Kosher kitchen:
Jewish couple switch to cooking according to dietary rules
By ROBIN MATHER JENKINS
Chicago Tribune

When Barbara and Marc Slutsky of Highland Park, Ill., married, she never thought she would end up keeping kosher.

After all, Barbara was raised in a reform Jewish family on Staten Island, N.Y. “We were pretty assimilated,” she recalled recently. “Keeping kosher wasn’t in the fine print,” and she knew nothing about kashrut, the Hebrew word for kosher.

Yet today she knows a lot about kashrut. The Slutskys switched to a kosher lifestyle when their children were small — about the time Marc and others founded Aitz Hayim, a “synagogue without walls,” and the family agreed its acts should match its faith.

Thus, this Rosh Hashana (which began at sundown Oct. 3), if Barbara had served the fricassee she learned from Marc’s family, she would have used margarine in the plum kuchen that ends the meal — because kosher rules say that meat (in the fricassee) and dairy (butter) can’t be served at the same meal.

Having converted to a fully kosher kitchen in 1989, the Slutskys may have been ahead of the kosher curve. Jews who grew up in nonobservant households and have made the change are driving a booming market. For them, keeping kosher is one way to align daily life with their faith.

Joan Nathan is the author of the forthcoming “The New American Cooking” (Knopf, $35) and a number of books on Jewish food, including the prize-winning “Jewish Cooking in America.” She doesn’t keep kosher herself, she said, but a cousin in France became kosher late in life.

“There’s a lot more fundamentalism in America today, and the Jewish people who are fundamentalists are coming back to keeping kosher,” she said. “I’m secular and not strictly kosher. But I do understand why people do it: They may want the religious connection, or the historical connection, or both.”

Sales of kosher foods have skyrocketed, with sales of more than $8.2 billion in 2004, up 15 percent from the year before. Many new products make it easier for Jews who want to follow regulations that are thousands of years old.

Keeping kosher means following rabbinical laws based on dietary rules laid out in the Torah (and also found in the Old Testament books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus). The rules are complex but prohibit pork and shellfish. They insist on the humane slaughter of healthy animals. Because they bar dairy and meat at the same meal, keeping a strict kosher kitchen requires two sets of dishes and cooking equipment: one for dairy meals, one for meat meals.

For Barbara, it was a gradual transition.

“We started by buying kosher meats, then gradually started reading labels,” she said. “I did resist at first; it wasn’t where I was. Then, one night we had friends over, and I made a shrimp dish. That night, Marc said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t make that again. I just think that’s not where we should be.’ ” Shrimp isn’t on the list of kosher foods. Neither is lobster.

So, she said, “what we ate, and how our family ate, began to be a reflection of our beliefs. My husband is really hard to buy gifts for, so one year my present was that I told him I was ready to buy a second set of dishes.”

Dual sets of everything in the kitchen is only one part of keeping kosher. Another is finding the ingredients you need. Fortunately, that’s getting easier as more and more kosher foods come to market.

Menachem Lubinsky of Lubicom Market Consulting in New York tracks them. Lubicom also produces the annual Kosher Fest, the world’s largest showcase of kosher foods, with products from 29 countries and 44 states.

“The core group of people that subscribe to kosher is growing,” Lubinsky said. “Also, many more religious groups, including Muslims, buy kosher foods than ever before. And kosher is becoming more popular with regular Americans, who feel the food is safer, cleaner and more humane.”

Nearly 40 percent of the products displayed at the 2005 Fancy Food Show in New York in July bore kosher certification, reported Kosher Today, and now more than 90,000 kosher foods are available in groceries.

That makes keeping “ingredient kosher” easier, said Lise Stern, author of “How to Keep Kosher.”

Someone keeping “ingredient kosher,” she said, might “look at the label and read ingredients, and if there are no non-kosher ingredients, buy the product. Trader Joe’s punjab choley chickpeas doesn’t have the “hechsher” (the mark that certifies it as kosher; its literal translation from Hebrew is “ritual permit”), but there are no non-kosher ingredients.”

Still, Stern said, a stricter kosher family “might not eat in my house because there are non-kosher-certified foods in my house.”