Every Hanukkah I crave Hebrew soul food, so when a reader asked me to reprise a piece from 20 years ago about my Bubbie’s holiday feasts, I was delighted to update the memory.

Bubbie was a grandmother’s grandmother who’d have the whole extended family over for holidays, plus some strays who had nowhere else to go, and spend three days cooking enough food for twice as many as she’d invited.

Since her passing many years ago, I’ve had to get my fix mainly from a dog-eared copy of “Mama Leah’s Jewish Kitchen,” which offers “a compendium of more than 225 tasty recipes” from kugel to kasha, blintzes to borscht.

In other words, major food porn.

These days, I mostly just read instead of actually cook — partly because of the level of difficulty and partly because of things I’ve learned from these recipes that I didn’t need to know about the ingredients of the dishes I love.

For instance, Mama Leah describes kishke, my favorite appetizer, as “stuffed derma,” which I never knew is the intestine of a cow.

I could only hope the many intestinal nuggets I’ve consumed were cleansed of what was passing through at the time of death. Or maybe that was the stuffing; I didn’t read on to find out.

I once hungered for brisket and Mama Leah’s cholent seemed perfect. She describes a yummy cassoulet of beef, potatoes, barley, lima beans, onions and garlic.

But what’s this quarter cup of schmaltz? I thought that’s what they called my cousin Dickie.

Mama Leah describes schmaltz as “rendered chicken fat.” The meat doesn’t have enough fat? You have to add more?

I tried to compensate with a lower-fat side dish and chose kugel, a delicious noodle dish that’s a Hanukkah staple. Wrong. Egg noodles, six eggs and again with the rendered chicken fat.

I researched rendering, and as it relates to schmaltz, it means to heat great heaps of chicken fat and skin until the fat liquefies and the skin gets crispy.

You snack on the skin to make sure your cholesterol doesn’t drop below 600 while you wait for the liquid fat to congeal into schmaltz.

My go-to dessert is ruga­lach, cookie-sized pastries filled with fruit, chocolate, nuts and cinnamon. I expected lots of sugar, but not fat.

Wrong again. Start with a couple of eggs and a cup each of butter, cream cheese and sour cream. Sprinkle in a tad of flour to bind all the heart-cloggers together and you’ve got the dough.

The recipe doesn’t call for schmaltz; I guess you serve it on the side as a dip.

Finally I understand why Jewish parents pressure their children to become doctors: We need cardiac teams with crash carts around when we chow down.

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Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com or blog.volcanicash.net.