Show notes

00:00 Adeena Sussman: [Various cooking/chopping sounds] S'more latke.

00:06 Shaina Hammerman: Those are the sounds of best-selling cookbook author Adeena Sussman mixing, frying, bruleeing, and tasting her recipe for s'mores latkes with her more than 235,000 followers on Instagram. Sussman, raised in Palo Alto, now makes Tel Aviv her home, and in the past few years has published Sababa, a cookbook celebrating Israeli culinary traditions for home cooks, And Shabbat, full of recipes that reflect the joys of the Sabbath table. What is Jewish cooking and what is Israeli cooking? How can the stories we tell about the provenance of an ingredient or a recipe inform how we understand the food or even how it tastes? How might our thinking about food change during times of war and trauma?

I'm Shaina Hammerman, and this is Cite and Sound, the Stanford Jewish Studies Podcast. Here, we host conversations with scholars and artists as we explore Jewish scholarship, culture, and history. On today's episode of Cite and Sound, Adeena Sussman joins Religious Studies professor and Jewish Studies core faculty member, Charlotte Fonrobert, to shine a light on the role a recipe can play in shaping or challenging religious and national identities. And now, the conversation.

01:20 Charlotte Fonrobert: Welcome, everyone. I'm Charlotte Fonrobert, and I'm the former director of Jewish Studies, the Center for Jewish Studies here at Stanford. I'm this year on leave, so I'm very happy to come in, especially Adeena Sussman, who came first, I want to say two years ago, when I taught for, in some instantiation, our food class, which has a long title of Food Justice and Ethnic Identity. Milk and honey, Wine and Blood. Something along those lines. Anyhow.

01:54 Sussman: Liquids of Israel.

01:55 Fonrobert: And... And Adeena came in for the last class and did a cooking session with the students which in that year happened to be a lot of fraternity boys. And whipped these guys into shape and we made a fantastic meal.

02:14 Sussman: You were worried, but I was not.

03:12 Sussman: I was.

03:13 Fonrobert: And so maybe you can say just a little bit by way of introduction how your family is.

03:20 Sussman: Thank you for having me. Thank you, Stanford, for having me back. I, a lot, most of my family now lives in Israel. Other than my sister, who lives in New Jersey, my father moved to Israel, made aliyah, as it's called, three years ago. And my husband's sister and his children, grandchildren, everyone is there. So... Um, we are, I would say, In the way that Israelis do, because I sort of identify partly as Israeli now, even though I'm really in between two cultures, we're functioning on a high level and operating on a high level of both, like, extreme presence and also... Expertise at compartmentalization, which is what you sort of do to sort of function and process everything that's been going on. It's been a very hard year. Um. I say I'm not scared, but I'm sad. It's been, there's been a lot of grief and processing of grief and it's still going on between the situation with the hostages and also the tragic situation in Gaza, like all of it together in one you know, fishbowl. Not only are we experiencing it, but we're experiencing it through the eyes of the world who are watching so closely. And so it's sometimes important to just really focus on our own feelings and our own experience and we're just going through it every day, but I am still continuing to work, travel, spend time with my family and trying to, trying to look forward.

04:51 Fonrobert: Thank god, I think we can use some compartmentalization here now. So maybe let's go into food culture. And your life is food. So maybe we can start with, uh, you can tell us a little bit about yourself, how you, your story, how you got into what inspired you. To become a cookbook author. Best-selling cookbook author.

05:18 Sussman: Um, I, I grew up writing and, and in a home where cooking was very central. Um, um, I've been writing since a very young age and cooking from a very young age. And as my career progressed, I realized that I wanted to find a way to combine those two things. I grew up in Palo Alto, like, just a couple of miles from where we are sitting right now. Um, and Some original members of the community are here with us today. Um, and so, you know, it was a very close-knit place. And we kept kosher and that put us into, I would say, a very exclusive and small club. And so we made almost everything at home because there was very little to buy. And there was a very strong focus on hospitality as well, Shabbat hospitality, both for other members of the community and visiting guests. And so I grew up really understanding the value both of Delicious, home-cooked, Jewish-inflected food and also how to season it with warmth and hospitality. And I think those two elements really are what have driven me throughout my career and I didn't really... Realize that until I started, I mean, I always knew those concepts, but when I wrote the Shabbat cookbook, like all those concepts kind of crystallized and I really enjoy cookbook authoring because it's It has like a very Jewish process to it. It's almost, there's, you know, it's a long arc. You're writing a book. You're studying. You're learning a subject. You're delving really deep into one thing. It's not... Very ephemeral. You're creating a permanent document and like a piece of something to add to the canon, you know? And so I used to co-author other people's books, none of which were Jewish in nature. And when I started writing my own books, I realized that I was sort of adding and contributing to the story of Judaism through food. Um, and I've kind of just really seized that opportunity and I've found my place in it. And that's also been really like a really amazing personal journey for me. And help me find my place in Judaism, which I practice differently from the way that I grew up, and also in Israel, where I'm still sort of like a bit of an insider and an outsider. So cookbooks, books. Are my professional passion and I've been able to use that also as a way for personal exploration and growth while making delicious food.

07:44 Fonrobert: Can you say a little bit about the process of writing a cookbook? What goes into...

07:52 Sussman: It's both very technical and very creative. The recipe development process is one of like lots and lots of cooking, hashing out ideas. Repeating and repeating. It's very, home cooking is very different from restaurant cooking. I enjoy it because it's more romantic. You know, it's more imbued and infused with family memories and feelings and, you know, you're not cooking everything exactly the same way every day like you do in a restaurant setting. However, when you're creating home recipes for people, you do have to codify the recipes, make sure that they work perfectly. I always say that, you know, in cookbooks, Everything else is subjective. If you don't like the writing, if you don't like the pictures, if you don't like the design of the cookbook, like that, that's subjective. If I, if a recipe doesn't work, then I have failed you as an author, you know? So like I put a lot of time and energy into making sure that the recipes work And I always say that I cook first and write later because when I started co-authoring cookbooks with other people, I realized that when you cook 100 recipes with someone, you create an exclusive language that only the two of you share. Like, if we cooked 100 recipes, your history would come into the fore. Your presence, how you like to cook... The terms you like to use, the ingredients that you love, the cadence that you have in the kitchen, everything. And I bring what I have to the table and then at the end, after I've created these recipes, there's a new language that needs to be expressed through writing. All of the introductions to the recipes, all of the little interstitial essays, head notes, and introduction to the book, which is always the last thing that I write. And it usually takes me about two years to write a cookbook, um, Shabbat and Sababa were like very heavy lifts for me because I was trying to really delve deep into sort of large overarching subjects: one being Israeli cooking and how I interpreted that through the lens of a new immigrant to Israel and how to translate the ingredients and the dishes to an English-language audience abroad. And Shabbat was like the exploration of this huge subject that's really at the core of Jewish identity and how to broaden it for a large audience, how to personalize it for myself, how to share my own personal history with it, and how to sort of take the concepts of Shabbat that I find universal and like translate them into my recipes in the pages of the book.

So it's a technical process and also a very personal process and you know in the wake of the war I had, I had this weird feeling that… Usually you don't sign a contract for a new book until the last book is out, but last, the July before Shabbat came out, I wrote, called my agent and I said, I want to try and get a book set up so that I can start working on it right after Shabbat comes out. I just have this weird feeling that I'm going to want to be working. And I did sell my next book idea and so glad that I did because the whole world went haywire and I can't imagine that I would have had the wherewithal to write a book proposal, flesh out a new idea… and so when I got back to Israel after the Shabbat book tour I had this new project to work on and I wrote my entire next book in eleven months. Lock, stock, and barrel. Which, it's done. The photography is done. The majority of the editing is done. It's about to go into the design process. And it's a, it's a bit of a different type of a book. It's called Zareez, which means quick in Hebrew. And it's a, it's like a quicker, easier sort of meal cookbook. Sort of taking, I sort of call it like, it's like Shabbat II. You know, Shabbat cookbook we called “Shababa” because it was kind of a combination of Shabbat and Sababa. And Zareez, I can't co-opt the first two names, but it has a lot of the idea, it's like a pared down Israeli pantry used in ways that you can make a lot of delicious meals. Um, and I think it was the book that I needed. I didn't even know it. I, I sold this idea before October 7th, but you know, I, I keep kept saying last year, like as things got more complicated, I needed my cooking to become more simple. Um, And those were the recipes that I created for this book. And again, it was like a meditation on where I was in my life in that year and the kind of food that I needed to make for myself and the things that I thought other people could…would want to eat. Um, still keeping very much, you know, to, to, to my style of cooking and to the ingredients that I've come to be known for and the style of cooking that I'm known for.

12:27 Fonrobert: Can we go back to the transition from, or the, the shift from Sababa to Shabbat? Because Sababa sort of feels, is really, Israeli cooking.

12:39 Sussman: Yeah. Yeah, whatever that means. We can talk about that for hours.

12:42 Fonrobert: You can say a little bit about that, but Tel Aviv sort of focused.

12:47 Sussman: Yes, very Carmel market focused, very, lots of personal stories of my integration into Israel after moving there and very energetic, colorful. Shabbat is, I would say, less Israeli only in that it involves many of the sort of ashkenormative, as we like to say, recipes that I grew up with, recipes more Eastern European recipes in origin that my mother made, learned how to make when she began cooking kosher food, which she only did after she met my father. Um, and you know, she also was learning from my mother-in-law, my grandmother, her mother-in-law, my grandma Mildred, who was sort of a really good Bubbe-style cook. But those recipes in Israel, Israelis call those recipes Jewish recipes, right? Like, when you talk about Israeli food in Israel, you're talking more about, for some reason, they identify, like, the Ashkenazi foods like matzo ball soup, chopped liver, kreplach, uh, schmaltz and gribenes, all that stuff. Like, they say, like, I want, like, Jewish food. And when you talk about Israeli food, it's, I typically... thought of as more the, the food that comes from the Mizrahi, uh, countries or the local food that was influenced by Palestinian culture, you know, all that stuff that kind of was hashed out in Israel and kind of created this new cuisine. But I think now Ashkenazi food is having a revival in Israel and it's getting touches put on it by local Israeli chefs who know and love that food from their own culture. And that's sort of what you see in Israel is that every cuisine kind of undergoes like a 2.0. You know, um, now Ethiopian food, there are some really interesting younger Ethiopian chefs, second generation, third generation, who are taking food, their heritage and ingredients, but sort of um, putting new and unique twists on them um, and expressing themselves through those foods and that's kind of happening also with with these Ashkenazi foods. Um, and I think that there is going to be some “Israelicizing” of them and they'll eventually kind of get blended. Like, you might see sort of a cured, like, piece of pastrami that might have maybe it'll have baharat on it or some kind of Middle Eastern spice and like it'll blend the two, you know, so that's like there's always this blending and fusing of the dozens of different culinary cultures that make up what we think of as Israeli cuisine. And Shabbat has a lot of those Ashkenazi recipes and then many, many recipes that I learned from local cooks of different ethnic backgrounds and also like my own creations.

15:33 Fonrobert: So I think I remember from the class also that you made that point very strongly that Israeli food in the end, whatever that means, is really fusion food. And so it's not really... In that sense, a national, but really a Mediterranean...

15:52 Sussman: Yeah, I mean, most of the dishes that have been popularized in Israel didn't necessarily have their origins there, but I think... Most foods are the result of peregrinations of people, diasporic people who moved around. I mean, you know, you know, not to get too political, but, you know, yeah, shakshuka is Tunisian and Moroccan in origin, and hummus is Lebanese, and falafel is actually originally was made with fava beans in Egypt, you know, so like... The claiming of the provenance of foods, like, I think kind of strips away what's interesting about foods. Like, you know, if you could spend all your time arguing about where an origin of the food, like, you lack... The ability to dig deeper into the story behind it, which is what I think is more interesting. So yeah, I think most Israeli food is the result of people bringing things to Israel, and of course there are ingredients and traditions that go all the way back to the Bible. Which is smoked cracked green wheat, which is traditionally considered more of a Palestinian food, appears in the TaNaKh, in the Bible. And, you know, so... I find those, I find those facts interesting but also limiting if you, if that's where you stop the conversation, like, where you talk about just the identity of the food and where it came from. Like, I want to include everyone and acknowledge the origins of all the foods and then find out: how did your grandmother make it or what did it mean to you or how has it evolved agriculturally and culturally over thousands of years. Like that's more interesting to me and I think ultimately to my audience. That's my hope.

17:27 Fonrobert: I still have freekeh boxes at home.

17:36 Sussman: Oh, good. Well, I'm just, I'm doing a really fun dinner next week in New York, a fundraiser for the Streicker Center, which is a big cultural center. And I created a creamy preserved lemon freekeh risotto. So I'll give you the recipe and you can use your leftover freekeh and make something yummy with it at home.

17:50 Fonrobert: And I also made the hummus, this is aside from the, I made the hummus, the chik-chak hummus.

17:55 Sussman: Oh yeah, it was good?

17:57 Fonrobert: It was so good. So good, so good. We have a few more minutes, so I guess I want to ask you about the sourcing. How that matters, right? Because you talk in Sababa about Tel Aviv, the shuk. Does it matter to you?

18:14 Sussman: I mean, of course it matters.

18:16 Fonrobert: I assume, but how does it feed into your...

18:20 Sussman: Sourcing, you mean the origin story?

18:22 Fonrobert: Yes, the origin of food, uh, this olive oil versus that olive oil in the za’atar from here.

18:27 Sussman: I mean, listen, you know, if you put two olive oils in front of me and they taste identical, and then you tell me that one of them is harvested from a thousands-year-old tree, that one's going to taste a lot better to me. I'm really interested in the story and the history and the terroir and all the stuff behind the ingredients. I think for cooks here though, you know, I always say that my recipes can be made with mostly supermarket ingredients. Like you need a few things here and there that you can order now easily online or purchase at local stores. I think I have, in Israel, obviously, the advantage of like, to me, olive oil isn't just an ingredient. It's like, it's a sauce all among itself. Like, it's so tasty and so, you know, you can get oil that's neon green that's been prepped, like, one week old, you know? So young and fragile and fresh and like you really understand something deeper about the ingredient and like what it can do for food. Um, and also its health benefits just kind of you feel, like feel it coursing through your body, you know, so all those, all those properties. Um, but you know, I, If you're cooking in California, like, try and use Californian olive oil. You know, try and use local ingredients. Try and use things that are associated with this area. You know, we're very blessed in Northern California. And I see a lot of through lines actually between the cuisine of California and the cuisine of Israel. And so, you know, I had a high comfort level because we had neighbors who would drop off figs and we knew people who had pomegranate trees and lemons and citrus. So the first kumquat that I ever tasted was in Nechama’s parents' home in Barron Park. I remember tasting that fruit and then I didn't taste it again until I moved to Israel where they grow wild everywhere. In my neighborhood during the season you can just pick them off of trees, communal trees. And so I felt like an instant comfort level with that sunny, spicy cuisine, I like to call it. There's a lot of pepper, hot peppers, and a lot of citrus in both places that I lived and now grew up and now where I live.

20:35 Fonrobert: Wonderful. Maybe one more thing, um. Is there a sense, I mean, now it's all difficult with the war, but what the hottest or the newest food trends are in Israel?

20:48 Sussman: The hottest food trend in Israel is Neapolitan pizza. Yeah. I mean, I think there was an interesting article in the New York Times about three months ago about culinary tourism and how it's changed a little bit. If you're traveling in Brussels... Like, the best restaurant in Brussels might be a Tibetan restaurant, right? And now people, ten fifteen twenty years ago, people felt the need to only eat the food of that place, but like with the globalization of cuisine, people are interested in having the best thing, not necessarily the thing that's from the place they're visiting. I joked with the pizza. Because I find that concept really fascinating. Like, when I go to Bologna in Italy, like, I'm not looking for Thai food, even if the Thai food is the best food that there is. But I would say in Israel... The biggest trends in food, um, there's kind of, you know, since COVID and also since the war, I think there's been... More of a, there's both a lot of great ethnic food, but people are kind of refocusing on the classics and sort of improving them. So shawarma. Humble shawarma has gotten its glow up, you know, people are focusing on the spices and the quality of the meat and how they layer the sandwich and how good the pita is and there are all these trendy shawarma joints now in every city. And I think it also has to do with inflation and it's a relatively inexpensive meal compared to restaurants that are super pricey. Food costs have increased in Israel astronomically like they have here. So people are looking for more value-oriented foods and, you know, those foods that sort of overlap like hummus and all those foods are relatively humble in origin and in price. But people are looking to have the best versions of them. So in general, a trend in the culinary world is fine dining chefs who've lost their patience with that whole world are opening these humble places. So a lot of the best joints In Israel have very sound culinary underpinnings under them. So like you might not see it when you walk in, but then you taste it and you understand that there's someone who really knows and understands food. Who's preparing this hummus or this falafel or this shawarma. So those, that's what I'm seeing. Um, and more like farmer's markets, organic products. Produce, we're a little behind. Israel has been behind the United States in terms of embracing Organic produce and that's also coming. A lot more people are ordering from CSAs and things like that. You know, there's a difference between farmers marketing and marketing. The Carmel market isn't necessarily a more organic source of produce than a supermarket. It's fresher, potentially, and if you know where to go, you can get certain things that came from local farms, but there are special farmers markets at different days of the week where I go on sometimes to get special things. And lots of cocktail bars and wine bars everywhere. Everyone's drinking right now in Israel. Everyone is drinking.

23:57 Fonrobert: That I'm very sympathetic to. Yes. Maybe before our concluding question, one more, I wanted to return to October 7th. Maybe, um, you can say a little bit more about... How your work, I guess I want to say your mission has changed since then, or has it changed?

24:19 Sussman: Um, yeah, I mean, I have a relatively robust social media platform. I have several hundred thousand followers on Instagram and that just kind of happened like that. It's something that I do cultivate now, but over the years, that's kind of grown. And a few years ago, long before the war, you know, I'm very upfront with where I live and who I am, my religion, my culture. I'd say after October 7th, I, I wanted to use my platform. First of all, it took me several months to start cooking recipes again and just posting recipes. I felt that it was, it seemed trivial to me in light of what was going on, although, you know, people need to cook and people need to eat and people need some lightness and a departure from the heavy, heavy news every day. But I have been fortunate in that I've been able to travel and share stories of how Israeli businesses have been impacted and how they are rebounding from the events of October 7th.

So if anyone follows me on Instagram, they know that I am obsessed with this juicer called the Zaksenberg Juicer. It's like a $200 juicer that all the juice shops in Israel use. And when you buy it, they say like, “you could have the Toyota, you can have the Mercedes. You should take the Mercedes.” They're always like upselling, but it's the best juicer I've ever owned. And I’m friendly with the company, the owners, founders of the company, it's a third generation business that happens to have its factory on Kibbutz Khalit, which is on the Gaza envelope and where many Thai workers were murdered and where people were taken hostage and killed on October 7th. So the factory closed and I was privileged to go experience the opening of the factory and to share the story, uh, both of what happened on that day and showing that they're trying to revive this business. And I've, I've done a lot of things like that, kind of trying to show the resilience and just the experience of the food community in Israel since October 7th. An amazing cafe opened that's founded by members of Kibbutz Reim where many, many people were killed and they've opened a chain of cafes in Israel to employ people who have been displaced from the war and are living in other cities and, you know, lots of stories like that. Um, but I, I just try and show I still try and show my life in Israel, um, the humanity of people. I, I, I don't believe that that's a political play. It's just a human play. And it's sort of my way of contributing something without sort of trying to be not so performative about it. I don't know if my mission has changed, but I feel…

27:03 Fonrobert: I mean, I guess in thinking about the, because the audience of these is mostly American, American Jewish.

27:10 Sussman: I think so. I mean, I've been very surprised at how vigorous the sales of my books have been since the war.

27:18 Fonrobert: Oh, they’ve increased?

27:19 Sussman: Yeah. Uh, it's, it's really interesting. I think people are digging deep into their Jewish identity and trying to understand it better. And I think food is a wonderful window into that. I just, when my events after the war started, I thought for sure that my events would be canceled or would become smaller. And in fact, the opposite was true because people were looking to be together and be in community. Um, so, you know, I, I think that I'm trying to, to build my own community and also be a part of this community and foster something like a fragile web that like holds us all together somehow be a part of that. Strengthening it and also finding comfort in it myself honestly. My audience is not exclusively Jewish. I have tens of thousands of followers who are not Jewish and I also feel that it's important to share my life and what I do and to just offer it to people and let them react and respond however they see fit.

28:17 Fonrobert: I want to ask you for our podcast, um, whether you can share a quote, whether you can share from the field of Jewish studies or Jewish text or, um, for that matter, any text that is meaningful and relevant to you for this particular contemporary moment?

28:39 Sussman: Um... Something, a recipe that I recently developed for the South Beach Food and Wine Festival where I participated a couple weeks ago. I did a dinner with a French Jewish chef and we did a French onion soup with a matzo ball in it. And it worked really nicely. And I thought it was a great idea. It was her idea. And we executed it together. And um, again, this is like an idea about the journey of Jewish food and the fusion of different traditions and, you know, that makes a lot of sense. That made a lot of sense to me, that recipe. And, um, I really enjoyed it. And I'm gonna, I think I'm gonna start making it for Pesach or just to have around. Thank you for the prompt.

29:27 Fonrobert: So nice. I was thinking, aside from all the Talmudic texts that are now speaking to the contemporary moment, but to some degree, um, I love going back to Heinrich Heine as a diaspora poet and co-founder of German language, but as a German-Jewish poet. And when you write this, you always struggle over what you call him, but he has this incredible ode to what he calls in German, Jewish, “Schalet.” And it's sort of the Jewish version, the, the, the German

Jewish, but the Jewish version of, um, of the Madeleine for Proust, um, and how that moment of remembering eating, and he's writing this from, uh, from exile in Paris. That memory of eating cholent, Schalet, infuses his love for his Jewish tradition, which he has a very complicated relationship with, but yeah. Yeah.

30:30 Sussman: It's, that's so true. I made my first hameen or cholant of the season like a few weeks before I left and the aroma of the cholent? Like, like, stayed in my oven for days after I took the cholent out and served it. Like, every time I opened the oven I was greeted again with a waft of the smell of Shabbat, actually, and it was such a nice way to transition into the week. Like, on Monday I was still smelling all the beauty of this long-cooked stew. So, yeah.

31:02 Fonrobert: Well, fabulous. Thank you. I think we're transitioning over to the other part of. Your visit. So join me for thanking. [applause]

31:17 Hammerman: Today's episode was produced by me, Shaina Hammerman, along with Iva Klemm and Nilofar Saraj. Sound design by Romi Chicorean. Original music is by Jeremiah Lockwood. Cite and Sound is a production of the Taube Center for Jewish Studies at Stanford.

Stanford University.