A biography for Gil Markshasn’t been written yet.
“Throughout history, Hanukkah was a relatively minor festival, but it's become very popular in America due to its proximity to Christmas.”
“To know a community is to know its food.”
“The Passover experience is an incredibly pedagogic one.”
“I never serve a dessert on Passover that I would not serve the rest of the year.”
“The more things you make from scratch, the less expensive and usually healthier and tastier.”
“We can all be defined by food.”
“Food is never static; culture is never static.”
“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.”
“Each Passover, I prepare all sorts of fancy desserts for my family and friends, often experimenting with adaptations of sophisticated modern fare.”
“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.”
“One of the keys to Jewish culinary history is that the Jewish role was not so much innovation but transition and transformation.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”