Fania Lewando & Mecyje: Rediscovering the Queen of Jewish Vegetarian Food
The fascinating story of Fania Lewando – a pre-war cook and entrepreneur, who served vegetarian kosher food to Marc Chagall and the Vilnius elite – inspired the Mecyje collective to do a project which brings the film ‘Julie & Julia' to mind: they prepared all the recipes from her long-forgotten book and made them relevant to the contemporary cook.
The chef
Fania Lewando was born as Fania Fiszelewicz in a Jewish, Yiddish-speaking family in Włocławek in 1887 or 1888. Her father was a fishmonger and her mother took care of her and her five siblings. We don’t know much about her childhood; what we do know is that in the 1920s she and her husband – the egg seller Lazar Lewando – decided to move to Vilnius. Before that, they were denied an American visa and decided to stay when some of their family members emigrated to the UK. They may have also spent some time in Warsaw as well, since Fania kept in touch with a wide network of artists and intellectuals from the Polish capital.
In the newly independent Poland, Vilnius became one of the most important Jewish cultural centres in the world. Here, on 14 Niemiecka Street, Fania and Lazar Lewando opened their vegetarian, kosher restaurant which they called Dietojarska Jadłodajnia.
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It was a casual spot, yet Fania put a lot of care into the freshness of ingredients she used and the overall composition of the dishes, which she wanted to be nutritious and delicious at the same time. She believed people should abstain from meat – to be fair, at the time most Polish Jews did anyway, since kosher meat was very expensive, and having a kosher restaurant was technically difficult, since it would require two separate kitchens. Yet to Fania, vegetarianism wasn’t only a practical choice: it meant obeying to the Jewish law of tza’ar ba’alei chayim – not causing any unnecessary suffering to any living creature – and it was also considered a light, healthy way of eating by a growing number of doctors and dietitians. Fania was aware of current medical discoveries – such as the discovery of vitamins by two Polish Jewish scientists Kazimierz Funk and Ludwik Rajchman – and dietary trends, promoted by such cookbook authors as Apolinary Tarnawski, Janina and Stanisław Breyer and the magazine Jarskie Życie (Vegetarian Life).
In 1936, Fania was given the opportunity of a lifetime – she became the head chef of the kosher kitchen on the Batory transatlantic liner. Baptised the ‘Lucky Ship’, it was elegant and refined, decorated with works by famous Polish artists Jan Cybis and Zofia Stryjeńska, and furniture and tableware by created by trendy Polish designers. It had an enormous kitchen which had to serve 760 passengers. The kosher section was led by Fania, who was supervised by a rabbi. There was even a special menu, printed in Polish, English and Hebrew. On 29th October 1937, for example, for luncheon the cooks prepared a broth with semolina and potato soup, carrots paysanne, asparagus and green beans; boiled, mashed, fried or baked potatoes; romaine lettuce, endive, tomatoes or cucumber and cream; as well as stewed beef, veal steak and broiled pullet.
The book
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The cover of the book 'Dietojarska Jewish Cuisine', photo: Znak Publishing House
Vegetarisch-Dietischer Kokhbukh: 400 Shpayzn Gemakht Oysshlislekh fun Grinsn (Vegetarian-Diet Cookbook. 400 Dishes Made Solely with Vegetables) is the title of Fania’s cookbook published somewhere between 1937 and 1938. Three thousand copies were printed, which, at the time, was a pretty impressive amount. In the book, Lewando proposed vegetarian versions of classic Ashkenazi meat dishes such as schnitzel, kishke and cholent, as well as dishes that were traditionally meatless – kugel, blintzes or barszcz (borscht). She dedicated the book to the traditional Jewish housewife, who might be taken aback by the total lack of meat, but could possibly also appreciate this new outlook on food.
Fania was killed during World War II and her collection of recipes lost; we last hear of her and her whereabouts in 1941... For decades the book remained forgotten and was only rediscovered at a London book fair in the 1995 by Wendy Waxman and Barbara Mazur, who worked at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York (which originally called Vilnius its home). It has since been translated into English – as The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook – and Lithuanian, and finally, in 2020, also adapted into Polish – but not in a conventional way.
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The cover of the book Fani Lewando from 1938, photo: Wikimedia Commons
The book Dietojarska Kuchnia Żydowska was edited by the Mecyje collective (metziah, from Yiddish: a good deal or a bargain) – five women, all fans of Lewando, who embarked on a project that brings the Meryl Streep film Julie and Julia to mind. Chef Sabina Francuz, along with Karolina Skoczylas and three Aleksandras – Doniczka, Fruga and Małota – worked together at the Cheder Café in the Kraków’s Kazimierz district. They became friends, all fell in love with Fania’s food, and for two years, they met regularly to cook her recipes. They worked with Yiddish and English versions of the book, to best establish the ingredients and procedures, aware of the changes they needed to make so that the book could be used by modern cooks in modern kitchens. They noticed that contemporary cookbooks were much more precise – you can’t just say to put a cake in the oven and ‘bake it until it’s ready’ or to ‘add as much flour as it needs’. And so, they didn’t just translate the text, but adapted it for a modern reader, chose but a selection of Fania’s recipes, the cooked them styled them and took professional photos of their culinary creations.
The food
What recipes will we find in this new version of the book? Fania’s cuisine is a mixture of Eastern European comfort food with some Middle Eastern influences, and a lot of inventive vegetarian ideas: there’s a Polish-style vegetable salad with homemade mayo and an aubergine, tomato and onion dip; there are cabbage and mushroom soups and Ukrainian barszcz, which we know so well; but there are also almond and wine soups which seem pretty exotic even now! There are a lot of different recipes for delicious latkes – the Mecyje team especially recommends the latkes made with soured milk – and kugels.
What’s most interesting from the modern point of view, is that all the meat and fish alternatives in the original book look exactly as if they had been taken from contemporary vegetarian restaurant menus: we have a gefilte fish made with celeriac, and a Viennese schnitzel made of cauliflower. There’s also a pretty fascinating recipe for prune tzimmes, which brings to mind a very similar dish from Yotam Ottolenghi’s bestselling Plenty, which goes to show how Jewish culinary traditions travel through time and space and keep finding their way back onto our plates.
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Yet the queen of all the recipes is for challah: the braided bread, which keeps us connected to our nation’s Jewish past every time we step inside a Polish bakery. Mecyje claims Fania’s dough recipe is one of the best they’ve ever worked with and keep teaching their readers and followers how to bake it (and braid it beautifully!) not only through the book, but also through meetings and workshops which aim to keep Fania’s legacy alive.
And so, eighty years after her untimely death, Fania Lewando’s body of work has finally found the recognition it deserves. Her view on food fits perfectly within modern trends: the interest in the cuisine of Polish Jews is constantly growing thanks to initiatives such as the Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków, the TISZ Jewish Food Festival at the POLIN Museum in Warsaw, or the kosher Sunday brunches at the JCC Warszawa. Thanks to chefs such as Yotam Ottolenghi and the growing interest in plant-based food, colourful and vibrant Middle Eastern cuisine is having a moment. All this shows us the different and delicious facets of Jewish culinary traditions from around the globe.
Chefs transform old-school Polish dishes into vegan and vegetarian versions, at the same time sticking with the traditional comfort usually provided by potatoes and yeast-based dough. And so, learning Fania’s recipes, which are meatless, yet delicious, inventive, yet comforting, and sit perfectly between the exotic and the familiar, is a perfect way to learn about a world we tragically lost – but which lives on, in our cities and towns, and in our collective and culinary memories.
Written by Natalia Mętrak-Ruda, May 2021