The Wednesday before Rosh HaShanah has special significance: it is the day when the New York Times Dining & Wine section and the Boston Globe Food section go Jewish. Today’s Times features an article on kugel and an exceprt from Marcie Cohen Ferris’ Matzo Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales From the Jewish South, along with a recipe for “Rosh Hashana Jam Cake.” The Globe features an article on the expanding role of hekhshers in American life as well as a brief column on Rosh HaShanah with accompanying recipes. There is also, curiously, an article on a kosher restauarant in Madrid.

As expected, the articles are not particularly interesting or informative, but it is sometimes worth having a look at how Judaism in general, and Kashrut in particular, are reperesented in the mainstream media. Joe Yonan’s article on hekhshers seems generally fair and accurate, although the phenomenon on which it focuses — the deliberate selection of kosher products by consumers who don’t keep kosher — continues to strike me as absurd. The article opens with the story of an Episcopalian with a dairy allergy who seeks out “kosher parve” labels, and goes on to mention others who buy hekhshered products in the belief that they are safer, healthier, or more “pure.” Somehow it continues to escape people that hekhshers are not indications of health or safety, only kashrut. Those with dairy allergies would do best to read the allergy information now available on most packaged foods, which account not only for dairy ingredients and equipment, but also for the potential presence of airborne particles. (Lactose intolerate individuals, on the other hand, are best off looking for “lactose free” labels, which may appear on some products that are halakhically dairy.) Consumers concerned about pesticides, antibiotics, or the humane treatment of livestock should look for organic produce or free-range poultry, respectively. People who are worried about their health should read nutritional information. Only those concerned about the kashrut of their food should be looking for hekhshers.

Joan Nathan’s New York Times article bears the tantalizing title “Kugel Unraveled,” but fails to address the underlying philosophical question: what makes a kugel a kugel? Nathan mentions that the word “kugel” comes from the German word for “ball,” but her statement that kugel is traditionally round doesn’t really explain its etymology — a circle is not a ball. (In his World of Jewish Cooking, Gil Marks presents a somewhat more compelling explanation, though I can’t vouch for its accuracy. Originally, he claims, a “kugel” was a round dumpling made from flour or stale bread and cooked inside a pot of cholent. Eventually, the term came to refer to any baked dish prepared without water and held together by eggs and fat.) The article does, however, address such topics as the mystical qualities of kugel, and the accompanying recipes for “killer kugel” (milchig), Jerusalem kugel (parve), and broccoli-potato kugel (parve) are probably fabulous, considering that they come to us by way of the eminent Joan Nathan.

None of this year’s Rosh HaShanah recipes are actually treyf, but a number of the side-dishes and desserts (including the Globe’s apple cake and noodle kugel and the Times’ “Rosh Hashana jam cake“) are dairy, and therefore incompatible with fleishig holiday meals. The Globe’s recipe for carrot tzimmis can be made parve, however, and its “braised brisket with wine and tomatoes” doesn’t look half bad.