By Rabbi Rachel Esserman

Whenever we were sick or injured, my mother would smash up 3-4,000 milligrams of vitamin C to help us heal. A fan of Linus Pauling, who was a proponent of vitamin C, she claimed that the reason I still have an eyebrow after a bike accident when I was a kid is because of the doses of vitamin C she gave me. Back then, she would put the smashed up tablets (she considered them more effective that way) into a glass, add some hot water and orange juice, and make us drink the concoction. I still follow this family custom, but now ingest the smashed pills in unsweetened applesauce and then make sure to rinse my mouth to get rid of the acid.
While this is not exactly a folk remedy, I thought about it when reading an article on The Nosher website called “7 Jewish Recipes To Cure Your Cold.” What was fun was that while I knew about chicken soup, most of the items were unfamiliar. OK, so I know and like sauerkraut (although do people really make their own sauerkraut?), but I’m supposed to watch my sodium, so I’m not sure how much of that I could eat.
Looking at the different items confirmed something about which we don’t always think: there is no such thing as Jewish food, but rather food Jews eat in the different countries they have lived in across the world. Most of the foods listed were either made exclusively by Eastern European Jews or exclusively by Yemenite Jews. As Jews emigrated across the world, they were forced to use local food items to create kosher dishes. No matter how much you might like a certain recipe, if the ingredients are no longer available, then you either can’t make the dish or have to find substitutes.
My favorite example of this change is how, in Eastern Europe, goose was once the fowl of choice. But geese need space, so as Jews moved from villages to cities like New York City, chicken became the easier choice. Just think: that Friday night chicken dinner might have once been roast goose. That sounds like something out of a Charles Dickens novel rather than a story about life in a Jewish shtetl in Russia or Poland.