Cookbook author proves it’s possible to make delicious — and kosher — Cuban cuisine

As far as author and researcher Genie Milgrom knows, her recently published “Salsa! A Cuban Kosher Cookbook” is the only cookbook that teaches people how to make authentic Cuban food according to kosher dietary laws.

For Milgrom, adapting the treif, heavily pork-and shellfish-based cuisine to make it accessible to religiously observant Jews was a decades-long trial and error process. The Miami-based Milgrom stuck with the effort for personal reasons.

An Orthodox Jew since the 1980s, she was born into a devout Catholic family in Havana. For Milgrom, these Cuban dishes are her comfort food and represent her strong ties to her family and culture of origin. She had to find a way to keep cooking and eating them.

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“I was trying to say something specific about Cuban food in the title of my cookbook, ‘Salsa!’ This is not salsa, like Mexican salsa and chips. By ‘salsa,’ I mean the Cuban dance of salsa. That is the essence, spirit, and joy of the Cuban people no matter where we are,” Milgrom said.

Milgrom was born in Havana. When she was a young child, her family fled to Miami after the Cuban Revolution and Communist dictator Fidel Castro’s rise to power in 1959.

In the United States, her family regularly cooked Spanish-Cuban foods that connected them to their roots. They brought over their recipes for dishes such as seafood salad, paella, Cuban crab tamales, and shredded roast beef with bacon marinated in sour orange juice.

All these comfort foods became problematic for Milgrom when she started keeping kosher, converted to Judaism, and married an Orthodox man. She wondered if she would ever again be able to cook what she calls her “old heimishe [homey] recipes.”

Over the years, Milgrom figured out how to adjust most recipes to recreate the culinary tastes, textures, and aromas she grew up with — only now in versions with kosher-only ingredients and cooking methods. She eventually arrived at the point where she felt ready to share her recipes with others by writing and publishing her cookbook.

The first thing Milgrom points out is that Cuban food is distinctive and should not be lumped in with the cuisine of other Caribbean islands.

“Cuban cooking is Spanish cooking that incorporates many New World, local Cuban flavors. This means using a lot of native tropical fruits like papaya, coconut, guava, and chayote. The cuisine also uses lots of rum. You won’t see much use of other spirits or even wine,” Milgrom explained.

“Cuban food has a lot of layers of flavor, but it is not spicy like the food of other Caribbean islands. What’s the point of eating spicy food in a hot climate when it will just make you feel hotter? Our cuisine is very tomato-y and has many sauces and stews. I remember even from my earliest years that the stews were served in the middle of the day before the siesta [afternoon nap],” she said.

Readers may recognize a few recipes from Milgrom’s first cookbook, “Recipes Of My 15 Grandmothers.” However, the books are very different. The first, published in 2019, is based on a treasure trove of recipes from 15 generations of Milgrom’s crypto-Jewish grandmothers going back to the Inquisition that she found stashed away in her mother’s kitchen.

Those recipes reflect Milgrom’s ancestors’ journeys from Spain to the New World. Her mother’s side migrated from Spain to Portugal and then to Cuba. Milgrom’s father’s side moved from Spain to the Canary Islands to Colombia to Costa Rica, with only several family members eventually continuing to Cuba.

For the dishes for this new cookbook, Milgrom needed to look no further than the ones her grandparents and parents cooked for her in Havana and Miami. She was also inspired by a cookbook she said almost every Cuban who likes to cook — in Cuba or the Cuban diaspora — owned.

“The book is ‘Cocina Cubano’ [Typical Cuban Cooking] by Nitza Villapol. She had a daily television cooking show called ‘Cocina al Minuto’ (Cooking at the Minute). It was on every day for 45 years,” Milgrom said.

“Every woman among my Cuban friends received a copy of Villapol’s cookbook on her wedding day. I got a copy from my grandmother as a gift for my first marriage [to a non-Jewish man]. I learned by this book, this book taught me. Its pages are dog-eared and greasy. When I found that stash of recipes my mother had, I also found her copy of this cookbook. Hers was an earlier edition printed in Cuba, while mine was printed in the US,” she said.

According to Milgrom, there were several significant obstacles to making the recipes kosher.

“I was looking to cook these recipes, but it was impossible. Everything had ham. Everything had shellfish in it,” she said.

“More difficult than anything was the meat cuts. I used to buy my meat at the Cuban butcher down the street. Suddenly, I find myself standing before a kosher butcher, and I can only buy kosher cuts of meat. Kosher cuts are a lot tougher. For instance, I used to get a thin pepper steak at the Cuban butcher. I’d throw it in a frying pan, and it would cut like butter. With the kosher meat, I would throw what they called a ‘pepper steak’ onto the frying pan, and it was like shoe leather,” she noted.

Although Milgrom had been slowly perfecting her recipes, it wasn’t until the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-2021 and prolonged lockdowns that she had the time to write “Salsa!” While stuck at home, she asked friends and colleagues to test the recipes. She especially sought feedback from Cuban friends who were familiar with the original non-kosher versions. (Full disclosure: Milgrom asked this reporter to test her recipe for vegan frijoles negro [black beans]. They were delicious.)

Milgrom prefaces each recipe with a paragraph on the dish’s history, how or when it is eaten, or its role in her family’s history. The cookbook begins with a helpful section called “It’s All About the Ingredients.” Here, the reader will find important tips. Among them is an explanation for why most fish recipes call for snapper. This is because it is the most common fresh fish used in Cuban cooking (substitutes are permissible if they are not heavy-flesh fish such as tuna).

In this section, Milgrom explains how she made kosher substitutions. For instance, she used pre-packaged smoked turkey legs or thighs when recipes called for pork. Although the turkey had a similar consistency to ham, it was saltier, so she adjusted accordingly.

Another interesting note is that although it may seem counterintuitive to some palates, the book contains recipes that use raisins and green olives in the same dish, giving a sweet and salty flavor. Milgrom admits this combination may not be to everyone’s liking, yet encourages readers to try it.

Unfortunately, other combinations were not possible in a kosher cookbook. Milgrom provides a fish/pareve (neither dairy nor meat) recipe for paella. It has fish and imitation crab, shrimp, and scallops. This is a far cry from the original dish containing fish, a variety of shellfish, and non-kosher seafood, chicken, and pork.

“I was sad about not being able to adapt the recipe fully, but not only were there so many non-kosher ingredients, but the original dish also involves cooking and eating meat and fish together — something that Orthodox Jews do not do,” Milgrom said.

She assured readers that they can access ingredients for her recipes wherever they live.

“Many of these items are available in ethnic food shops or markets if you can’t find them at your regular grocery store. And you can get just about anything on Amazon,” she said.

For Milgrom, the publication of “Salsa!” is another step in her journey of integrating the life and family she was born into with her return and conversion to Judaism.

“I’ve always been looking for ways to blend my past with my present…I never thought that closing the door was a good idea. I think it alienates everything you are, the essence you grew up to be. There’s no reason why you cannot be a traditional Jewish person and embrace your [non-Jewish] past as well as you can,” Milgrom said.

“My having found a way to keep cooking Cuban food has brought me a kind of comfort and ongoing connection to my parents, who are now gone. I cook just about everything, but honestly, I can’t get into a piece of gefilte fish like I do a snapper,” she said.

Picadillo
2 pounds ground beef
2 tablespoons onion powder
2 teaspoons black pepper
1 tablespoon crushed garlic
½ cup cornflake or bread crumbs
1 egg
1 teaspoon hot sauce
6 large olives crushed and cut into quarters
4 tablespoons dark raisins
Fried potato cubes optional to mix into the picadillo when finished.
Sofrito mixture
½ cup diced onions
½ cup diced green peppers
¼ cup diced garlic
6 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

The sofrito mixture should be made first. Sauté the onions, green pepper and garlic until the onions are transparent. Set aside.

Mix all ingredients together by hand except the olives and the raisins. Put into the saucepan with the sofrito mixture and cook while stirring all the time to make sure there are no clumps in the meat. Add the olives and raisins and simmer for 20 minutes.

This can be eaten inside empanadas or over white rice with sweet plantains on the side. PJC