: the result was relly tasty.
Not the usual recipe book or family memoir.
Nice and interesting
Many thanks to Netgalley and Concierge Marketing Inc.

A lovely family book, with recipes and highlights of traditions passed down.
Being Jewish I know about all the recipes that get passed down and have had the pleasure of cooking with my grandmother and great grandmother through the years. This is a lovely compilation of their family. I will be flipping through this again and again.

Winter is definitely in full swing here in NH. As I sit here on my couch surrounded by books about food, there is a snowstorm blowing around outside. The weather outside is frightful and our natural tendency is to look for comfort foods to cook and eat. They will warm us up physically and emotionally.

Here is a book that reads like the memoir of a food lover, bringing you histories of different kinds of “Jewish” foods and how they became the icons of our collective memory.
This is not a cookbook. It has some recipes, but it is really more the history of our people through food.

Sarah Goldberg Wendel writes in her soon to be published book, Chewish: 36 Recipes of Love with Stories from Nama”, “The kitchen is the center of the universe, and the dining room table is the United Nations of world order where the world’s problems can be solved, I am certain, over a nice bowl of matzo ball soup.” Her book is a mix of personal stories of growing up in the Midwest with a grandmother who cooked Jewish comfort foods, that now Wendel remembers fondly and recipes she tries to replicate in her own kitchen. She is trying to share the foods and culture of her Jewish childhood with her children. She is not following any rules of kashrut and her recipes are mainly from the memory of cooking with her grandmother. There are also recipes and stories from other friends of her grandmothers, who were also transplanted from a more religious and culturally Jewish environment to the less observant world of Middle America.

Hm. Ok. So, the good things first. The author obviously loves his grandmother very much and has wonderful memories of her. This book is his love for her, put to paper. That said, it's not really a book, per se, but rather a collection of memories that would be passed down from family member to family member. It's not very long, the recipes aren't really outstanding, and it's just not a 'book.' It's a great heirloom piece, and a lot of work has been into it, but it won't mean nearly as much to people outside of the family. Also, something that would help a LOT is having pictures of the recipes in the book.