Gorgeous Make-Ahead Rosh Hashana Short Ribs, Courtesy of a Reader

This recipe not only tastes better with time, but also allows the cook to relax.

Ask Jewish old-timers about flanken, especially before Rosh Hashana, which this year begins the evening of Sept. 11, and they will wax euphoric about the dish.

A Yiddish word for the cut of beef from the side of the cow, or short ribs slow cooked to tenderness, flanken was once a special treat in Jewish homes.

Recipe: Holiday Wine-Braised Short Ribs

I recently spent a morning watching Shaw Fodor make the dish at her kitchen in Washington. Ms. Fodor, 63, was born Shi Xiaoxia in Chengdu, China, the capital of Sichuan cuisine. “In the late 1960s and early 1970s in China, food was rationed,” she told me. Meat was especially limited, she told me, with pork and chicken available only on holidays.

“Looking back,” she said, “my family had nothing, but plenty more than others.”

Ms. Fodor moved with her family to Beijing at 14 and lived there for another decade. At 24, she decided to visit Israel: Her life changed when, while in line at the check-in counter at Ben Gurion Airport, she met Thomas Fodor, a Hungarian Jewish architect she would marry.

Today, Ms. Fodor’s bright, modern kosher kitchen, designed by her husband, includes a lot of red, a lucky color in Chinese culture: red curtains, red baking dishes and bowls used only for meat dishes as well as a bouquet of fresh red roses.

As she put warm spices into a dish, it was clear that she had made short ribs so many times — she assured me she’d made the meal more than 180 times — that the process was almost automatic.

“The best part of making short ribs is because it makes me less anxious before I am entertaining,” she said. “And it gives me four hours to do whatever I like.”

Short ribs can come in a flanken cut (thin slices across the bones) or English cut (usually thicker pieces with the bone running horizontally), and occasionally butchers will sell a thicker cut of flanken that resembles English cut. Ms. Fodor, a finance director at Hillel at George Washington University, has used both over the years.

I could not wait to try the dish, but Ms. Fodor said I had to hold my anticipation — for at least a day — so that the flavors could mellow. When she finally served the short ribs, I was dazzled by their tenderness and flavor. But I figured it did not have that Sichuan kick that I thought she must have missed from her childhood.

When I asked her about this, she laughed and said that she always served short ribs with her homemade chile oil on the side for those who don’t like them spicy. Of course, it’s in a red dish for good luck in the coming New Year.

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