Butcher’s wife African flavours
Sharon Lurie’s third kosher cookbook gives a haimishe twist to the food of her home country
SHARON LURIE is not what you’d expect of the wife of a kosher butcher. The publicity shots for her first book, Cooking with the Kosher Butcher’s Wife (published in 2012) showed the 59-year-old grandmother in a diamante-adorned animal print kitchen apron. With her glamorous hair and nails she made quite an impression. Meat has long been a passion. Husband, Ian Lurie, is a fourth-generation Johannesburg kosher butcher. Son, Boruch — the oldest of her four children and a qualified rabbi — has joined the family business, expanding the meat production, retail and catering business into hospitality, with kosher restaurant, Burger and Brew.
Her recipe-writing career started when she began handing out recipes to customers at the butchery business. She’d noticed that they tended to buy only certain cuts of meat. “Everyone wanted Scotch fillet, lamb chops and crown roast, but there were so many tasty kosher cuts that they had no idea what to do with! So I’d give them a recipe.”
Word spread, and the local Jewish newspaper came knocking on her door, asking her to share. “My first recipe was mock oxtail and it grew from that. I wrote for them every week and built up a file of meat and parev recipes so huge I couldn’t close it!”
Her sister-in-law took her and her bulging folder to Cape Town where they pitched the idea for a book to publisher Penguin Random House. “They loved it!”
After the book came out, she became a regular contributor on Jewish radio station Chai FM. She progressed to presenting her own cooking show in which she interviews guests and shares what she’s making. “I tell them what I’m making for Shabbos, and how it went down. Everything has to get past the ‘Lurie Jury’ — my family — before it goes on the show or in a recipe. If they push away their plates unfinished it won’t get any further.”
A second helping, Celebrating with the Kosher Butcher’s Wife followed a couple of years later, focussing on festival cooking. “They insisted I include fish and I was horrified — I’m married to a butcher, not a fishmonger!”
That book was awarded a spot in the top ten cookery books picked for New York’s annual kosher exhibition, Kosherfest, and she was invited to join other kosher cookbook glitterati in their
“author’s corner”. “I couldn’t believe that I was mixing with food writers like Suzy Fishbein and Jamie Geller” she enthuses.
For the third book, A Taste of South Africa with the Kosher Butcher’s Wife, her publishers wanted it all — meat, fish, parev and dairy. She was only too happy to fuse her Jewish roots with the culinary traditions of her home country.
Shortly after she was commissioned, however, her mother fell ill, so the recipe ideas were brainstormed with her brothers and sister around her mother’s hospital bedside.
“We were with her in the hospital and I asked my brothers and sister to help me work out the recipes. My mother, Jill
Smith, was an incredible cook and Cordon Bleu trained. She also worked as a chef. She was drifting in and out of consciousness and I’d be asking her how she made this or that and she was telling me. She passed away just after that, so it’s a special tribute to her.”
South African classics, like Mossbolletjie, a loaf brought by the Huguenots are given a haimishe twist. The French-influenced loaf is reinvented as an Eastern European babka and flavoured with rooibos tea.
Bobotie, traditionally made with curried minced beef baked in an (very unkosher) savoury custard is made with tuna fish into a sort of tuna-filled blintze baked in the creamy sauce. Latkes are topped with salty, smoked snoek — a local fish. With snoek unlikely to be sourced outside her home country, Lurie suggests replacing it with salmon.
Asked to list her favourites, she has endless suggestions — “The melktert is wonderful, and there’s a Sheva brachot curry, which is lovely and light — I love anything spicy. Braai-ing — is my best. I braai all my roasts before I put them in the oven on a low light for a long cook.”
Expect to see more of that leopard print apron — Lurie has been invited to England to demonstrate her recipes later in the year.
‘A Taste of South Africa with the Kosher Butcher’s Wife is available on Amazon’