#vegetarish

[mariacallous]

When you think of Eastern European Jewish cuisine, which words come to mind? Light? Healthy? Plant based? Probably not. Heavy, homey and meat-centric are more like it. 

Fania Lewando died during the Holocaust, but had she been given the full length of her years, Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine may have taken a turn to the vegetarian side and we might all be eating vegetarian kishke and spinach cutlets in place of brisket.

Lewando is not a household name. In fact, she would have been lost to history had it not been for an unlikely turn of events. Thanks to a serendipitous find, her 1937 work, “The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook” (“Vegetarish-Dietisher Kokhbukh”in Yiddish), was saved from oblivion and introduced to the 21st century.

Vilna in the 1930s, where Lewando and her husband Lazar made their home, was a cosmopolitan city with a large Jewish population. Today, it is the capital of Lithuania but it was then part of Poland. Lewando opened a vegetarian eatery called The Vegetarian Dietetic Restaurant on the edge of the city’s Jewish quarter. It was a popular spot among both Jews and non-Jews, as well as luminaries of the Yiddish-speaking world. (Even renowned artist Marc Chagall signed the restaurant’s guest book.)

Lewando was a staunch believer in the health benefits of vegetarianism and devoted her professional life to promoting these beliefs. She wrote: “It has long been established by the highest medical authorities that food made from fruit and vegetables is far healthier and more suitable for the human organism than food made from meat.” Plus, she wrote, vegetarianism satisfies the Jewish precept of not killing living creatures. 

We know little about her life other than she was born Fania Fiszlewicz in the late 1880s to a Jewish family in northern Poland. She married Lazar Lewando, an egg merchant from what is today Belarus and they eventually made their way to Vilna. They did not have children. 

Lewando, to quote Jeffrey Yoskowitz, author of “The Gefilte Manifesto” was “a woman who challenged convention;” a successful entrepreneur, which was a rarity among women of the time. She supervised a kosher vegetarian kitchen on an ocean liner that traveled between Poland and the United States, and gave classes on nutrition to Jewish women in her culinary school. 

“The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook” was sold in Europe and the U.S. in Lewando’s day, but most of the copies were lost or destroyed during the Second World War. In 1995, a couple found a copy of the cookbook at a second-hand book fair in England. They understood the importance of a pre-war, Yiddish-language, vegetarian cookbook written by a woman, so purchased it and sent it to the YIVO Institute’s offices in New York. There, it joined the millions of books, periodicals and photos in YIVO’s archives. 

It was discovered again by two women who visited YIVO and were captivated by the book’s contents and colorful artwork. They had it translated from Yiddish to English so it could be enjoyed by a wider audience.

Like many Ashkenazi cooks, salt was Lewando’s spice, butter her flavor and dill her herb. The book is filled with dishes you’d expect: kugels and blintzes and latkes; borscht and many ways to use cabbage. There’s imitation gefilte fish and kishke made from vegetables, breadcrumbs, eggs and butter. Her cholent (a slow-cooked Sabbath stew) recipes are meat-free, including one made with prune, apple, potatoes and butter that is a cross between a stew and a tzimmes.

There are also some surprises.

Did you know it was possible to access tomatoes, eggplants, asparagus, lemons, cranberries, olive oil, Jerusalem artichokes, blueberries and candied orange peel in pre-war Vilna? There’s a French influence, too, such as recipes for mayonnaise Provencal and iles flottante, a meringue-based dessert, and a salad of marinated cornichons with marinated mushrooms. 

“It’s hard to know who the target audience was for this cookbook,” said Eve Jochnowitz, its English-language translator. “We know from contemporary memoirs that people in Vilna did not have access to these amazing amounts of butter, cream and eggs,” she said. “Lewando was writing from a somewhat privileged and bourgeois position.” While many of these recipes may have been aspirational given the poverty of the Jews at the time, the cookbook demonstrates that it was possible to obtain these ingredients in Vilna, should one have the resources to do so. 

While the cookbook is filled with expensive ingredients, there is also, said Jochnowitz, “a great attention to husbanding one’s resources. She was ahead of her time in the zero-waste movement.” Lewando admonishes her readers to waste nothing. Use the cooking water in which you cooked your vegetables for soup stock. Use the vegetables from the soup stock in other dishes. “Throw nothing out,” she writes in the cookbook’s opening essay. “Everything can be made into food.” Including the liquid from fresh vegetables; Lewando instructed her readers on the art of vitamin drinks and juices, with recipes for Vitamin-Rich Beet Juice and Vitamin-Rich Carrot Juice. “This was very heroic of her,” said Jochnowitz. “There were no juice machines! You make the juice by grating the vegetables and then squeezing the juice out by hand.”

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, a Jewish scholar and Jewish cookbook collector, describes Lewando as “witty.” “She is showing us,” she said, “that once you eliminate meat and fish, you still have an enormous range of foods you can prepare.” Lewando is about “being creative, imaginative and innovative both with traditional dishes and with what she is introducing that is remote from the traditional repertoire.” She does that in unexpected ways. Her milchig (dairy) matzah balls, for example, have an elegance and lightness to them. She instructs the reader to make a meringue with egg whites, fold in the yolks, then combine with matzah meal, melted butter and hot water. Her sauerkraut salad includes porcini mushrooms. One of her kugels combines cauliflower, apples, sliced almonds and candied orange peel.

There is much that, through contemporary eyes, is missing in “The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook.” The recipes do not give step-by-step instructions; rather you will find general directions. Heating instructions are vague, ranging from a “not-too-hot-oven” to a “warm oven” to a “hot oven.” Lewando assumes the reader’s familiarity with the kitchen that today’s cookbook writer would not. 

Lewando and her husband were listed in the 1941 census of the Vilna Ghetto but not in the census of 1942. It is believed that they both died or were killed while attempting to escape. “She really was a visionary,” said Jochnowitz. “It is an unbearable tragedy that she did not live to see the future that she predicted and helped to bring about.”But in cooking her recipes, said Yoskowitz, as dated and incomplete as some of them may be, the conversation between then and now continues.

[kuechenkosmonauten]

Reis vom Ende des Regenbogens

ja, ich weiß: ihr sucht vor allem den topf voller gold am ende des regenbogens… den hätte ich wohl auch gern :). aber immerhin haben sich meine geschmacksnerven einigen können: dieses rezept ist zumindest die schüssel voller reis vom ende des regenbogens! probiert habe ich ihn eher zufällig auf dem dessertteller einer freundin. sie sagt “weggelöffelt”. ich sage “probiert”... er lässt sich ziemlich einfach machen, wie ich beim herumwerkeln an den heimischen töpfen feststellen konnte. die zutaten sind:

500 ml kokosmilch, ungesüßt

100 ml wasser

100 g milchreis

1 prise salz

30 g zucker

alles einmal aufkochen und dann ca. 30 bis 40 minuten garziehen lassen. ganz klassische zubereitung. er schmeckt himmlisch und noch besser mit einem kleinen klacks aus pürierter mango on top. ich mag übrigens keinen milchreis. es sei denn, er kommt vom ende des regenbogens… oder aus dem vietnamnesichen restaurant um die ecke. :)

[darinaling]

{New BLoGPoST🌸} Das Rezept für diese leckeren FroYo Bites gibts jetzt auf darlingrina.com - Link steht in der Bio 💕 || Vllt habt ihrs gemerkt: Ich hab ein paar Tage Instagram Pause eingelegt. Die Prüfungen rücken näher, mein Freund hatte Geburtstag, wir dekorieren unsere Wohnung um ... - viel los also. 😌 Da ist es manchmal schwer alles unter einen 🎩 zu bekommen. In meinen Instastories halte ich euch aber immer auf dem Laufenden 🙃. Ich hoffe euch gehts allen gut und ich wünsche euch einen entspannten Abend ❣️ • • • • #foodblogger #fashionblogger_de #froyo #healthyeating #yogurt #vegetarian #vegetarish #delicious #nobake #snack #rezeptideen #rezept #recipes #foodporn #food #foodphotography #blueberry #foodblogger_de #photography #foodie #instafood #breakfast #eathealthy #eatright #healthysnack #healthyfood #lifestyleblogger #foodprnshare #foodporn_xox #thedailybite (at Frankfurt, Germany)

[praticfood]

Paprika with Cream Cheese #paprika #onion #basilikum #bochum #nrw #taste #leckererezepte #schnellesrezept #foodgod #rice#cooking #fastrecipes #fastfoodwars #praticfood #quickrecipes #quickfood #praticrecipes #essen #foodblogger #foodlover #foodie #foodstyle #yemektariflerim #yemekler #vegany#veganfood #vegandeutschland #vegetarish #yummy #lecker (at Bochum, Germany) https://www.instagram.com/p/CMMiIrDl8HM/?igshid=6on1gduq59dw

[raisedbythewolf]

Canh tofu 🍲 . . #vegan #vegetarian #vegetarish #pho #phosoup #budapest🇭🇺 #Budapest #plantbased #glutenfree #glutenfreevegan #veganfoodporn #oriental #orientalsouphouse #vietnamesefood #mutimiteszel_fitt #mutimiteszel #pholeves #finom #veganhungary #베트남음식 #식당 #헝가리 #비건 #채식 #소통 #선팔 #맟팔 (helyszín: Oriental Soup House)

[dreamswithlafra]

Sapete che ho eliminato dalla mia tavola tutti i prodotti animali L'ho fatto, no per una questione di etica, ma banalmente, perchè non ne potevo più di manzo, pollo, tacchino, bistecche, salsicce, insaccati. Mi sono accorta che, fondamentalmente a me la carne e tutti i prodotti animali, non piacciono. Si sa che la carne è fonte primaria di proteine, ma non necessariamente devono essere di origine animale. Io opto per quelle vegetali, sicuramente più sane, a detta dei più. Per un corretto apporto proteico è fondamentale saper combinare le proteine vegetali nel modo giusto. Infatti, se consumate da sole, l'assimilazione della componente proteica risulta dimezzata rispetto alla carne, vanno quindi associate tra loro. Se anche voi, avete deciso di eliminare dalla vostra alimentazione la carne o semplicemente siete spinti dalla curiosità di sperimentare nuovi sapori e ricette 100% vegetali, voglio segnalarvi #Fiordinatura #Eurospin =>https://goo.gl/Ms8cPg Ne parlo nel mio nuovo #postblog=> https://goo.gl/L4HnQw #mangiaresano #vegetariano #soia #food #foodporn #subitopronto #vegetarian #foodblogger #vegetarianfood #vegetarianismo #lovefood #instafood #iosonovegetariana #vegetarish

[lubane269-blog]

Et oui mes chiens aussi ;-) #veggiedog #greenpetfood @greenpetfood #croquettes #croquettesvegetales #boxerdog #veganboxer #indyboxer #vegetarish #dogfood #boxerdogfans #boxerdoglover #boxerdoglove #bzh #bretagne #morbihan (à Bretagne, France)

[bialerwochenblat]

Do you remember Fania Levando’s Vegetarish-dietisher kokhbukh? If you like Yiddish and cooking check Dos familien kokh-bukh by H. Broyn (Braun), a compilation of American, French, Italian and German recipes selected specially for a Jewish family cooking.

New York, 1928

[simonwilliamsim]

  Location

1005 Granville St, Vancouver, BC V6Z 1L4

After a long morning exploring, we were starving and found this magical bargain pizza place!

I recommend it for a quick bite and it can suit vegetarish types such as myself and meat eaters (like the other half!)

  MegaBite Pizza, Van Location 1005 Granville St, Vancouver, BC V6Z 1L4 After a long morning exploring, we were starving and found this magical bargain pizza place!

[travellingteadom]

This is one of the many 1 Euro cups we had on our trip. Overlooking a not-so-busy Munich street, we settled for some fresh breakfast bread. Well we settled after a long conversation (including loads of finger pointing) on which ones are veg and which not. We also learnt the German word for vegetarian is : vegetarish. Life was much simpler afterwards.

[darinaling]

{NEW BLOGPOST} Guten Abend ihr Lieben! Ich hoffe ihr habt morgen auch alle frei? Super! Dann habt ihr nämlich ganz viel Zeit in Ruhe zu frühstücken & dabei meine drei Rezepte für vegane Brotaufstriche zu testen! 😃 Dabei sind: Spekulatius Creme, Vegane Nutella & (mein Favorit) Kokos-Mandel Aufstrich mit weißer Schokolade 😍. Apetit bekommen? Dann klick dich doch mal in meinen neuen Beitrag - der Link steht in meiner Bio 😊❤️. • #aufstrich #healthyfood #vegetables #vegan #vegetarian #vegetarish #kochen #backen #rezeptideen #rezept #recipes #foodporn #food #foodphotography #foodblogger #foodblogger_de #photography #foodie #instafood #breakfast #eathealthy #eatright #veganerezepte #frankfurt #spekulatius #veganenutella #nutella #whitechocolate #coconut #almondbutter (at Innenstadt, Cologne)

[darinaling]

{New BLoGPoST🌺} Happy Friday 😊 Auf meinem Blog gibts ein neues Rezept zu entdecken: Himbeer-Kokos Engery Bites! Die leckeren Kügelchen sind vegan & zuckerfrei und enthalten dank Kokosmehl und Haferflocken ganz viel Porteine und Ballaststoffe 😊. Also unbedingt mal testen - den Link zum Rezept findet ihr in meiner Bio 🎂❣️🌺 • • #foodblogger #fashionblogger_de #energybites #healthyfood #raspberry #vegan #vegetarian #vegetarish #delicious #nobake #snack #rezeptideen #rezept #recipes #foodporn #food #foodphotography #cashews #foodblogger_de #photography #foodie #instafood #breakfast #eathealthy #eatright #eat #lecker #coconut #lifestyleblogger (at Frankfurt, Germany)

[darinaling]

{New Blogpost} Guten Morgen ihr Süßen🌸. Für alle die sich immer schon gefragt haben, wie es so ist eine Saftkur zu machen, habe ich einen spannenden Artikel auf darlingrina.com veröffentlicht. Dort setze ich mich kritisch mit dem Thema auseinander - Falls ihr interessiert seid, schaut unbedingt vorbei - der Link steht in der Bio 😘✨. • PS: Ich freue mich natürlich auch sehr über Kommentare ABER bitte seid doch so lieb und kommentiert nur, wenn ihr den Text auch gelesen habt. In den letzten Tagen habe ich viele Kommentare von Co-Bloggern erhalten, die ihn offensichtlich nicht gelesen haben und nur ihren Link platzieren wollten. Sehr schade, denn ich gebe mir mit meinen Posts schreiberisch enorm viel Mühe und lege auf den Text besonders viel Wert. Über alle relevanten Kommentare freue ich mich natürlich umso mehr 😌 Schaut also vorbei und macht mich wieder glücklich 😘❣️ • • • • #fashionblogger_de #saftkur #healthyfood #vegetables #vegan #vegetarian #vegetarish #ernährung #kaleandme #review #food #foodblogger_de #photography #foodie #instafood #eathealthy #eatright #eat #detox #catiecarrot (at Frankfurt, Germany)

[darinaling]

{New BLoGPoST} Huhu 👋🏼. Es ist ein neuer Blogpost online gegangen: Heute erfahrt ihr auf darlingrina.com nämlich wie ich die Saftkur von Kale&Me fand und wie ich generell zu dem Thema Saftkur stehe. Soviel kann ich schonmal verraten: Ich bin kritisch an die Sache herangetreten. Alles weitere erfahrt ihr jetzt auf meinem Blog! Der Link steht wie immer in der Bio - ich freue mich auf euren Besuch und bin gespannt auf eure Meinung ☝🏼😘. Schönen Abend euch allen ✨ • • #fashionblogger_de #saftkur #healthyfood #vegetables #vegan #vegetarian #vegetarish #ernährung #kaleandme #review #food #foodblogger_de #photography #foodie #instafood #eathealthy #eatright #eat #detox #catiecarrot (at Frankfurt, Germany)

[darinaling]

Guuuuten Morgen 🌸😋🌸 Habt ihr eigentlich gewusst das es bei mir auf dem Blog auch viele tolle Rezepte zu entdecken gibt? Zum Beispiel für leckere vegane Brotaufstriche, wie dem auf dem Bild - aber auch Kekse, Suppen, Smoothies und und und. Schaut mal rein - es lohnt sich! 😊 Den Link zu meinem Blog darlingrina.com findet ihr in der bio. Ich freu mich auf euch und wünsche guten Apetit 😘 • • • #fashionblogger #fashionblogger_de #aufstrich #healthyfood #vegetables #vegan #vegetarian #vegetarish #delicious #kochen #backen #rezeptideen #rezept #recipes #foodporn #food #foodphotography #foodblogger #foodblogger_de #photography #foodie #instafood #breakfast #eathealthy #eatright #eat #lecker #modeblogger #lifestyleblogger (at Frankfurt, Germany)

[darinaling]

Freitag Abend 🎉 ☺ Und von mir ein letztes Bild aus meinem aktuellen Post in dem ich euch gleich drei Rezepte für super einfache, super leckere vegane Brotaufstriche vorstelle �� Wer den Post noch nicht gesehen hat: Der Link steht in der bio ✨Dieser hier ist übrigens die Linsen-Curry Variante😋 Habt einen schönen Abend❣ • • • #fotografie #aufstrich #healthyfood #vegetables #vegan #vegetarian #vegetarish #delicious #kochen #backen #rezeptideen #rezept #recipes #foodporn #food #foodphotography #foodblogger #foodblogger_de #photography #foodie #instafood #breakfast #eathealthy #eatright #frankfurt #modeblogger #fashionblogger_de (at Frankfurt, Germany)