Susie Fishbein by design: Fueling connection through food 

Like many of us, acclaimed kosher cookbook author Susie Fishbein grew up in a home where the Shabbos menu was more predictable than gas prices – a constant within an ever-changing, inconstant world. As she moved into her community and built her own family, cooking and entertaining became a focal point of her home, but she never thought that it would evolve into more than just a passion. Through a series of unexpected twists and turns, this casual love of cooking grew into a tremendous arsenal of recipes, culminating with the release of her cookbook series “Kosher by Design.” These bestsellers, a staple in your typical Jewish kitchen, have cemented her status as the “Queen of Kosher,” help showcased her tremendous talents for producing great recipes, and introduced a new group of people to the world of kosher cooking.

Back in 2020, IWantRomanian.com writer and foodie Adina Mayer had the pleasure of having a Zoom session with the one and only Susie Fishbein to learn more about her journey, love of food, the development of her cookbooks, and (as expected) her family’s love of Romanian hot dogs. 

Gathering the ingredients

Adina: Who was Susie Fishbein growing up?

Susie: Growing up my father, of blessed memory, loved the same food day in and day out. One

of those foods happened to be chopped liver. He would break his fast after Yom Kippur on chopped liver and he would eat it almost every day. This was my earliest tie to Romanian.  

I trained to be a teacher, but I did discover that every once in a while, I could impress my dad by recreating fancy dishes like we had at restaurants. That was a bonding experience with me and him because he liked his food to look pretty. I always said he was like a frustrated caterer so I think the seeds were planted at those moments in my life even though food is never something I thought I would do as a living.

Adina: Wow, that’s such an incredible story!

Susie: Absolutely! It wasn’t really until I owned a home and lived in a community that I actually started entertaining and wanting to make things look pretty. Although my friends from seminary remember we were starving one morning and somehow, we broke into the kitchen, and I made these amazing French toast dishes for everyone. They all tell me, “Oh, we knew it then what Susie would go on to do!”

Then I realized I had a knack, passion and love for making food look pretty and taste delicious. I love making people happy with food and I love tablescapes so I really found my knack.

I think it’s Inspiring to people to know that just because you trained to do something it’s not necessarily the road you’ll take. Sometimes a door opens and if you push on it, it could lead to something incredible. I just fell into this cookbook life, giving classes, culinary school for kids. I was not trained, and I never took a cooking class, not even the kind I give. Sometimes passion, drive and hard work can be enough and I’m an example of that.

Adina: Now I’m inspired. I’ve seen that in my own life, too. I was trained as a high school

English teacher and after I had my son found my first writing job and the rest is history.

Susie: Right, with writing it’s similar. You want people to be able to process and understand

information in an understandable way and that’s a teacher skill!

Opportunities present themselves and often skills transfer. My Master’s degree in Education and Science helps because I often find that when I explain the way things work in cooking people appreciate the science behind it and it can help them make 100 recipes, not just the one I’m teaching them by understanding that. That’s definitely the teacher that comes out of me in my cooking classes.

Adina: I love that you’re able to combine science and cooking because it definitely helps. I’m a

very novice cook and whenever I actually make something delicious everyone is still shocked. But I’ve found learning the science aspect of it really does help. What do you think are the key ingredients to your success?

Susie: I think it was really about keeping my head down and focusing on what I wanted to do.  It

wasn’t until ten years into my career, I had never kept newspaper clippings or anything, but my husband always kept saying to keep a box of it because your grandchildren will want to see it. We started this collection and now have this overflowing box of accolades like “The Queen of Kosher,” and one of Forward 50’s most influential Jews. These were moments that showed what I’m doing really makes a difference for people. It brings them joy and brings families together.

I always felt like I had to work three times as hard because I didn’t have credentials or a degree, so I almost never picked up my head to look at the landscape of what I had created to that point where I had three or four books that had success and a huge following.

Adina: I always found it incredible that people of all Jewish affiliations loved your cookbooks

and how it was their primary connection to kosher.

Susie: Two stories come to mind. One summer I was working at a religious summer camp. One

of the girls comes up to me and says that she has the most incredible place in my heart for my Kids in Kitchen cookbook. I’m waiting to hear, “I make the fluffy pancakes every Sunday.” She said, “I got it as a Bat Mitzvah gift from my neighbor. That year my mother was diagnosed with cancer and passed away and it was a project between me and my neighbor.” I would go to her house once a week, pick a page and make something to bring home to my mother.”

It was such a happy moment and memory in what was probably the most awful year in this girl’s life. That stayed with me that these books served as markers in life. I always think of it as light and happy cooking, but for some people it marks time in a way that is really valuable.

Another story took place in the Upper West Side. I was signing copies of one of my cookbooks and often people would share stories with me. Sometimes people would tell me how to make my recipes better and offer tips. I noticed two girls out of the corner of my eye and could tell they wanted to share something with me.

One of them started, “We moved to the Upper West Side to meet guys and weren’t really finding anyone in the bar scene. Our mothers recommended we go to a synagogue, and they realized Friday night dinners were a great way to meet guys, so they started attending. One of them was gifted my original Kosher by Design and they started hosting Friday night dinner.

Through these dinners they started to become more religious and said to me, “Your job is to make food look pretty and help people have fun cooking. What you don’t know is that you carry our souls, our neshamas, on your shoulders because your cookbook made our Friday night feel like Shabbos. It wasn’t just about finding guys to come to our table, but it was actually buying into Modern Orthodox Judaism.”  That really stunned me and brought tears to my eyes.

Adina: I have tears in my eyes right now. What a beautiful story of how your cookbook

connected them to Yiddishkeit!

Susie: I started to feel a sense of accomplishment that I had never felt before. I also became

even more careful about what I say because you never know what you do or say and how it could influence someone.

Adina: It’s interesting because you wouldn’t think a cookbook author could have that kind of

power but it’s true and the stories are incredible in showing that. Growing up did you think you could have that kind of impact? Like, in high school, what were you voted ‘most likely’?

Susie: I think there was a tell in my high school experience because I hated art. One of my kids

has this, too, where I almost get a pit in my stomach when I have to hold a paintbrush. I just don’t have the patience or aptitude for it and it got to such a point in my high school art class that the teacher gave me a pass out of her class and instead gave me a second period of Home Economics. We spent time cooking, sewing and table decor and it was that second period of Home Economics that put me over the edge. I guess I owe that art teacher a thank you.

Adina: What a cool teacher to allow you to do that.

Susie: I think it was really just to get me out of her hair.

Adina: It’s so interesting because I would think that art and cooking are so connected.

Susie: If you look at my stuff, it’s not like that. I never made a cake that looks like a pocketbook. Nothing is fake or phony in my cookbooks. I don’t want any garnish that’s not in the recipe. I wanted to represent exactly what the recipe is and honestly, I think that’s part of the key to the success of these books because people know they can turn to any page in any of the books and their food will turn out exactly like the picture.

They can trust that it will turn out well because I tested and developed the recipes enough times to make sure that I thought of everything. I thought of the person that doesn’t know if it should be covered or uncovered, what temperature it should be cooked at, how much salt to add. You’ll never find a recipe in my book with “add salt to taste” because for some people, it might be their first time opening a cookbook. I think I garnered the trust of my audience that they knew they could count on a recipe and photo being the same.

Adina: That’s something I love about your cookbooks because I’m a total novice cook. I have a

friend that makes these amazing Syrian meatballs and I asked for the recipe, and she said, “take some cherries, put some Tamarind sauce in” and I’ve made it twice unsuccessfully so I, like so many people, really need these Susie Fishbein instructions!

Susie: I always say that Artscroll took a big chance on me, and I took a big chance on them. Let’s be honest, they took a big chance on me. I took no chance because if it hadn’t been successful, I would have had a lovely souvenir from my family and I would have gone back into the classroom world.

I fell in love with the cookbook world fast and furious and I knew this is what I wanted to do and if I worked hard and diligently enough, I could make it happen. I remember in the two years I was writing that first book I kept like regular office hours. Friends would ask to grab a coffee but there were times I just didn’t answer the phone and worked six straight hours in my kitchen. I was able to make it happen by working really hard, quadruple testing every recipe and giving up on recipes that weren’t working.

Adina: What was it like for you when that first book came out?

Susie: From the first few weeks of that cookbook coming out my life changed. This was 18 years ago, so there was really no internet, and my face wasn’t in the book due to the fact that Artscroll is such a religious company. People knew my name and not my face which was kind of nice at the time.

And Susie Fishbein became almost like a verb. I heard, “I’m Susie Fishbein-ing it for Shabbos.” It was cool to stay in the background for a bit, but almost immediately after I started getting calls to do these live cooking demonstrations. I knew how to be a great teacher, I had tenure when I was teaching. But I just didn’t know how to be a great cooking teacher at first. Once I got my sea legs and my confidence I started going out in the public and the reaction I got from everyone was, “I expected you to be a Bubbe!”

Adina: Such an interesting time to become a cookbook author and have that presence in a time

before social media.

Susie: Now people talk all day long to their Instagram followers and then they get a book deal.

For me, it was the opposite. I was reluctant even to do anything with social media and I still stink at it. All these new, young girls are amazing at it and they are so much fun to watch. It’s a backdoor to the world I fell into. My career is really just a gift from Hashem. It was mazel and being in the right place at the right time.

Adina: Were there any big challenges when you joined this cookbook world?

Susie: You’re not going to believe it, Adina, but I have to tell you that I have had the most happy

career that I could ever imagine. I have never had a hard or sad day of work and there hasn’t been a day that I didn’t come home from a show or working that I’m not just joyous.

I’ve had the most incredible relationship with Artscroll with mutual respect. There’s a joke when a sitcom begins everyone signs on for $10,000 an episode and then when it becomes a huge hit there’s fighting and friction. There was none of that and we’ve had an unbelievable marriage.

The most challenging experience in my career was doing a show in Baltimore during a horrible storm. The power went out when I was supposed to do a cooking demo for a room of 75 women.

My heart was beating, and it was in my earlier days where I was less secure about what I knew how to do. Then, the husbands brought generators and the women were singing songs at an impromptu kumzitz by candlelight. I was doing my best by candlelight over one little gas burner to get all the food prepped. It really goes down as a happy memory.

Probably the only other stressful time was when I took a job on yeshiva week on a kosher cruise line. I’m incredibly detail-oriented, which I think is the secret to my success. I gave them a detailed list, brand specific, about what I needed for each demo. When we boarded the cruise, I realized they didn’t get any of my ingredients. I’ll never forget what happened next. At each Island stop, I had my family running around to every possible bodega and market trying to gather ingredients like a scavenger hunt.

Adina: New York and New Jersey have the best of everything, why do you still order from

Romanian all the way in Chicago?

Susie: Romanian has a very soft spot in my family’s appetite. A young couple moved to town

recently and remembered they came to my parents’ house for Shabbos once. I asked how the remembered that, and the wife said, “Because your mother gave us access to your fridge and freezer and when we opened it up it was completely full of chopped liver.”

My father’s favorite local place closed down years ago, so growing up it became the job of my family to find the best chopped liver for him and of course that award goes to Romanian. Right then and there, anytime anyone was going to Chicago, I would put in an order to bring back chopped liver.

Any night when I had a shows became my “kids’ choice” for dinner, because when I was working on cookbooks my kids would eat my work product from that day. They didn’t always enjoy it and “kids’ choice” was never something I made, usually Wacky Mac or hotdogs. It used to hurt my feelings every single week although I will pretend it didn’t.

My husband is a Yankee fan and I used to go with him a couple of times a season to games just to get the Kosher hot dog. The company that made them went out of business but Romanian fills that need for us.

My daughter got married this year during the pandemic, so we went to Israel for the wedding. My new son-in-law’s favorite food is hot dogs and there really aren’t good ones in Israel. Because of Coronavirus, I’d only met my son-in-law one Shabbos the year before, so we really wanted to do something special. We ordered 45 packages of Romanian hot dogs, and the majority of them came with me to Israel. It was the key to my son-in-law’s heart on our first meeting. So, yes, I am a true Romanian fan!

The products are reasonably priced even when you have to factor in the shipping especially if you split the box with someone which I’ve done on occasion. It’s phenomenal and exciting. You think living in the tri-state area you have everything, but not that chopped liver, those hot dogs, the salami. They do it better than anyone.

Adina: There are just the best stories of how far people would go to get Romanian, and now you can just have it shipped right to you.

Susie: One of my high school friends has a brother who lives in Chicago. Anytime she travels

there she brings a duffel bag of bagels.  She brings the bagels to him, he puts them in his freezer, and then loads her up with a duffel of Romanian stuff that she brings home to Teaneck. That was my source before I could order online, and I used to drive 40 minutes there to get it.

Adina: What’s been your experience like ordering from IWantRomanian.com?

Susie: It’s been seamless. I ordered it online and it came packaged beautifully on dry ice.

Everything was frozen solid. I was nervous I’d have to use everything right away because it defrosted, but it went right into my freezer and I’m telling you, a lot of that stuff ended up coming with me to Israel and it stayed frozen.

Adina: Could I get a sneak peek at some of the dishes you made with Romanian products?

Susie: Every once in a blue moon I’ll take the cover off and fire up my grill to have hot dogs for

dinner. I have a son who’s a senior in high school. There’s no fun for seniors in high school right now.

One of his friends has a backyard barbecue pit and last Saturday night was his birthday, so his mom said he could have his “school pod,” who gets tested twice a week, over to hang out.

Our contribution was two packages of Romanian hot dogs, and he was the hero of the night. He said that kids were grilling London Broil and wings, but all everyone was talking about was the Romanian hot dogs. It really brought them a lot of joy.

Adina: Those hot dogs are gold!

Susie: You have to really decide if people are worthy for Romanian hot dogs before sharing.

And there’s nothing better than the salami and chopped liver. Those three are the Fishbein family highlights.

People should know that you have an unbelievable product and don’t have to drown the stuff in duck sauce.  When you have a quality product and the flavors are so good, you don’t need to pull out a Susie Fishbein cookbook to make something out of it, because they are perfect in their natural form.

Using aged salami on a charcuterie board is great. I just love this meat in its natural form, but a Hasselback salami using Romanian salami is another level. The sugar makes it crispy and crackly which is incredible, but these items really do stand out without needing to be doctored.

Adina: Do you have any fun facts that people might not expect?

Susie: I really have more fun anecdotes from my professional life. I was once at a media event

at Pomegranate supermarket. There were writers and reporters all around and my father was sitting in the front row. A reporter came up to him and said, “Oh, you must be so proud of your daughter. What’s your favorite dish that she makes?” He looks her straight in the face and says, “I really don’t like her food, it’s just way too fancy for me. I like my wife’s cooking.” This is my family’s favorite story.

Adina: That’s hysterical!

Susie: Besides that, I really just enjoy making people happy. I enjoy anything that keeps me

organized and busy. I definitely don’t like just sitting around and am more like a worker bee kind of person. I just feel very blessed to have a happy life with a wonderful family that just appreciates and values what I do and to have a fun, easy and happy career, thank G-d.

Adina: I really can’t tell how much I appreciate getting to meet you and put a face to the name. I’ll admit that I read your cookbooks and as a kid I totally thought of you as a Bubbe!

Adina was definitely inspired by this Zoom session with the Queen of Kosher, which also happened to be one of the most entertaining points of that pandemic year. Susie’s path towards kosher culinary royalty shows the tremendous fruits of her hard work, passion and love of food, which has helped transform a side hobby into an incredibly rewarding career. Sure enough, we at IWantRomanian.com consider Susie as a role model, as we are lucky enough to similarly take our love of Romanian kosher products and help pass that along to you – our customers.

As a parting treat, Susie graciously shared one of her Grilled Salami and Fig Salad recipe with us to pass along to you. Her comments on the advantages of using Romanian salami speak for themselves, so it’s a no-brainer to include that in this salad. We hope you enjoy!

Grilled Salami and Fig Salad (Meat Yield: 6-8 servings)

• Pine nuts (2 ounces) – keep additional on side for garnish
• Red wine vinegar (2 tablespoons)
• Extra virgin olive oil (6 tablespoons)
• 1 jar of Fig Preserves (11-ounces)
• Tofutti Nondairy cream cheese (1 tablespoon)
• Beef salami (1 pound of 4-inch diameter slices)
• Baby Arugula (4 ounces)

• Place the 2-ounces of pine nuts into a large empty skillet or grill pan over medium heat. Toast until fragrant, shaking the pan, for about 2 minutes. Transfer the pine nuts to a quart-size container. Add the vinegar and olive oil. Using an immersion blender purée the mixture into a dressing. This can also be done in a food processor fitted with metal “S” blade.
• Place the fig preserves into a second quart-sized container. Add the nondairy cream cheese. Using an immersion blender, process until the figs are evenly chopped. If you don’t have an immersion blender, finely chop the fig preserves and whisk them into the cream cheese.
• Preheat the skillet or grill pan over medium heat. Place the salami slices on your work surface. Spread the fig mixture evenly on one side of each salami slice, about 1⁄2 teaspoon per slice. Fold each slice of salami in half twice to form a fan. Place the salami fans into the hot pan. Cook, using tongs to turn each fan once, 1-2 minutes per side or until the salami is grilled. Set aside. Do in batches and rinse out pan between batches if necessary.
• Place the arugula into a large bowl or platter. Toss with the dressing. Set the salami fans into the lettuce. Garnish with pine nuts.