A Night at Lewando’s: The Book Launch of The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook

Join us for the launch of this mouthwatering vegetarian cookbook straight from YIVO’s archives. In 1938, Fania Lewando, the proprietor of a popular vegetarian restaurant in Vilna, published a Yiddish vegetarian cookbook including 400 recipes, impassioned essays about the benefits of vegetarianism, and lush full-color drawings of vegetables and fruit. Enchanted by the book, YIVO commissioned a translation, making Lewando's charming, delicious, and practical recipes available to a contemporary audience. Tonight, we celebrate the launch of this new publication by recreating the experience of Lewando’s restaurant, complete with tastings from the cookbook, live music performed by Frank London and Lorin Sklamberg (of The Klezmatics), and more. Special dishes from the cookbook will be prepared by The Gefilteria in collaboration with the Center for Kosher Culinary Arts.

The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook: Garden-Fresh Recipes Rediscovered and Adapted for Today’s Kitchen was commissioned by YIVO and published by Schocken Books. Translated from the Yiddish by Eve Jochnowitz, with a foreword by Joan Nathan. A copy of Fania Lewando’s original Yiddish-language cookbook, Vegetarish-Dietisher Kokhbukh: 400 Shpeizn Gemakht Oysshlislekh fun Grinsn (Vegetarian-Dietetic Cookbook: 400 Recipes Made Exclusively from Vegetables) was generously donated to YIVO by Pessl Beckler Semel Stern and Hank Stern.

Sponsored by Ruth and David Levine.

A long-lost Yiddish cookbook, now rediscovered and translated for the contemporary kitchen, gives much credence to our great-great-grandparents’ knowledge—and foresightedness. Lewando, proprietor of a restaurant in Vilna, the so-called Jerusalem of Lithuania, majored in vegetables and nothing but. Her 400 recipes, though not all low in calories, could tempt even the heartiest of meat eaters to taste and, perhaps, to convert to a partial-vegetarian diet. Many of her dishes, all presented in a narrative style (that is, without the list of upfront food items and detailed step-by-step directions), are simply variations in ingredients, whether omelets and porridges or salads and soups. Sweet teeth haven’t been forgotten; chapters on baked goods, turnovers, compotes, and desserts feature such delectabledishes as lemon cream and lemon kissel (a kind of syrup pudding). Excerpts from a treatise on why fruits and vegetables are so important, as well as the translator’s preface, underscore the health benefits of vegetables, decades ahead of today’s movements. Complimentsfrom celebrities like Marc Chagall and others tell us of a talent lost way too soon in WWII.
— Barbara Jacobs, Booklist