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

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

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

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

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.

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.