For cookbook author Adeena Sussman, moving to Tel Aviv reshaped her kitchen — and her life

(RNS) — It’s like a film plot: A woman working at Gourmet magazine and then celebrity cookbook writing in New York City. Then, after years of being single, she falls in love and moves across the world with her new husband. To acclimate to her new home, she starts writing about it. She becomes a New York Times-bestselling cookbook writer. 

Who could play her in the movie? 

The real-life protagonist, Adeena Sussman, suggests Bette Midler when she was younger, Teri Garr or Toni Collette — a “good actress with an interesting face,” she suggested in an interview with RNS on Google Chat. Her new locale? Tel Aviv, whose cuisine and the mixtures its intermeshing of cultures produce have given shape to all three of her cookbooks — including the newest, “Zariz: 100 Easy, Breezy, Tel Aviv-y Recipes.” It published in April and has appeared on the Times bestseller list.

During a recent visit to the Pittsburgh Jewish Community Center at the end of her six-week U.S. tour to promote the book, she told the audience that she is proud to be described as “Ottolenghi without the potchke”(fuss or involved work), referring to the Israeli-born British chef, Yotam Ottolenghi. 

Growing up in a Modern Orthodox Jewish family in Palo Alto, California, Israel was always part of Sussman’s life, but living there allowed her to experience it in new dimensions. Getting acclimated in Israel was learning its food ways. She told the audience at the Pittsburgh JCC that the shuk, or Israeli market, was her ulpan, which translates literally to studio but also refers to Hebrew language and cultural education for immigrants.

She said Israeli food is often an “unconscious blending of flavors,” in part because Israel was on the ancient spice route. In our interview, she added that Israeli food is the “Middle Eastern Mediterranean diet that has a Levantine ancient feeling.” She spoke of its use of spice, citrus, olive oil, whole grains, pita and bread as characterizing its cuisine. Its focus on seasonality and micro-seasonality are also unique, she explained.

On stage with Sussman in Pittsburgh, James Beard Award-winning restaurateur Michael Solomonov explained that a typical Israeli Shabbat lunch might blend the cuisines of four grandparents who hail from different places, such as Morocco, Poland, Bulgaria, Iraq, Libya, Turkey, Egypt or Yemen.

Sussman said after she adjusted to her new home, she liked the pace of life in Israel. The vibe was more casual and driven toward spontaneity. People would drop by or invite her out without the eight weeks of advance planning that can be characteristic of social life in the U.S. Now, she has a “near-native tolerance for spices,” she said. 

Asked what was surprising to her about the food scene in Tel Aviv, she said the global aspect of it was different from “Americans who are only interested in American food,” calling it “extremely sophisticated” and “fast moving.” And historically, Israelis have tended to travel a lot, making them curious about new food experiences, like tacos or omakase.

However, Sussman said that since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, there has been a “turn inward,” manifested via an interest in traditional Israeli street foods. For example, shawarma is having a moment as its elements — the pita, meat and spices — are often adapted to build more sophisticated dishes. And, “good shawarma is light-years cheaper than a restaurant” — an easier sell in a time of economic restraint after almost three years of war. 

At Gourmet magazine, Sussman initially wrote for advertising sections about topics like Spanish wines, which made up large sections in the magazine. Then, Gourmet’s editor, Ruth Reichl, who worked on the same floor she did, gave her her first writing assignment: Yemenite Jewish cooking in Israel.

As she kept writing and realizing her love for cookbooks, she started to train to co-author cookbooks, met an agent and started co-writing cookbooks, including with model Chrissy Teigen. 

However, her solo writing career grew after she moved to Israel in 2018. Her goal, she told the audience at the JCC, is to show Israel in a lens not political or religious, but to cook, tell stories and share who she is authentically living there.

In “Zariz,” she depicts her everyday life using photos of the different shopkeepers in the Tel Aviv shuk who she sees on her everyday rounds, the owner of her coffee shop of choice, Caffe Tamati, and the fishmonger from whom she shops. Alongside the photos, the book shares 100 meant-to-be-simple recipes inspired by Tel Aviv. 

In the interview with RNS, she said she feels as though cooking in Israel is more connected to grandmother’s cooking according to the agrarian calendar — picture garlic hanging on a porch to dry — than it felt growing up in America, despite being only 30 miles from the innovative farm-to-table Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse.

At the same time, she said there is “no shame” in relying on easy ingredients, like powdered garlic, and her goal as a cook is to “meet people where they are at.”

And the personal connections she talks about are evident in recipes like her garlicky semolina porridge (chashu), which came from being invited to cook with the grandmother of chef Priel Shabo, who had a restaurant stall at Tel Aviv’s Carmel Market. 

At the JCC event, Sussman demonstrated her spicy watermelon whiskey sour on stage. Showing her cocktail shaking technique — after pouring the whiskey in a way she said was akin to how her grandmother added oil to potato latkes — the cap flew off the aluminum shaker. She told the audience, “I’m good,” spilling watermelon juice on her arm. 

The recipe, which I tasted both with and without alcohol, exemplifies Sussman’s approach in “Zariz” — strong flavors made by deploying simple ingredients well — and by trying new things, like making your own watermelon juice. 

Where does Sussman get her cooking ideas? By “whim, tradition, seasonality, nostalgia,” she told me, and “based on something from America that is missing” in her new home. From the States, she brings back Nielsen-Massey vanilla bean paste (it is much cheaper in the U.S. than in Israel) and Diamond kosher salt to have the same salinity level American cooks use.  The “ingredients speak to” her, and she will have “crazy ideas in the middle of the night,” she added.

Readers can also see the fusion of her American upbringing with her Israeli life, which she cites in recipes like her tahini blondie, sloppy yossi (Hebrew for joe) and Tel Aviv Sunrise pomegranate cocktail. She also takes inspiration from holidays and the market, as well as seasonality, and addresses a “dearth of good fish recipes,” she said. 

In response to a question from a 10-year-old in the JCC audience about why one should buy cookbooks when so many recipes are online, Sussman said, “Cookbooks have plot, need to be juicy and have details. (They) have a beginning middle and end, and some drama.” A cookbook as a whole is personal, and hers share something about herself and her family.

In our interview, she added that “cookbooks have a premise laid out intentionally” where the order of the recipes and concepts create a “crescendo” that can’t be replicated online, where concepts are often more “disjointed and diffuse.” Cookbooks are “not just recipes, but feelings, emotions, techniques,” she added. “They build skills and familiarity with cooking language.”

Moreover, a cookbook is an “inexpensive window into a world, for at most $25 or $30”; if you buy five cookbooks for $150, you get “500 or 600 great recipes,” she added.  

Another element of good cooking and hosting is good conversation, which she learned from her mother, she noted. She continues her mother’s practice of making guests comfortable by giving them a job to do, even if it is just pouring their own drinks from pitchers set out for them. 

Bringing great conversation to the table carries over into how Sussman shares about her current home. She said she “wanted to show her life and show the impact of events (since Oct. 7)” so that “food is a balm and a point of focus, (and) provides a means of escape.”

“I feel a responsibility, and am aware that I am being watched, seen in a different way both by endemic community and beyond,” she said. “There are challenges and privileges and opportunities to show something different” in depicting “Jewish continuity and Israeli life in its full complement.”

The credits are rolling.  

(Beth Kissileff is co-editor of “Bound in the Bond of Life: Pittsburgh Writers Reflect on the Tree of Life Tragedy.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)