[...] By the time I’d finished reading his article I wanted to call him up on the phone and suggest, as politely as knew how, that he might just have grown up surrounded by bad cooks. It seems never to have occurred to Ozersky that the food wasn’t supposed to taste bad, and that people were attached to it because genuinely delicious versions exist. In fact, despite his assertion that “[n]obody is giving Jewish food the Torrisi treatment, raising up to a world-class level and celebrating its flavor profiles,” there’s been a recent swell of haute cuisine aspirations among traditional Jewish cooks, largely inspired by the Kosher by Design series. While my reactions to those books are generally mixed,* I have to applaud anyone who is at least trying. (It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Mr. Ozersky has never heard of Susie Fishbein. We’re talking about a guy so out of touch with American Jewish eating habits that, despite writing about food for a living, he only discovered this week that hummus can taste good.) [...]