november / december 2005:

The queen of kosher
Forget Martha Stewart. We have our own domestic diva, and she didn’t just get out of prison either. Meet Susie Fishbein, the phenom who is single-handedly redefining kosher cuisine.

by Benyamin Cohen


It’s a grey and chilly Monday morning in Atlanta, but you wouldn’t know it by looking through the window. That would be the window to a beautiful but fake sun shiny day on the bright set of Good Day Atlanta. Inside the studio of the popular morning show, the weather is perfect. It always is.

Bright wood paneling blankets the room from floor to ceiling. A yellow couch straight out of a Pottery Barn catalog sits in a comfy living room area. A green screen used to report the day’s weather conditions is surrounded by two beautiful pillars. Just don’t lean on them. As I found out the hard way, they’re not real. And to the wonderful people at FOX 5, I hereby apologize for almost knocking one over during filming.

Across the stage is a makeshift morning show kitchen where occasional cooking segments are shot. Today, the woman behind the stove is cooking up some larger than life matzah balls. Green ones.

“They’re not actually kosher,” the chef warns me, “since they were made on non-kosher equipment.” Which is perfectly fine, since green matzah balls are not normally my food of choice for so early in the morning.

The chef in question is none other than Susie Fishbein. For those of you not in the know, Fishbein is a rock star. She’s the Jewish equivalent of Julia Child, Martha Stewart, and Nigella Lawson combined. Not a small feat for the diminutive mother of four from New Jersey.

Fishbein catapulted to spiritual stardom in the spring of 2003 when she published the groundbreaking cookbook Kosher by Design. Yes, you heard us right. We said groundbreaking. For the first time, kosher eating wasn’t about Sephardic traditions from Spain or Bubbe’s brisket, but it was actually beautiful.

Taking a page from mainstream food publishing, Fishbein published what critics have called the most visually stunning kosher cookbook on the market. Flip through the pages and you’ll see what we mean. That’s if you can get your hand on a copy. The cookbook sold more than 70,000 copies.

Mesorah Publications, the company behind the cookbook, knew a good opportunity when it saw it. Earlier this year saw the release of the sequel, Kosher by Design Entertains, and this month Kosher by Design: Kids in the Kitchen should be out just in time for Chanukah stuffers.

As for Fishbein, she credits her success to just plain logic. “Too many cookbooks speak above the reader,” she says as we drive from the television studio to her next stop, a cooking class where participants paid upwards of $250 to attend. Fishbein, who has no formal culinary training, wears her novice status as a badge of honor. “I cook like normal people do. I talk like they do. I don’t ever want to lose that.”

And, perhaps more importantly, Fishbein is giving kosher food a much-needed makeover. Most non-kosher food doesn’t look as good as her creations do. To do this, she spends hours meandering through supermarket aisles and scanning the menus of fancy non-kosher eateries for that “Eureka” moment that inspires her.

The cookbooks, which have high brow shops like Williams Sonoma clamoring to sell them, have already exhausted their initial printings and the presses are now in overdrive pumping out more copies.

“Kosher eating has exploded onto the national scene,” she says. “Clearly, there’s something going on in the kosher world. It’s not a chesed (an act of kindness). It’s a business.”



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