Holiday menu of discovery

You can't cook just anything for Rosh Hashana. There are rules to follow, traditions to uphold. And I wasn't familiar with any of them: I grew up in Tornado Alley, in a Quaker boarding school in northern Iowa. But here I was, in Southern California, setting about to prepare a Rosh Hashana dinner for my Jewish boyfriend. What to cook became a theology lesson as well as a culinary one.

By Amy Scattergood