The Modern Menu

By Kim Kushner

Gefen Publishing House, 2013.

Reviewed by Gloria Deutsch

If, like me, you have several shelves full of cookery books, you probably don’t feel that you need another. But this one has a great deal to recommend it and I loved it. The sub-title is ‘Simple. Beautiful. Kosher’ and it really lives up to its promise. Simple is very important for today’s busy cooks as you don’t want to be confronted with a long list of esoteric ingredients when you tackle a new recipe. Here nothing has more than ten ingredients and they can all be easily found in any Israeli supermarket. And several recipes have only five or six ingredients. I liked many things about this book but the best thing is that every dish has its own, full-page beautiful illustration so you can see exactly how the dish should look.

For those not blessed with food decorating prowess or who feel insecure about the finished product, all you have to do is look at the photo accompanying the recipe and you can see exactly how the food is supposed to look. I also liked the fact that the author, Kim Kushner, has organized the recipes into menus, named for the way the dishes make her feel. There’s a ‘vibrant’ menu, filled with color, a ‘crisp’ menu loaded with crunchy items, a ‘saucy’ menu to highlight the transformational power of a well-made sauce. Other menus have names like ‘gutsy’, ‘indulgent’ and ‘nourishing.’

Kim Kushner has been teaching for 10 years in New York where she lives, and this is the first time she has collected recipes she learnt as a child and put them into a book. She has a philosophy of cooking which she tries to impart to her students and many of her aphorisms are included in the book. Among her homespun ideas are several which will resonate with the reader. “At the end of the day,” she writes, “everyone needs – and loves – to eat, especially when what’s on offer is made with love.

If I have one small criticism it is the fact that her ‘crab’ recipes (she uses surimi, mock crabmeat) do not always use inverted commas for the forbidden crustacean. It’s quite disconcerting to come across ‘crab and mango salad in wonton cups’ in a kosher cookbook. But this is a very minor transgression ... all in all, a lovely book.