On the Table Manners podcast, the Jewish hosts, singer Jessie Ware and her mother, Helena “Lennie” Ware, cook, eat, and chat with famous guests.
But turns out there’s one thing this British mother-and-daughter duo doesn’t know how to make: challah. The actress and singer Kate Hudson, their special New Year’s Eve podcast guest, is hoping to remedy that.
Hudson, whose mother is the iconic Jewish actress Goldie Hawn, is apparently a challah master.
The “Song Sung Blue” star, who has previously shared that she feels more Jewish than anything else, thanks to the influence of her maternal grandmother, Laura Hawn, told Table Manners that she often makes challah with her three children. Hudson and her kids recite the blessing together and talk about the significance of the ingredients in the traditional Jewish bread.
“You’ve never taught me what all the ingredients of the challah bread represent; you’ve just given me Jewish guilt,” Jessie, who celebrated her bat mitzvah at age 38 in response to rising antisemitism, then jokingly complained to her mother (who hosted said 2022 bat mitzvah in her living room).
Jessie and Lennie laugh, and Lennie then confessed: “I’ve never made challah in my life.”
Hudson gasped in disbelief, telling Lennie, “But they’re so easy to make.
Lennie then asks Hudson if she is a four-strand challah or a three-strand challah kind of person, and Hudson (rightfully!) boasts that her challahs are the four-strand variety. (We’re impressed!)
Hudson explains that she uses a diagram to remind her how to do it. (If you need a video guide too, our friends at the Nosher have a great one!)
Lennie then laments that she just doesn’t have a good recipe for the dough, and Kate promises to hook her up. “I’ve got a great one,” she says, promising to text it to Lennie. Is there a better sign of good character than sharing your good challah recipe upon first conversation? We’re kvelling.
The talk of challah isn’t just superficial. It stems from a question the duo asked Hudson about the food that fills her with nostalgia. And while Hudson divulged earlier in the podcast that she mostly cooks Italian food, an homage to her father, singer Bill Hudson’s heritage, it’s “Jewish food,” she said, that”makes me emotional.”
Hudson also praises her mother’s cooking, calling her a “one-pot wonder” and saying that she often could improvise incredible one-pot meals without a cookbook. But she goes into most detail when she talks about her grandmother’s cooking.
According to Hudson, Laura Hawn, who lived in their house when Kate was growing up, was a great cook of traditional Jewish food. She made challah (which she turned into delectable challah French toast), matzah balls, to-die-for brisket and latkes, and those specific Jewish foods are the most emotionally evocative for Hudson. In the podcast, she reminisced about her grandmother’s matzah ball soup, which was perfect, with just matzah meal dumplings that were — “kind of medium, she didn’t make the big balls,” and that there is absolutely “nothing like it.” (When Lennie wonders if she should make her own small matzah balls bigger, Hudson encourages her to try).
She also talked about the blueberry blintzes her grandmother used to make. She recalled that she recently got them at a restaurant with her daughter, Rani, and that eating the stuffed sweet treat made her “so emotional.”
“We’re not a religious family,” she told the Wares. Although they did go to synagogue with her grandmother when she was alive, “we didn’t really carry the religious part of our Judaism, but the traditions are so amazing and beautiful.”
Back in 2022, Hudson reminisced about some of those rituals in a make-up video: “She lit candles every Friday and put a napkin on her head,” Hudson said of Laura, “I remember when we were little, she would put the napkin on her head, and we all thought it was funny, and she was like ‘it’s not funny!’”
“There are such beautiful [Jewish] traditions, and my grandma gave that to us, she was the only one, no one else, and thank God for that,” Hudson shared with the Table Manners ladies.
We’re also pretty grateful for Hudson’s love for Jewish food and tradition — and would be even more grateful for her challah recipe!
Send it our way, Kate (please and thank you — we do have table manners, after all)!
