Aaron Hamburger is a writer, a baker and a recipe maker. While food informs all of his genres, cooking has not always been his thing.

“I could barely boil water for a long period of my life,” Hamburger, who writes fiction and non-fiction, as well as food and recipes, told the Journal.

Around the time his first book, a short story collection called “The View from Stalin’s Head,” came out, Hamburger’s publicist went on vacation to cooking school for a week.

“I thought that sounded amazing,” he said. “So I went to the Institute for Culinary Education in New York, and the bug just bit.”

Hamburger started taking as many classes as he could, collecting cookbooks and learning through trial and error. After a while, he decided to combine the two interests.

“Food’s [even] been present in all of my fiction, just in different ways, often depending on the places or topics that I’m writing about,” Hamburger said. His recipe for mojito cookies from his novel “Hotel Cuba” is below.

When asked if there was food in that first short story collection, Hamburger said it actually contained a lot of bad food.

“The book is set in Prague right after the Cold War, when it was really difficult to find fresh vegetables or fruit and things like that, so the chances of running into some bad food, frankly, were quite high,” he said. “To accurately describe that milieu, the bad food kept coming up; a few readers were not happy with my depiction.”

Hamburger was living in Prague at the time, teaching English. During the break for Christmas in 1998, he and a friend decided to go to Israel.

“I remember biting into an orange and I felt like I had never tasted an orange before,” he said. “The freshness of the Mediterranean cuisine really stood out, after being in Eastern Europe for all this time and eating things like tripe soup.”

When his second book, “Faith for Beginners,” came out, “it definitely featured that sense of light and air and the freshness of that food.”

For writing recipes, Hamburger said being a former noncook puts him at an advantage, since he understands how things can go wrong in the kitchen. When he writes recipes, he thinks about, “What’s the mistake that I would make?” or “How do I make this clearer?”

When a recipe goes wrong, he explained, it’s always the recipe writer’s fault.

For instance, when Hamburger wrote the babka recipes for Lesléa Newman’s children’s book “The Babka Sisters,” he had testers with various experiences in and out of the kitchen; some were not Jewish, others had never tasted a babka. Hamburger wanted to know what did and did not understand.

“I had to design a double recipe because the book is about two sisters: one sister makes a chocolate babka, one makes a cinnamon babka, and they’re having a competition to see whose is better,” he said. “One of the testers came back and said, ‘There’s one problem with the recipe for the cinnamon babka: you forgot to include cinnamon in the recipe.’”

That is why editors and testers are so important.

Hamburger also believes that food writers, and even fiction writers, tend to overwrite their food descriptions.

“The time guide is elastic: What you are looking for is more important, like ‘bake until golden brown’ or ‘slightly golden brown at the edges,’” he said. “Fiction writers tend to … describe [food] in lofty, elevated terms, rather than just dealing with it frankly and head-on, like what kind of food is it and how it functions in this world.”

So, if you’re writing about food, either fiction or nonfiction, be direct and be specific.

The best practice to get better at food description is to study food. Hamburger recalled the first assignment he got in his food writing class at NYU: pick a fresh food item and look at it for an hour. He chose a lemon.

“If you actually look at the surface of a lemon, there’s a variety of colors: there might be a little green on the stem end where it was picked, there might be some flex of orange or a blush of pink, there might be little dirt marks there,” he said. “It’s more than a yellow oblong fruit.”

There are also the qualities of the different parts of the fruit: The zest, the pith, the flesh in the middle, the seeds.

There are so many different parts there and, in our two-minute or two-second attention span culture, we can just gloss over those things that are so important,” Hamburger said. “I think it was [French novelist] Gustave Flaubert who said, ‘Anything gets interesting if you look at it long enough;’ if something is not interesting, it just means you haven’t looked at it with enough attention.”

When it comes to food, the senses are memory carriers.

“There’s this object in the Harry Potter series, called a portkey: it’s an object that if the characters touch it, it whisks them away to, like, another place in time,” Hamburger said. “Food is like that kind of portkey that exists in our lives.

“If you really focus, you may find that the foods that you naturally gravitate to, and also the foods you stay away from, may have [a rich] history tied within them,” he continued. “I think examining it just makes your life all that more fulfilling.”

Learn more at AaronHamburger.com.

For the full conversation, listen to the podcast:

Watch the interview:

Mojito Cookies

These cookies are inspired by the torticas de Morón (Cuban shortbread cookies) Pearl craves while in Havana, as well as the classic tropical cocktail, the mojito. The cookies are delicious without the rum extract if you want to keep them alcohol-free. Or, if you want to dress them up, top with melted white chocolate, dulce de leche or a quick icing made with one cup of powdered sugar and the juice of a lime. Yield: About two dozen cookies.

1 stick (½ cup) unsalted butter, room temperature

½ cup confectioners’ sugar

½ tsp Diamond kosher salt or ¼ tsp table salt

1 Tbsp minced fresh mint leaves

1 lime, zested (if you want to add icing, save the lime to juice)

1 tsp vanilla extract

¼ tsp mint extract

¼ tsp rum extract (optional)

1 cup flour

Green sanding sugar

1. With an electric mixer, beat the butter until smooth, then reduce speed and gradually add confectioners’ sugar. Once combined, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add salt, mint leaves, lime zest, vanilla extract, mint extract (and rum extract, if using) and mix until incorporated.

2. Reduce speed to low and add flour, ½ cup at a time, occasionally scraping the bowl. Transfer dough to a sheet of plastic wrap and form into a disc. Wrap and refrigerate for one hour.

3. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Roll out dough to ¼-inch thickness and cut with a 1-inch circular cookie cutter (with fluted edge if you have one). Place on the baking sheet about 1 inch apart and sprinkle with green sanding sugar.

4. Bake for about 12 minutes, until just golden brown at the edges. Let cool on the baking sheet for 5 minutes. Then move cookies to a rack to cool completely.

Debra Eckerling is a writer for the Jewish Journal and the host of “Taste Buds with Deb.” Subscribe on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform. Email Debra: tastebuds@jewishjournal.com.