Green, who lives in Elkins Park and served as a culinary consultant for Max & David's there, was a key player and one of the few women involved in Philadelphia's 1970s restaurant revival.
For the Passover workshop, she worked at a table in the front of the room, her every step enlarged on an overhead monitor, and chatted freely as she made three desserts.
Each is from her next cookbook, Starting With Ingredients: Baking Recipes (Running Press, fall 2008), and each was adapted for Passover to eliminate flour, baking powder, and other leavening ingredients.
Cornstarch is a no-no, replaced with potato starch. Instead of flour, many Passover recipes call for matzo meal, a coarse mixture that can be difficult to work with.
Eggs can be used because they fall into the pareve category of the Jewish dietary laws, meaning they can be eaten with either meat or dairy. And when they're whipped to a froth, the eggs add lightness.
Of course, that level of egg-beating calls for something more powerful than a good old hand beater, so the food processor and standing mixer Green used had to be ritually prepared in a time-consuming process.
Green is a longtime student of food history and kitchen miscellany. In fact, she's writing a Jewish culinary history.
The rubber spatula is one of the few kitchen tools invented in America, she told the gathering.
"That and the swivel peeler," she announced, apropos of nothing. "Mostly everything else is from Europe.
"And did you know that the rectangular grater found in most kitchens came from a design used for wood shaving?"
The things she knows: Separate a large egg and the white yields one tablespoon while the yolk yields two. And when cooking with honey, remember that it is twice as sweet as sugar.
