Kissing Butter Goodbye

Popular restaurateur Levana Kirschenbaum goes dairy-free in her new book. Soy, anyone?

by Sandee Brawarsky
Jewish Week Book Critic

When Levana Kirschenbaum was growing up in
Casablanca, she had no choice but to eat well. Her family was poor but they ate wholesome foods, prepared simply and well. There were no canned foods, no frozen selections, just what was available fresh at the local market. She remembers her mother cooking “as though she had her hands tied behind her back,” with limited resources to feed seven children, but she was a master at making delicious meals.
Now a restaurateur (one of the founding owners of the Upper West Side restaurant that carries her name), chef, cooking instructor and author, Kirschenbaum is herself a master at serving original, healthy, beautifully presented meals, and she’s generous about sharing her secrets. Interviewed in the salon of

her apartment, which is also on the Upper West Side but which evokes her native Morocco, she discusses her latest cookbook, “Levana Cooks Dairy-Free: Natural and Delicious Recipes for Your Favorite ‘Forbidden’ Foods” (Skyhorse Publishing). It is a boon for those who are lactose intolerant, and need to cut all dairy products from their diet, and also for those who keep kosher (and cannot mix meat and milk) and seek new ways to make their cooking more flavorful and nutritious.
Kirschenbaum creates contemporary dishes without using any dairy products, including some foods that seem almost defined by their dairy components, like pizza and cheesecake, Chicken Tandoori and Cream of Watercress and Asparagus Soup. In cooking, she explains, butter is an emollient, a vehicle for texture that can be replaced. She’s not advocating substituting margarine and non-dairy creamer for butter and milk, but using healthier, natural alternatives, that stand on their own as fine ingredients. Her recipes call for natural foods like soy, rice, oat, almond and coconut milks.
“Too many cooks still believe that a meal that is not traditionally prepared with milk or butter can never be as good,” she writes in her introduction. “This book proves just how wrong that assumption is — and the feeling of liberation it will give cooks will be wonderful.”
Her Pizza Puttanesca has tomatoes, capers, olives and anchovies, set on homemade dough; her Beef Stroganoff features a bit of soy or other non-dairy milk and some Tofutti brand sour cream. And she creates desserts like tiramisu, crème caramel, chocolate truffles, ice cream and pistachio halva mousse with maple sauce.
“The truth is we all love dairy products, but that love is too often unrequited by our religion, our bodies, or both,” she writes. She admits that almost nothing tastes as good as toast with butter, but several years ago, she discovered, through a series of elimination trials, that she was somewhat lactose intolerant. For some people, food allergies can be life threatening, and for others the symptoms can be mild. She explains that it’s not uncommon to have later onset of food allergies.
In this new book, she’s not advocating kosher cheeseburgers, although it’s indeed possible — and kosher — to combine meat and dairy-free cheese. But she doesn’t like the aesthetic of it, nor does she find nutritional value in layering two proteins.
Dairy-free cooking is part of her Sephardic culinary tradition. While she was growing up, her family of course kept kosher but didn’t have a set of dairy dishes. When they’d buy goat butter and cheese in the market, they ate it immediately on a glass plate, and had one pot for cooking occasional dairy treats.
“If I learned cooking from my mother, I was the most inadvertent observer,” she says. “I never helped out, I was caught up in my studies.” She earned a master’s degree in psychology in Paris, and then came to the U.S. in 1972. But the first job that came her way was in cooking.
Conversations with Kirschenbaum are lively, interspersed with recipes, passionate opinions and stories, but she never mentions the word “diet.” Her fundamental philosophy about food and cooking is to keep things simple, insisting that fresh, natural ingredients yield great results without a lot of fuss and with no need to worry about calories. She compares the 700-plus calories in a deli-bought oversized muffin to a lunch of half a roasted chicken and salad — and she’d prefer the chicken.
For Kirschenbaum, “Eating at home is the best defense for eating well.” As a home cook, she regularly hosts well over a dozen guests every Shabbat, making everything from scratch, avoiding processed foods. She shows her kitchen and the food processor she relies on, and somehow makes this all sound possible for cooks of all levels, including those who don’t have much time in the kitchen.
She notes that so much wonderful food is available in America, and still, so many people who have opportunities to make good choices instead choose to eat so poorly. When she sees women in fur coats buying canned potatoes rather than spending the few extra moments to peel fresh ones, she’s stunned. “I think every intelligent person should use some of the intelligence given to them for good nutrition,” she comments.
Kirschenbaum is not a trained nutritionist, but she keeps up with the latest studies, and urges discretion and good sense when new findings seem to offer confusing results. When she consults with friends and students about their eating habits, she helps them to understand that they have to change something they do in order to achieve a healthier balance. A first step is often “taking out anything that doesn’t look like whole food.”
With color photographs accompanying each recipe, “Levana Cooks Dairy-Free” includes recipes for every meal. Her suggested ingredients are available in health food stores as well as supermarkets.
Kirschenbaum, who teaches weekly cooking classes — “Levana Cooks” — at Lincoln Square Synagogue in Manhattan and travels around the country to give workshops, is the author of “Levana’s Table: Kosher Cooking for Everyone.” She has also just published “In Short Order,” a book/DVD set, in which she features more than 20 dishes, including nutritional charts. The booklet is really a compilation of her personal thoughts on eating well and sensibly, full of good advice.
“I strive in every way possible to create nutritious, economical and streamlined meals without ever sacrificing flavor,” she says.
Kirschenbaum thinks of herself as an artisan, in the kitchen and elsewhere. She loves creating things with her hands, and shows some beadwork she has done, along with a coat she designed and knit.
Readers who remember Levana’s Bakery, which she founded in 1977 on West 67th Street, are likely to recall her pareve chocolate, carrot, poppy seed and other cakes. She’s now working on developing a line of baked goods to be available commercially, featuring those old favorites and also including non-dairy cheesecakes, coffee cakes and muffins and some wheat-free and sugar-free variations — “what I would be baking if I had time,” she says.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization