All-American Kosher Cooking

Ruth Reingold, creator and owner of Ruth’s Kitchen, shares her kosher cooking secrets and must-have tips on keeping kosher in America.  Get expert advice on converting traditional non-kosher recipes into tasty kosher versions, and take an inside look into a kosher cook’s life at home and on the road.

1. Could you please tell us a bit about your culinary background?
 
I grew up in a very close family where my mother and her mother were always in our kitchen. Both of these amazing women were great cooks, and my mother was a dietician who worked on developing the very earliest cake mixes for Quaker Oats. As a little girl I was making bread, cakes, and cookies. Before I left for college, I remember thinking about menus and how to put together interesting and really tasty meals.

When I got married, I decided that we needed full menus for months at a time. We lived in Ithaca, New York -- there were no kosher stores, the closest kosher meat was hours away, and planning was essential. Of course we didn’t have to have four course meals every night, but I thought it was a necessity. I also thought that every meal had to be new and tasty and beautifully presented. This was all decades before food TV! Many extra pounds heavier and many experimental recipes and menus later, we decided to cut back, but I kept up my interest in finding great recipes and figuring out wonderful ways to make mealtime a delight.

From Ithaca, we moved to Urbana, Illinois. Again we were hours from kosher sources. This was before the large food producers were selling kosher bread, pasta, cheese, and meat in small towns across America. I also wanted to make our Shabbat experience very, very special. So I began baking all the bread we ate. I focused on superb challah and Shabbat food, but I also wanted to duplicate, to the extent possible, the fast foods that our kids would hear about and see with their friends – there were only a handful of religious Jewish families in Urbana/Champaign, Illinois, and certainly no kosher restaurants. I started making all kinds of pizza, hamburger and hotdog buns, bagels, pita, and even homemade marshmallows. We amassed a huge collection of cook books, I watched Julia Child on TV and tried to copy everything I could. I was a chemist, so I used whatever knowledge I could muster to make our meals top quality and kosher. As we traveled, we saw and smelled all kinds of new foods. We tried to buy ingredients to make these somewhat exotic (at least to us), and we brought many items back to Urbana. After a while we were bringing cheese, paté, wine, special mustards, and spices from France; cheese, kosher gelatin, and spice mixtures from Israel; and we were ordering wild rice, kosher maple syrup, coffee, dried fruit, and other ingredients from vendors across the US.

2. What is it like keeping kosher in the United States?
 
We’ve lived mostly in the United States, but we spent three years in Israel and lived for months at a time in France and England. Keeping kosher in the US depends a lot on where you live. I’d say that keeping kosher in most parts of New York City is as easy and can be, and is at least as interesting as keeping kosher in Israel. That’s because everything is available in New York; it’s just more expensive, however keeping kosher in much of the US can be a challenge. Chicago and Los Angeles have many kosher stores, a range of kosher restaurants, schools, mikvaot, synagogues, etc. However it is just not easy without the wide range of high quality resources that you have in Israel or in New York, Paris, and London. When you get to a place like Urbana/Champaign, Illinois, with about 1000 Jews, and only a handful of religious families, there are no restaurants, no bakeries, no full range kosher stores. The grocery stores carry a tiny selection of Manishewitz products and then all the usual items that have kosher certification as a matter of course – catsup, mayonnaise, most pasta, baking ingredients, many canned and frozen items. There are many kosher breads and pastries, both fresh and frozen, but nothing of the quality available in Israel or New York.