Stories of Food, Family, and Tradition in Jewish South Carolina

Kugels & Collards

On sale now!

by Rachel Gordin Barnett and Lyssa Kligman Harvey

Explore South Carolina’s Jewish history through the lens of food and memory. Kugels & Collards is a poignant—and delicious—collection of South Carolina Jewish family and community stories and special family recipes.

About the Book

Where people go, so goes their food. In Kugels & Collards, Rachel Gordin Barnett and Lyssa Kligman Harvey explore the food history, traditions, and memories of Jews in South Carolina, building on their blog of the same title. The book explores the diversity of Jewish South Carolina, with stories and recipes contributed from families with Sephardic and Ashkenazi heritage who have been in the state for hundreds of years, from descendants of Holocaust survivors, and from more recent immigrants from Russia and Israel. Kugels & Collards is also a story of cultural assimilation and exchange and considers how local ingredients and techniques have become part of the South Carolina Jewish table, including the influence of the generations of Black women who cooked for Jewish families.

  • Includes more than 50 stories and approximately 80 recipes, organized thematically.

  • Showcases the diversity of Jewish cooking throughout the state.

  • Illustrations include approximately 60 historic and family photographs as well as over 15 professional photographs of finished dishes.

  • Marcie Cohen Ferris, best known as the author of Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South provides a foreword.

  • Dale Rosengarten and Historic Columbia advised on the project.

About the Authors

Rachel Gordin Barnett and Lyssa Kligman Harvey are passionate about all things southern, Jewish, and historical. Native South Carolinians, Rachel hails from small-town Summerton and Lyssa from Columbia. Both now live in Columbia, South Carolina.

Rachel and Lyssa have been instrumental in preserving Jewish history across the state. Founding members of the Historic Columbia Jewish Heritage Initiative, they created the Kugels & Collards® blog to preserve and share Columbia’s Jewish history by collecting food stories, recipes, and photographs in a digital venue. Rachel is executive director and a past president of the Jewish Historical Society of South Carolina (JHSSC). Lyssa is a teacher, therapist and artist. Her life’s work has been dedicated to helping children and impacting her community by creating the Columbia Holocaust Education Commission, the Jewish Cultural Arts, and serving on arts and environmental boards.

Rachel and Lyssa’s families are longtime South Carolinians. Their mothers were born and raised in Charleston and passed down recipes from their Jewish heritage to their daughters. Exploring southern and Jewish foodways enable Rachel and Lyssa to honor their own family histories and preserve those stories for future generations of South Carolinians.

  • “The best cookbooks weave an evocative personal narrative with a treasure trove of irresistible recipes [and] in the process deepen our understanding of a culture and its food. Kugels & Collards more than delivers on this formula, opening a new window into South Carolina Jewry and its rich, delicious history.”

    Adeena Sussman, author of Shabbat: Recipes and Rituals from My Table to Yours

  • “This brilliant book has made me terribly sorry I wasn’t raised Jewish in South Carolina. . . . From challah and cheesecake, peach cobbler and pickles you can make in a day, collards simmered down with onions and tomatoes to kugel baked with raisins and apricot jam, the recipes in this book tell important stories of Southern Jewish foodways, give thanks to the African American cooks who worked in Jewish home kitchens, and remind us how food connects us all.”

    Anne Byrn, food writer and author of American Cake, and the forthcoming Baking in the American South

  • “'Kugels & Collards' is a book we’ve been waiting for. Through first-person accounts and family recipes, Rachel Gordin Barnett and Lyssa Kligman Harvey reveal the expressive power of food to speak as well as to nourish. . . . Region and religion clash as observant Jews strive to keep kosher in the land of shrimp and pork. Every page, every photograph, every ‘long-loved recipe’ is charged with memories and a determination to honor the cooks by passing their legacies to the next generation.”

    Dale Rosengarten, founding director of the Jewish Heritage Collection, College of Charleston, and curator and coeditor of A Portion of the People: Three Hundred Years of Southern Jewish Life

Publisher Information

Kugels and Collards is published by University of South Carolina Press. 8’’x 10’’ trim, 240 pages, 75 color images, $36.99 hardcover; e-book also available.

Contact: Cathy Esposito
Marketing & Sales Director
(803) 777-2021
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“Southern Jews revealed who they were and what they believed through the foods they ate—and did not eat.”

—Marcie Cohen Ferris, from the foreword