''I HAVE always said that holidays are very dangerous,'' said Edward Serotta. Old Jewish women are always looking to stuff a nice Jewish bachelor like him. Still, Mr. Serotta, 54, takes his chances because holiday meals are essential to his work, documenting what remains of Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe.

Mr. Serotta is the director of Centropa, the Central Europe Center for Research and Documentation. It is an oral-history project that includes an interactive archive of recipes gathered in Jewish population centers in 13 countries.

Centropa has roots in a kitchen epiphany. In 1999, Mr. Serotta was producing a documentary for the ABC News program ''Nightline'' on Rosie Jakab, a Romanian in her 90's who was still cooking the food she loved for both Jews and non-Jews, at a home for the elderly where she lived.

''A dozen people were eating in the soup kitchen, and another dozen upstairs,'' said Mr. Serotta, who had first visited the home a dozen years earlier. ''They were cooking so well that I hung around for five weeks. It was so embarrassing. The good thing was they kept feeding me, so I thought, 'Why hurry?' ''

While editing the film, Mr. Serotta told his translator that it was a pity that the Jewish cultural and culinary heritage of Central and Eastern Europe was being lost. The translator introduced him to Eszter Andor and Dora Sardi, two newly arrived Israelis, who had been trained to record oral histories. Mr. Serotta hired them immediately, along with an Internet-oriented archivist, Dejan Petrovic, from Belgrade.

That was the start of Centropa, which is based in Vienna and has 90 full- and part-time staff members, more than a dozen trained interviewers and an annual budget of $600,000, financed by the Austrian government; the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the relief and rescue organization; and numerous foundations.

Along with recipes and interviews, family photographs are put on a searchable database. (A little exploring on www.centropa.org will take you to ''Eating Around Eastern Europe.'')

What drives Mr. Serotta's work is his realization that the Jewish communities in cities like Bucharest and Arad, in Romania, are on their last legs. (There are 466,400 Jews in the 18 countries that constitute Eastern Europe, including Russia, the American Jewish Committee says.)

''For 50 years, the Nazis and then the Communists barred these people from Jewish life,'' said Amir Shaviv, assistant executive vice president of the Joint Distribution Committee. ''The recipes are gone because the grandmother died in the Holocaust. Food is one aspect of many to study. Because the Jewish center of the shtetl was the table, a lack of funds gave birth to an innovative folk life and innovative recipes. When you are poor and have no money, you can eat simply with potatoes and bread and occasionally meat.''

The purity of Jewish recipes of Eastern Europe has been hard to preserve. Families that survived the Holocaust took recipes to the countries where they resettled, mainly Israel and the United States. The recipes blended with the traditions of the newly adopted countries.

For Mr. Serotta, the flavors of Eastern Europe changed his life. He was a stockbroker in Atlanta, bored with his job, when he vacationed in Eastern Europe 19 years ago.

''I was sitting in a coffeehouse in Prague,'' he said during a fund-raising trip to Washington. ''I was eating great baked Czech chocolate pastries and talking with an elderly Jewish woman, watching the snow falling.'' He was entranced by her stories about growing up in the years before World War II. ''I thought, 'I am not going back to Atlanta,' '' he said.

He did return, but not for long. Once again in Eastern Europe, he visited a Jewish community center in Bucharest in 1985 and had another culinary epiphany.

''Someone served me a piece of brisket the size of a telephone book with big boiled potatoes. It felt like home,'' he said. ''Then I realized, it is the old country, and these were the recipes of my grandparents in Poland.''

He vowed then to capture the family stories of these people. Three years later, he sold everything he owned and moved to Budapest. He has produced three books and four documentary films. His photographs are in the permanent collections of many American museums.

In Vienna, where Mr. Serotta now lives, he often eats Friday night dinner with his neighbors Sarah Moskowicz and her daughter, Ruth Rabinovich, who cook Hungarian Jewish classics like chicken paprika for him.

''You put a Hungarian in a room with a deep dish, a large cast-iron pot, a fowl and some wine, and you get a spectacular result,'' he said.


Adapted from Rosie Jakab

Time: 1 hour

For the chicken:

1 3-pound chicken

1/4 cup olive oil

1 teaspoon salt

1 large onion, chopped fine

1 tablespoon mild paprika

1/4 teaspoon hot paprika

1 cup chicken stock

1 tablespoon tomato paste

For the dumplings:

6 to 8 tablespoons flour

2 large eggs

1/4 teaspoon salt

4 cups chicken stock or water

2 tablespoons parsley, chopped.

1. Heat oven to 400 degrees. Cut chicken into 8 pieces, and pat dry with paper towels. Heat oil in a Dutch oven or a heavy frying pan that can go into oven. Sauté chicken over medium-high heat until pieces are golden brown, about 10 minutes. Remove chicken with a slotted spoon, and sprinkle with salt.

2. Place onion in same pan, sauté until soft. Remove pan from heat, and let cool for 2 minutes. Stir in mild and hot paprikas.

3. Return chicken to pan on top of onions. In a small saucepan, heat chicken stock, and stir in tomato paste. Bring to a boil, stirring until tomato paste dissolves. Pour over chicken.

4. Place pan, uncovered, in middle of oven for around 30 minutes. Turn chicken every 10 minutes or so. Sauce will thicken.

5. To make dumplings, mix flour with eggs and salt until a thick dough forms. In a saucepan, bring 4 cups stock to a boil. Drop dumpling dough by half teaspoons into stock, simmering for about 4 minutes. Dumplings are done when plumped up and firm. Drain, and stir them into chicken mixture during the last 5 minutes of cooking. Sprinkle with parsley, and serve.

Yield: 4 to 6 servings.

Photo: EDIBILIA -- Edward Serotta chronicles Eastern European dishes, like chicken paprika.