c. 1996 Religion News Service

VAIL, Colo. (RNS)-Why is this night different from all other nights? On this night we hold the Passover Seder at a posh ski resort in the Rockies.

Like devoted Jewish cooks around the world, award-winning chef Jim Cohen will be in his kitchen Thursday, April 4, lovingly preparing a Seder, the Passover feast described in Chapter 12 of the biblical Book of Exodus and the most beloved of Jewish family rituals.

While the symbolic dishes of the Seder are traditionally cooked and served at home, Cohen’s chicken soup will simmer on a restaurant stove. His succulent Moroccan lamb will roast in a commercial oven. His flourless chocolate Passover cake will be plentiful, serving 90.

Cohen’s guests, among them family members and friends, will observe Passover at a $50 prix fixe Seder in the unlikely setting of the elegant Lodge at Vail, as part of its”Ski & Seder”weekend package.

As for the Seder’s non-traditional setting, food historian and author Joan Nathan says,”the reality of our world is that Passover falls during spring vacation and families want to go away. “It’s more important to have a Seder away from home than not to have one at all,”says Nathan, author of the 1994 bestseller,”Jewish Cooking in America.”(Knopf).

The emergence of Jewish food in many restaurant kitchens, Nathan says, is due in part to the fact that in this multi-ethnic era, Jewish food is as much of an inspiration for American chefs as is French, Mexican, Italian or Asian fare.”A good chef is always looking for a challenge, such as how to take the laws of Kashrut (dietary laws) and use them in their own kitchens,”she said.”And Jewish chefs are no longer embarrassed about their backgrounds.” Cohen, 40, is food and beverage director at the Lodge at Vail, where he presides over Wildflower, its signature restaurant.

Cohen is not himself religiously observant, and even for this Seder feast his restaurant kitchen will be far from kosher. But he is one of a cadre of notable Jewish chefs-among them Jonathan Waxman of San Francisco’s Stars and Anne Rosenzweig of the elegant Manhattan eatery Arcadia-who are putting the foods of their youth on America’s map of haute cuisine.

Cohen’s recipes for Jewish dishes, Sephardic Short Ribs of Beef and Kosher Chicken in a Pot, are year-round fare at Wildflower, along with less ethnic specialties such as Morel Mushrooms with Cornbread and Pumpkin Risotto with Chives.”My mother did the cooking and my grandmother was a great baker,”said Cohen, who grew up in a Buffalo, N.Y., Reform Jewish family.”I was heavy as a kid. I loved to eat, so my nickname was `the Food King.’ I could always take care of myself in the kitchen.” At 18, Cohen moved to the San Francisco Bay Area home of family friends while attending college, exchanging his bread-baking skills for rent. West Coast life and travel introduced him first to the complexities of Indian and Mexican cuisines, then to the Sephardic tastes of Spanish-Jewish fare.”A friend took me to the Sephardic area of Los Angeles and it was like, `Wow, they’re cooking with chilis,'”says Cohen, whose family is of Ashkenazic (East European) origin.”Jewish food for me is the cooking I grew up with plus Sephardic food, which has similar flavorings to Indian and Mexican cuisine, such as cumin, coriander, cinnamon and citrus.” Returning home in the mid-1970s to study photography and anthropology at the University of Buffalo, Cohen began cooking to offset darkroom costs. He soon found himself at Mulligan’s, a local bistro-bar-disco where, under the tutelage of a French chef named Vince, he made”a thousand crepes at a time.””The insanity of the restaurant business was attractive to me,”says Cohen, who followed up his Mulligan’s experience with more formal training at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. There, he gained a career and a wife; Connie Cohen is pastry chef at Wildflower. The Cohens, who live about 15 minutes east of Vail, have three children.

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After his graduation from CIA, Cohen helped launch a restaurant in Atlanta’s Colony Square Hotel, then moved to Colorado where he cooked at the Denver Country Club and at Denver’s famous Tante Louise restaurant. There he was selected by Julia Child as one of 15 regional chefs to be featured on the PBS series”Dining with Julia.” The Cohens, who had one child at the time, wanted to move to Berkeley. But 11 years ago, a headhunter came along with an offer they couldn’t refuse, just across the Continental Divide in Vail at the soon-to-be-opened Wildflower.

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Cohen, who loves to cook Italian food at home, says he started delving into Jewish foods and adding them to his menu about nine years ago. He calls it”postmodern Hebrew.””I tried to duplicate my mother’s brisket, but it took me three years to pull the information out, to know what to ask,”he says.”The learning process has changed as our daily food has become more generic and assimilated. We no longer have several generations in the kitchen together. Now it’s book learning-that has drawbacks. There’s no baseline for how things should be.” The practice of Jewish chefs introducing the foods of their childhoods into their restaurant kitchens is happening almost subconsciously, Cohen says.”This will be our third Seder at the Wildflower,”says Cohen, who recently served a Shabbat (Sabbath) dinner to a sell-out crowd.”At the first Seder, my mother stood in the kitchen and watched me cook.” At this year’s Wildflower Seder, Dr. Benjamin Honigmen, a local physician, will lead the participants through biblical readings and prayers contained in the Haggadah, the book that details the ritual meal. Children of the families assembled will be called upon to ask the famous”Four Questions,”which launch the narrative of the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt.

Laid out on a special Seder dish will be the ritual foods of Passover-a roasted bone, the hardboiled egg, bitter herbs and salt water; haroset, a cinnamon-spiced blend of apples and nuts emblematic of the mortar prepared by Israelite slaves in Egypt; parsley, wine and the unleavened bread known as matzo.”The Seders have become family events and they’re also open to the public,”Cohen explains.”I started doing them because of my culinary interest, for those of us who grew up around family. If there’s a level of sacredness, the sacredness is in the sense of community, family and connections to ancestors. For me, the pleasure of the table comes at these holiday meals.” And the pleasures of the table are plentiful-and far from traditional. Cohen’s gefilte fish is spiked with beet horseradish; his haroset comes in three flavors, and the polenta that accompanies his Moroccan lamb is made with matzo meal rather than corn. His chocolate cake is garnished with grilled oranges and a decidedly un-kosher dollop of whipped cream.

While it has taken Cohen’s staff a little while to get the hang of some of the Jewish food combinations- kasha and squab, for instance-Wildflower’s non-Jewish customers seem to love them.”A lot of people ask me `What is schmaltz?'”he says, referring to the rendered chicken fat valued as highly by Jewish cooks as the French value butter.”I tell them it’s the essence of life.”

MJP END MITCHELL