Nela often said cooking requires intuition and joy, which meant rejecting the rigid rules and trusting ones imagination.
She believed that cooking should be a source of joy, even if a tasty meal had to be prepared on a portable stove in a hotel during a tour or in a trans-Siberian train. The latter occurred during a concert tour in Soviet Russia in 1935:
After five days I entered the dining car and, to the great surprise of the comrade cooks who had never seen a ‘capitalist’ cook before, I fried us some scrambled eggs for dinner.
In fact, intuition became a sort of obstacle during her work on the book, because the recipes written down over the years on scraps of paper did not include the mundane elements, such as the proportions of the ingredients, time of preparation or the temperature. As her daughter Eva remarked in an interview for Wysokie Obcasy:
Mom had something you could call perfect taste. She was never mistaken in distinguishing the ingredients of a dish served in a restaurant and was later able to prepare the same dish at home, usually better. She depended on intuition and never weighed ingredients, except maybe for the pound cake. But the recipes required exact amounts and this measuring and weighing was really difficult for her.
Because Rubinstein’s collection included recipes from friends and befriended cooks, it was full of different languages: Polish, Lithuanian, but also English, French, Russian, German or Spanish. For example, Sergei Rachmaninov’s wife provided a recipe for a Russian coulibiac filled with cabbage and mushrooms. It was taken from a cook who had once worked for the last Russian tsar.
Other than intuition, she valued speed in her cooking. She was familiar with technological advances and culinary novelties such as pressure cookers, food processors or even stock cubes that are so vilified by food-lovers nowadays. She liked to cook simple things. One of her favourite dishes was chicken meatballs with dill. She also often prepared łazanki with mushrooms. Both dishes were highly esteemed by American guests.
Thanks to the ability to divide her attention, she never found it difficult to amuse guests while cooking. She could even do it in many languages as she spoke… seven. In the same interview, her daughter Eva said:
My mother really was an extraordinary cook, full of unquenchable inventiveness. She cooked fast and without fuss. She could be baking a cake, talking to a guest in French and listening to an English TV show at the same time.