To Jump straight to Green Beans: As Innocent As They Look or Green Bean Recipes on the Wine & Challah Website or to Two New Pages on the Wine & Challah Website.
Cooking inspiration comes directly from my Savta Zahava, it was in her kitchen at her knee that I learned how to cook and bake. Historical inspiration comes from my Savta Eta, a woman I never met, but whose history has been one of the driving forces in my study of the Holocaust and the world that came before. But eating, my love of food, a good meal and good company, that is 100 percent learned by both nature, but even more so by nurture from my Dad. My Dad is a bon vivant in the best sense of the word. From him, I have inherited the skill (or is it bad luck?) to always, without knowing it or even being mindful of it, gravitate towards the best and most luxurious object in a shop, on a menu, or on a charcuterie board. It’s a sixth sense, and I come by it legitimately.
My father’s tag line over the last ten years has been taking a selfie with delicious food and captioning it “I didn’t come here to suffer.” He has always felt that way, but it’s only in the last ten years that he has had a platform (the family WhatsApp group) to share the sentiment further than the Shabbat or restaurant table.
Sundays in NY were extra special. Daddy’s best friend, Ephraim, would turn up with a box of fresh bourekas, filled with kashkeval cheese and brown eggs. As a kid, I thought the brown eggs were there to mimic Ephraim’s perfectly shaped and bald head, but it turns out they were meant for eating. And, in the other hand, Ephraim had a box of bagels and bialys. The only real way to eat a bialy, if you are asking, is schmeared with cream cheese (full fat please, anything less is not worth it), topped with a few pieces of sable fish, a thin slice of tomato, an even thinner translucent slice of red onion, and a sprinkle of capers for their brininess that is the perfect foil to the silkiness of the fish. Each mouthful is salty; so salty, from the salt of the bread, the salt of the fish, the brine of the capers. It’s sweet from the tomato. The onion is the perfect bite to cut through the creaminess of the cheese, and the whole thing is a burst of competing and complementary flavours. This is my dad’s perfect sandwich.
After breakfast we would say goodbye to Ephraim, pile into the car, and drive from Queens to Brooklyn. On three occasions I can recall, we lined up outside 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights to get a blessing and a dollar from the Lubavitcher Rebbe, even though the line and the wait were always long, and either it was too hot or too cold to be outside. My dad made it clear that this was important and that it was a huge privilege to be able to meet one of the greatest Rabbis of our generation.
With dollars firmly in hand, these dollars from the Rebbe were not for spending. They were handed to our parents for safekeeping, forever. I still have my dollars all these years later.
We would drive from Crown Heights over the Brooklyn Bridge into the Lower East Side of Manahattan. Here we would stop off first at Ratner’s for blintzes, or Yonah Schimmel’s for a knish, or the Pickle Guy (yep, for a pickle). We would then end up in the front half of Shmulka Bernstein. My dad would order a knockwurst topped with mustard and sauerkraut for each of us, before going into the back room that housed the Chinese restaurant. And it was in these moments at restaurants that I learned from my dad the joy of eating out, of generosity, of living the good life when it is literally served to you. But always, always being kind to the people around you.
Though our time in NY was often haphazard (we would spend a year in a different country and then come back to NY as our base over and over), one of the stories that stays with me dates back to one of those returns to NY.
Just before my tenth birthday, we left our sprawling home in Rio de Janeiro. That home, affectionately known as Casa Sete (House 7), overlooked the Atlantic Ocean. For most of the year we slept with our windows open, lulled to sleep by the crashing of the waves against the mountain far, far below. In the winter, the flimsy glass was all that kept us from the angry sea raging and churning outside.
It was obviously idyllic, and not just because I was a kid. My parents, if memory and photos serve, looked like Adam and Eve living in the Garden before the Fall. We were all suntanned and glorious, living a life filled with sunshine and friendship. Casa Sete had once housed a famous Brazilian folk singer called Elis Regina. Tragically, she died at age 36, but the house maintained its good humour even with its sad association. My brothers and I each had our birthday parties on its terraced verandas; my brothers had pool parties, enjoying their birthdays in December and January at the height of summer, while mine in May, rather than being at the end of the school year, was towards the start.
In one photo from my ninth birthday, my parents’ friend Olga came over and, together with my mom, made traditional Brazilian birthday treats: such as brigadeiros, with each one rolled in chocolate sprinkles and wrapped in traditional fringed foil.
After eight years in South America, my dad’s contract was up and we moved back to New York, from our vast home in Rio to a small apartment in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Though we spoke English at home, mine was heavily accented. We left Brazil in May, and I found that in the blink of an eye I had missed most of the fourth grade. From having the driver Señor José take us to school, I now had to take a couple of trains with my older brother Boaz from our apartment in the Upper East Side to school on the West Side, going downtown, cross-town, and then back uptown to Manhattan Jewish Day School.
Rather than a birthday party filled with friends and foil-wrapped brigadeiros, my birthday was just days after our move. My dad, in his infinite wisdom, took me out for a special father–daughter lunch. Even then I loved food, but not nearly as much as I loved time with my dad. He took me to the famous Lou G. Siegel’s on 38th Street and 7th Avenue, at the heart of the Garment District. Established in 1917 by Romanian immigrant Siegel, it touted itself as “America’s Foremost Kosher Restaurant.”
As a kid who had spent the previous eight years in South America, Lou G’s sounded to my young ears as if it was an Italian restaurant. One look at the menu, however, and you realised straight away that the food came straight out of the shtetl: offal was part of every course save dessert, and stuffing and boiling was the pinnacle of culinary accomplishment.
That said, the restaurant to my ten-year-old eyes was the height of elegance. It was dark and rich inside, the walls covered in wood veneer, the ceiling beamed in the same wood, and the tables all had starched white cloths. The chairs around each table were covered in red leatherette upholstery. The bar curved elegantly off to the side, with red matching stools positioned as sentinels. I could imagine that in times gone by, when non-Jewish businessmen took a liquid lunch, the Jewish ones would come and do the same at Lou G’s, though obviously theirs was liquid with a side of chopped liver spread on rye, a few slices of pastrami, and a half-sour pickle for good measure.
I can’t remember what I ate at that meal. But what I do remember, aside from the richness and darkness of the restaurant and how special I felt to be at a real grown-up establishment with my dad, was the way my dad behaved. More than any lesson he could have taught, his example shaped me in a way I hope has helped me treat everyone I meet with respect.
The first thing he did was to ask the waiter his name, and how he was doing. My dad always does this. In this instance, the waiter was an Auschwitz survivor, as his rolled-up sleeve showed us. This was in no way remarkable or uncommon in New York City in the mid-eighties. And then my dad launched, as he often does, into telling the waiter that when he was younger he worked as a waiter for seven years in the Catskills. The work (if anyone could imagine the dining room at the Concord that held 2,000 people in one sitting, was to underestimate it) was backbreaking.
My dad ordered, in his usual style, one of everything off the appetiser menu. This is still the level of ordering I strive to reach: the confidence to know that appetisers almost always sound appetising, and if you can, order one of each! He made a point of remembering the server’s name, thanking him each time, and acknowledging him. And at the end, and I know this now, though there was no way I knew this as a kid, he tipped the waiter well above standard tipping practice.
I suffer second-hand embarrassment when I see overprivileged Jewish young people at fine dining establishments either ignoring their servers or, worse yet, treating them poorly. I know there is entitlement and privilege working across all of society. Though later life has blessed my dad with a beautiful family and an ability to stop working after nearly seven decades of work, he always treats every waiter and every service provider not just with respect and dignity but with gratitude.
Not far from our home in Central London is Tony Page’s restaurant, kosher fine dining a world away from Lou G. Siegel’s. From the gorgeous Iryna, who welcomes you at the door, to the waiters in white gloves serving you drinks, to Tony himself who, on the nights he isn’t catering an over-the-top event at an exclusive location, welcomes his guests into his elegant restaurant, dining at Tony’s is a beautiful experience. The servers are stunning people, greeting every request and complaint with a smile; the service never slips.
There are so many lessons being taught to me daily by the people around me. This is why I love food: it can bring out the best and the worst in us. Lack of food can bring out the worst, and yet you can see people who will sacrifice themselves for others. Too much food and money should bring out the best, and yet sometimes, instead of gratitude for God’s bounty, entitlement and privilege rear their ugly heads. Welcoming people into one’s home should be viewed as a gift and not as a chore.
I love talking about food, writing about food, and eating, but I love people more. And this, I think, should be the start and the end of any food conversation. Food is great, but people are greater.
Lou G. Siegel’s looms large in my memory, but my dad looms larger. Happy Birthday Daddy.
Green Beans: As Innocent As They Look
Keeping kosher is a gauntlet. I really feel for people who encounter it for the first time. Sure, you may have heard about not mixing meat and milk. You probably know about forbidden foods such as shellfish and pork, and that kosher meat needs to be ritually slaughtered. But where many people find themselves scratching their heads is when faced with the most offensive of all fruits: the strawberry.
You may think it innocent. But noooooo… under that innocent green stem it may be harbouring a whole colony of bugs!
I once had one of the people in charge of kashrut for KLBD (London Beth Din Kashrut Division) come speak to our Bar and Bat Mitzvah class about the halachic dangers of eating bugs. Sadly, what the kids heard was that it is better to eat pork than to eat a bug. Do I need to tell you that they left the class and headed to the nearest McDonald’s? Nothing wrong with McDonald’s—unless you keep kosher… or are trying to teach kosher!
The truth is, in the Torah it is literally five times’ worse to eat bugs as it is to eat pork. It’s just that bugs are tiny, and unlike pork, they hide in plain sight. That makes observant Jews suspicious of their fruits and vegetables.
Embarrassingly—I’m still not sure if it was more embarrassing for me or for her—I once had a woman at my table who ate a salad in the strangest way. She gingerly picked every single piece of lettuce off her plate and banished it. A couple of thoughts ran through my mind as I watched her systematically dissect her salad:
- Why did she take the salad in the first place?
- Did she not notice the bag of lettuce still on my counter, testifying that I’d paid a premium for someone else to check it?
- Even if she thought the lettuce might be infested, wouldn’t the dressing have carried the bugs onto the tomatoes anyway?
I said none of these things, just sat there in mesmerised fascination as she picked, inspected, and discarded lettuce leaf by lettuce leaf.
This is all to say—if you thought we were nuts, you’re totally right. Though nuts themselves are safe from a kashrut point of view. Eat them at will! Unless you’re allergic—in which case, don’t. Or unless you’re Ashkenazi and it’s Rosh Hashanah. As I said: nuts.
Now, onto green beans.
The reason you’ll find so many green bean recipes on the Wine & Challah website is because they’re a non-controversial vegetable. Unlike broccoli or asparagus, bug infestations are rare, and if there are bugs, they’re easy to spot and remove. Green beans have become my go-to vegetable. That’s not to say I don’t cook others—they just require more prep and effort to be kosher-ready.
If you want to be brave and branch out, here’s the KLBD guide on how to check most fruits and vegetables for bugs.
Good luck, and stay strong—the strawberry is not the enemy!
Green Bean Recipes on the Wine & Challah Website:
- Garlic Green Beans
- Odelle’s Sesame Green Beans
- Green Beans in Tomato Sauce
- Green Beans with Cherry Tomatoes
- Green Beans with Nectarines and Almonds
Two New Pages on the Wine & Challah Website:
I’m constantly trying to develop my website. This started as a way to share my recipes and love of tradition and food with my children and my community, and has developed into so much more. I have now added two new pages. One is called Culinary History. In it, I have placed my blog posts that specifically deal with Jewish culinary history. That said, there is historical information to be found in many of the headnotes of my recipes as well.
The second new page, which I hope will be useful to you, features Sample Menus. The name of this website comes from my weekly menu planning: I start every menu with the words Wine & Challah. If you have a specific menu in mind that you would like help developing, drop me a line!
