One Cook, Thousands of Seders

April 16, 2008
One Cook, Thousands of Seders
By JULIA MOSKIN
TO Passover cooks parched for new ideas, wandering in a desert of matzo and dried-out brisket, Susie Fishbein is like a tall, icy Coca-Cola — the kosher for Passover kind, made with sugar instead of corn syrup.

Mrs. Fishbein is the author of the popular Kosher by Design cookbooks, which have sold more than 300,000 copies.

“No corn, no grains, no legumes, no seeds — not even mustard or soy sauce for eight days,” she said, searing a rib roast as big as a bread machine in her kitchen in Livingston, N.J. “It’s quite challenging, as a cook.”

She will not be making her famous tricolor matzo balls (colored by spinach, tomato and turmeric) for the Seder this year, and her signature napkin rings made of braided challah are prohibited during Passover.

But she has produced beef roulades with creamy parsnips, molten chocolate soufflés and yet another cookbook, “Passover by Design,” her fifth since 2003. On Tuesday it was the best-selling book in three categories on Amazon.com: holidays, entertaining and kosher foods.

Among strictly kosher cooks, she has an unparalleled following and unparalleled credibility: at ArtScroll/Mesorah, the religious press in Brooklyn that publishes her books, two Orthodox rabbis review her books for Jewish content and kosher law before publication.

A review of her closets reveals no edict limiting the number of platters one woman can own. In all of Mrs. Fishbein’s books, tables drip with feathers and hydrangeas, sparkle with crystal and shimmer with tea lights, tinsel and gold.

“I go shopping at Pottery Barn and Crate & Barrel right after Christmas, when everything goes on sale,” she said, looking with satisfaction at her silver-clad Passover table, set weeks ago for the first Seder. “Their holidays end after New Year’s Eve, but we have them all year round.”

But, Mrs. Fishbein stipulated, her daily table resembles that of anyone with four children and a full-time job. “I would rather be the kosher Rachael Ray than the kosher Martha Stewart,” she said. “My books speak to harried everyday cooks like me.”

That is, women with a fundamental commitment to Jewish faith and family, some disposable income and a house to be proud of — along with a matching appetite for entertaining friends and occasionally impressing the socks off the neighbors.

According to Lubicom, a marketing firm for the kosher food industry, about 350,000 households in the United States keep kosher kitchens year-round, a number that has gone up by 3 percent to 5 percent every year since 2005 as some American Jews have become more observant.

Mrs. Fishbein has earned her star status in those kitchens partly with knife skills and charisma, but mostly by tireless appearances on the national circuit of Jewish benefits, Hadassah bake sales, kosher cruises and food festivals.

“These ladies cook three meals every day, so they are not rookies,” said Debbie Cohen, a member of the Orthodox B’nai B’rith Jacob congregation in Savannah, Ga., who arranged for Mrs. Fishbein to teach a Passover cooking class to 50 members last month. “But everyone there felt that they had learned some great new thing for the Seder.”

In her congregation, Ms. Cohen said, it is not unusual for women to have all five of the Kosher by Design books.

“She is a contemporary baleboosteh,” Matthew Shollar said of Mrs. Fishbein, using a Yiddish term of praise for an excellent homemaker. Mr. Shollar is chief executive of Chosen Voyage, a travel service for religious Jews. Chosen Voyage sends rabbis to purify kitchens on vintage European train cars, makes sure that men and women will have separate swimming pools on cruise ships, and provides upscale entertainment, like cooking classes that are taught by Mrs. Fishbein.

“Susie is part of this whole trend in the Orthodox community to a more luxurious lifestyle that is still very religious,” he said, referring to the drift toward American-style consumption from the traditional scholarly, synagogue-based model of family life. “And she knows exactly what her audience wants.”

One thing they want is to move beyond the classics. Like many of her readers, Mrs. Fishbein, who was raised in Oceanside, N.Y., has never eaten nonkosher food, meaning that whole worlds of flavor are unfamiliar to her. She has never, for example, eaten in a Chinese or a Japanese restaurant. (“There is one kosher Thai restaurant, in Florida,” she said wistfully.)

But she has figured out how to adapt the culinary experiences of others to her own purposes, quizzing chefs, reading cookbooks and strip-mining menus to come up with dishes like quinoa seasoned with mango, lime juice and red onion; slow-roasted tomatoes with fresh herbs; and chewy-crisp macaroons that reflect French pâtisserie more than Passover tradition.

(Quinoa is fashionable among kosher cooks, she said, because although it tastes and chews like grains, which are forbidden during Passover, many religious and botanical authorities consider it a berry.)

“A lot of kosher cooks just make what they know, and they get bored, their families get bored,” Mrs. Fishbein said, citing common missteps like overcooking, using dusty herbs from jars that date from the time of the Second Temple and relying on packaged foods ($15 billion in kosher food products were sold in 2007, according to the Orthodox Union, the largest kosher certification agency).

Her recipes, she said, are modern without being exotic or scary; virtually all of the ingredients are available at the supermarket.

Mrs. Fishbein is hardly the first ambitious cook to rise from the ranks of Jewish women, but she is one of a handful to have acquired an international following.

Her business model may be unique: in 2000, having compiled a successful community cookbook at her children’s day school, she decided to upgrade the results by soliciting recipes from chefs. After developing a network of contacts in the small world of kosher fine dining, she began hiring chefs with kosher experience who were between gigs to provide cooking lessons and recipes for publication in her books.

“It’s all about the out-of-work chefs and restaurants that have closed,” she said.

Damian Sansonetti, now the executive chef at Bar Boulud, near Lincoln Center, had just finished a stint at an upscale kosher restaurant in New York when Mrs. Fishbein called him in 2002.

“I would never have thought I would spend so much time teaching one lady to cook,” he said. “But Susie is humble and fun and very curious. It was interesting to take someone with no experience of seasonal vegetables to the farmers’ market for the first time.”

She soon began absorbing principles of cooking that were new to her: cooking with fresh herbs, sea salt and freshly ground spices; getting a good sear on a piece of meat; using water instead of broth as a braising liquid to lighten flavors, as in her rib roast with melted tomatoes and onions.

The books, like Mrs. Fishbein herself, remain enthusiastic, encouraging and uncritical, presenting ambitious recipes like pineapple-coconut truffles and salmon tartare with undemanding ones like brisket roasted in barbecue sauce and ketchup and baked chicken stuffed with boxed rice pilaf and apricot jam.

Kosher cooks have built-in responsibilities for a great deal of cooking. In most parts of the country, takeout and restaurant options are limited; cooking is still a daily necessity.

And observing the Jewish calendar generates many festive meals, like a weekly Shabbat lunch for 13 people or the formal first Seder, where Mrs. Fishbein provides each guest with a bento box and sake flask of warm water for ritual handwashing.

“Aren’t they great?” she said, pulling back the creamy silk drapes in her dining room to reveal even more table tchotchkes, stacked on the floor because they did not fit anywhere else. “I go shopping in Chinatown in every city I go to.”