Adeena Sussman’s book tour for her New York Times best selling cookbook Shabbat: Recipes and Rituals From My Table To Yours landed in Toronto in mid-October. Sussman’s follow up to Sababa launched on September 5, and has clearly made a splash.
For the self-described homecook, this three-month book tour is a journey she could not have expected, especially after the events of October 7. The Israel-based, American born, Sussman remains resilient. “We’re here,” she tells Bonnie Stern, during their J Chefs panel at the Prosserman JCC, “to embrace what is beautiful about our culture and to celebrate and talk about it.”
And talk about it, they do.
Over the course of two helpings (two J Chefs events), Stern, a noted cookbook author in her own right, hosts Sussman’s musings about how Shabbat is a shifting and ever-evolving practice.
I feel there's a reason why you’re here at this time: you have the ability to help people and bring them together, and your wonderful sense of humor, even in sad times, is really important.
I've been living in Israel for the better part of the last 10 years and Israelis live with this duality of joy and sorrow. It's very much a part of our lives because Israel is my home. It's my home and my homeland, and being here during this time has been super challenging, but the community has come out to support Israel and each other and me and I feel energized and inspired by the way that people are coming together. And we're going to have Jewish joy, I promise, in about 30 seconds. We keep living. We celebrate life. If we don't, then they win.
How did your two cookbooks, Sababa and Shabbat, come about?
I met my husband nine years ago on a blind date and we got married six and a half years ago and I moved to Tel Aviv. I moved to Israel for love and I stayed for the food. We moved into the Carmel market area together and I think Jay very wisely knew that I couldn't leave if I was living in this incredible place. And he was right. I quickly became connected to it and Sababa was the story of my absorption into Israeli culture using the shuk or the Carmel market as my ulpan, where people go to learn Hebrew. I knew Hebrew, but the food culture was the way, my way, into Israel and the way that I could make myself feel at home quickly. And when I had the opportunity to write the book, I wanted to find a way to translate everything I loved about Israeli cooking as an American living in Israel. Most of the chefs who've written amazing cookbooks about Israel are Israelis living in America and I found myself with this weird, unique perspective as sort of an insider outsider in the culinary culture. it has all the staple ingredients in it and how to use them in multiple ways so you don't end up with that bottle of pomegranate molasses that you bought for that one Ottolenghi recipe four years ago, and it just keeps looking at you from the pantry, like “use me, use me.” And so, I like to take all of my condiments and ingredients and put fun twists on how to use them. How to make them so if you live somewhere where you can’t get preserved lemons, you can just make them, it's simplifying and de mystifying the cuisine and it was really fun to see so many people cook from the book. it was like a proof of concept that israeli food is like no longer a moment, it's a movement, it's been happening for a long time. It used to be that you would say I want French food, I want Spanish food, I want pizza, now saying I want Israeli food is something millions of people say every day.
And how long did it take you to write Shabbat?
Writing a cookbook is kind of like cooking a 10 course feast and then waiting a year and a half for anyone to eat the food. This [Shabbat] concept was a little bit more complex for me because I had to dig into my own family history and talk about how my observance level has changed and how I observed Shabbat has changed. I used to do it with my family in a very traditional way and left it for a while and kind of came back to it, and Israel re-inspired a lot of my love of Shabbat and that combination of Judaism as both a religious and a cultural construct. And yes, I have to say from a Jewish pride perspective, seeing the word “Shabbat” in the New York Times bestseller list is one for the team. That's been amazing.
Tell us a little bit about Shabbat in your own home.
I grew up in Palo Alto, California. One of very few Orthodox Jewish families. My mother became religious when she married my dad. She met him on a blind date and she ordered fried clams and didn't understand why he wouldn't eat them at Howard Johnson's when he was eating the cold ice cream. And he explained to her what Kashrut was. That's how little she knew. And they fell in love and she took on religious observance.
She grew up in a home where cooking was not cherished. Her mother was taken out of school during the Depression to cook and clean for her family. And so my grandmother viewed cooking as a chore. So when my mom met my dad, she learned how to cook and cook kosher at the same time and the two cookbooks that were the pillars of our kitchen were the New York Times Cookbook by Craig Claiborne and the Chabad Spice and Spirit cookbook. My sister and I still have both of those books. My mother passed away 17 years ago, and they're two very cherished heirlooms. I have the New York Times and she has Spice and Spirit, sometimes I'm jealous I don't have both, but we share.
Because Palo Alto was a small town and a very small [Jewish] community, our table was always full of whoever was visiting from out of town. If you go to one of those sisterhood charity gift shops, there are those spiral bound travel guides from the 1980s, and for Northern California it says Sussman 4931639. So people would call and say can we come over we need a place to sleep, we need meals for Shabbat, and it just made for this very interesting Salon/Shabbat table experience where people from all walks of life were coming, whether it was Nobel Prize winners who were at Stanford or single moms with kids who needed a place to sleep for a few nights. I would come home from summer camp and my father would throw my duffel bag in my room and point at my bed and tell me that the chief rabbi of France had slept there the weekend before. Having a big tent approach to entertaining is that extra element of Shabbat. There was always room for other people and everyone had a voice and was seen and heard at the table. My mother’s only requirement was that you contributed something to the conversation.
The really wonderful thing about the book is that you share other people's recipes, you give other people credit.
Of course and give other people the stage. People invite me to cook in their home and I think in Western culture that's a polite, maybe semi-sincere invitation. And in Israel if someone says “Come learn my recipe,” I'll say, “What time should I be there? Give me the address.”
There's a great recipe in the book for a beautiful braised lamb and rice that has a Bharat style spice blend, which is a warm spice blend with pepper and cinnamon and cardamom and ginger, from the cloves and mace from the northern part of Israel. The family [whose recipe this is from] was from Lebanon.
I was buying cheese in the shuk and a woman with a baby carriage came up to me and she knew my work and invited me over to make her grandma's lamb and rice. I got to the house a few weeks later, at the appointed time, and all of a sudden all these cars started screeching and converging at different angles and all of her sisters were joining. What I didn't realize was that she was just using me to get her grandmother to commit the recipe to paper. They've been trying to get it out of her for about 20 years. And only did that happen when they told her that this cookbook writer wanted to come over. Sometimes I can be that buffer. We had this amazing day where I hung out with these beautiful sisters and their grandma and she told me amazing stories about how there were Jews in so many Arab lands. She's from Lebanon and her family owned a textile factory and they lived on the water. They loved their life in Lebanon and they had to leave in the late ’50s and early ’60s because of antisemitism and discrimination.
It's a great privilege to be able to help people codify these family recipes and put them on paper, and now these sisters have it to give to the next generation. That's the kind of thing I love to do.
What are your views on perfectionism in the kitchen?
Perfectionism is overrated. My mother used to always say there are no mistakes in the kitchen, they're only happy accidents. If she burned the chicken it was smoked chicken. We're overly focused on the kitchen being immaculate and everything being done perfectly heated and all that stuff and for me, I like to bring people into the process especially on Saturday, like when we do a big pot of stew on Shabbat afternoon. Perfection can get in the way of the cook enjoying the process. I tried to focus on a different spiritual aspect of Shabbat also for the cooking. It's not always about quantity. For me, the perfect Shabbat meal is the one that you have the time, the resources, the energy, and the budget for.
It's so comforting when you spend a Shabbat dinner with someone. It really adds levels to a friendship.
Growing up, everybody wanted in on Shabbat at our home, whether they were religious or not, Jewish or not. The idea that you're invited into someone's home for this special meal is something that a lot of us take for granted, but a lot of people don't have that in their lives.
And that's what I love about our traditions: you just get to it. You make the food you put it out. You have the holiday, you do your thing and so much just comes out of that routine and ritual and obviously it's elevated by spirituality and culture but I always tell people if you don't know the prayers, you can say the regular prayers but also maybe say something that's meaningful to you. Create a ritual of your own. I'm very into people meeting Shabbat and Shabbat meeting people where they're at. The book intentionally does not have an instruction manual on how to do the rituals. That's not my job. I love the way that I was raised and I'm so grateful for it but I do think there's a wide range of ways to celebrate Shabbat and that it’s a wonderful way to bring people into Jewish culture.
And Shabbat in Israel has a special spirit because the whole country slows down and takes a collective sigh on Friday afternoon. Three, four o'clock just gets quiet, the buses stop. You can hear yourself talk, which in Israel is always a wonderful thing. The country does a lot of the work for you and helps set you up for this beautiful time together. I really love celebrating Shabbat in Israel. I miss it a lot and it's going to be hard to go back in some ways because the country is a different country than the one I left seven weeks ago. But I'm also eager to be there and cook in my home and anchor myself in the place I love, with people I love.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Adeena Sussman’s book tour for her New York Times best selling cookbook Shabbat: Recipes and Rituals From My Table To Yours landed in Toronto in mid-October. Sussman’s follow up to Sababa launched on September 5, and has clearly made a splash.
For the self-described homecook, this three-month book tour is a journey she could not have expected, especially after the events of October 7. The Israel-based, American born, Sussman remains resilient. “We’re here,” she tells Bonnie Stern, during their J Chefs panel at the Prosserman JCC, “to embrace what is beautiful about our culture and to celebrate and talk about it.”
And talk about it, they do.
Over the course of two helpings (two J Chefs events), Stern, a noted cookbook author in her own right, hosts Sussman’s musings about how Shabbat is a shifting and ever-evolving practice.
I feel there's a reason why you’re here at this time: you have the ability to help people and bring them together, and your wonderful sense of humor, even in sad times, is really important.
I've been living in Israel for the better part of the last 10 years and Israelis live with this duality of joy and sorrow. It's very much a part of our lives because Israel is my home. It's my home and my homeland, and being here during this time has been super challenging, but the community has come out to support Israel and each other and me and I feel energized and inspired by the way that people are coming together. And we're going to have Jewish joy, I promise, in about 30 seconds. We keep living. We celebrate life. If we don't, then they win.
How did your two cookbooks, Sababa and Shabbat, come about?
I met my husband nine years ago on a blind date and we got married six and a half years ago and I moved to Tel Aviv. I moved to Israel for love and I stayed for the food. We moved into the Carmel market area together and I think Jay very wisely knew that I couldn't leave if I was living in this incredible place. And he was right. I quickly became connected to it and Sababa was the story of my absorption into Israeli culture using the shuk or the Carmel market as my ulpan, where people go to learn Hebrew. I knew Hebrew, but the food culture was the way, my way, into Israel and the way that I could make myself feel at home quickly. And when I had the opportunity to write the book, I wanted to find a way to translate everything I loved about Israeli cooking as an American living in Israel. Most of the chefs who've written amazing cookbooks about Israel are Israelis living in America and I found myself with this weird, unique perspective as sort of an insider outsider in the culinary culture. it has all the staple ingredients in it and how to use them in multiple ways so you don't end up with that bottle of pomegranate molasses that you bought for that one Ottolenghi recipe four years ago, and it just keeps looking at you from the pantry, like “use me, use me.” And so, I like to take all of my condiments and ingredients and put fun twists on how to use them. How to make them so if you live somewhere where you can’t get preserved lemons, you can just make them, it's simplifying and de mystifying the cuisine and it was really fun to see so many people cook from the book. it was like a proof of concept that israeli food is like no longer a moment, it's a movement, it's been happening for a long time. It used to be that you would say I want French food, I want Spanish food, I want pizza, now saying I want Israeli food is something millions of people say every day.
And how long did it take you to write Shabbat?
Writing a cookbook is kind of like cooking a 10 course feast and then waiting a year and a half for anyone to eat the food. This [Shabbat] concept was a little bit more complex for me because I had to dig into my own family history and talk about how my observance level has changed and how I observed Shabbat has changed. I used to do it with my family in a very traditional way and left it for a while and kind of came back to it, and Israel re-inspired a lot of my love of Shabbat and that combination of Judaism as both a religious and a cultural construct. And yes, I have to say from a Jewish pride perspective, seeing the word “Shabbat” in the New York Times bestseller list is one for the team. That's been amazing.
Tell us a little bit about Shabbat in your own home.
I grew up in Palo Alto, California. One of very few Orthodox Jewish families. My mother became religious when she married my dad. She met him on a blind date and she ordered fried clams and didn't understand why he wouldn't eat them at Howard Johnson's when he was eating the cold ice cream. And he explained to her what Kashrut was. That's how little she knew. And they fell in love and she took on religious observance.
She grew up in a home where cooking was not cherished. Her mother was taken out of school during the Depression to cook and clean for her family. And so my grandmother viewed cooking as a chore. So when my mom met my dad, she learned how to cook and cook kosher at the same time and the two cookbooks that were the pillars of our kitchen were the New York Times Cookbook by Craig Claiborne and the Chabad Spice and Spirit cookbook. My sister and I still have both of those books. My mother passed away 17 years ago, and they're two very cherished heirlooms. I have the New York Times and she has Spice and Spirit, sometimes I'm jealous I don't have both, but we share.
Because Palo Alto was a small town and a very small [Jewish] community, our table was always full of whoever was visiting from out of town. If you go to one of those sisterhood charity gift shops, there are those spiral bound travel guides from the 1980s, and for Northern California it says Sussman 4931639. So people would call and say can we come over we need a place to sleep, we need meals for Shabbat, and it just made for this very interesting Salon/Shabbat table experience where people from all walks of life were coming, whether it was Nobel Prize winners who were at Stanford or single moms with kids who needed a place to sleep for a few nights. I would come home from summer camp and my father would throw my duffel bag in my room and point at my bed and tell me that the chief rabbi of France had slept there the weekend before. Having a big tent approach to entertaining is that extra element of Shabbat. There was always room for other people and everyone had a voice and was seen and heard at the table. My mother’s only requirement was that you contributed something to the conversation.
The really wonderful thing about the book is that you share other people's recipes, you give other people credit.
Of course and give other people the stage. People invite me to cook in their home and I think in Western culture that's a polite, maybe semi-sincere invitation. And in Israel if someone says “Come learn my recipe,” I'll say, “What time should I be there? Give me the address.”
There's a great recipe in the book for a beautiful braised lamb and rice that has a Bharat style spice blend, which is a warm spice blend with pepper and cinnamon and cardamom and ginger, from the cloves and mace from the northern part of Israel. The family [whose recipe this is from] was from Lebanon.
I was buying cheese in the shuk and a woman with a baby carriage came up to me and she knew my work and invited me over to make her grandma's lamb and rice. I got to the house a few weeks later, at the appointed time, and all of a sudden all these cars started screeching and converging at different angles and all of her sisters were joining. What I didn't realize was that she was just using me to get her grandmother to commit the recipe to paper. They've been trying to get it out of her for about 20 years. And only did that happen when they told her that this cookbook writer wanted to come over. Sometimes I can be that buffer. We had this amazing day where I hung out with these beautiful sisters and their grandma and she told me amazing stories about how there were Jews in so many Arab lands. She's from Lebanon and her family owned a textile factory and they lived on the water. They loved their life in Lebanon and they had to leave in the late ’50s and early ’60s because of antisemitism and discrimination.
It's a great privilege to be able to help people codify these family recipes and put them on paper, and now these sisters have it to give to the next generation. That's the kind of thing I love to do.
What are your views on perfectionism in the kitchen?
Perfectionism is overrated. My mother used to always say there are no mistakes in the kitchen, they're only happy accidents. If she burned the chicken it was smoked chicken. We're overly focused on the kitchen being immaculate and everything being done perfectly heated and all that stuff and for me, I like to bring people into the process especially on Saturday, like when we do a big pot of stew on Shabbat afternoon. Perfection can get in the way of the cook enjoying the process. I tried to focus on a different spiritual aspect of Shabbat also for the cooking. It's not always about quantity. For me, the perfect Shabbat meal is the one that you have the time, the resources, the energy, and the budget for.
It's so comforting when you spend a Shabbat dinner with someone. It really adds levels to a friendship.
Growing up, everybody wanted in on Shabbat at our home, whether they were religious or not, Jewish or not. The idea that you're invited into someone's home for this special meal is something that a lot of us take for granted, but a lot of people don't have that in their lives.
And that's what I love about our traditions: you just get to it. You make the food you put it out. You have the holiday, you do your thing and so much just comes out of that routine and ritual and obviously it's elevated by spirituality and culture but I always tell people if you don't know the prayers, you can say the regular prayers but also maybe say something that's meaningful to you. Create a ritual of your own. I'm very into people meeting Shabbat and Shabbat meeting people where they're at. The book intentionally does not have an instruction manual on how to do the rituals. That's not my job. I love the way that I was raised and I'm so grateful for it but I do think there's a wide range of ways to celebrate Shabbat and that it’s a wonderful way to bring people into Jewish culture.
And Shabbat in Israel has a special spirit because the whole country slows down and takes a collective sigh on Friday afternoon. Three, four o'clock just gets quiet, the buses stop. You can hear yourself talk, which in Israel is always a wonderful thing. The country does a lot of the work for you and helps set you up for this beautiful time together. I really love celebrating Shabbat in Israel. I miss it a lot and it's going to be hard to go back in some ways because the country is a different country than the one I left seven weeks ago. But I'm also eager to be there and cook in my home and anchor myself in the place I love, with people I love.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.