Jodi Luber’s Jewish Kitchen | Building a recipe community

By Patrick Chatelain

Jodi Luber, a professor at Boston University’s College of Communication, teaches courses for the Media Ventures program within the Film and Television department. She has an extensive background in the television industry as both a writer and producer. Besides teaching, she continues on a separate venture: The Jewish Kitchen, a website she created to amass a collection of Jewish cooking recipes.

“It starts, like a lot of things for me, in Brooklyn,” Luber said. Luber’s father owned Brooklyn’s first certified Kosher bakery. As a young girl, Luber spent a lot of time with him as he sat on a bench, making bagels by hand. This is a rare practice in today’s world. 

Whenever Luber asked her friends and family how to prepare certain dishes, she only received vague answers, so she decided to start a website for recipes. One day in 1987, Luber called her grandmother to ask how much onion to add when cooking sweet and sour meatballs. Her grandmother told her, “Chop up an onion, don’t be shy.” - Luber responded, “‘Don’t be shy’ is not a measurement, how much water do I add?” Her grandmother didn’t know the exact measurement, but that she always used the red glass at the side of her stove. Luber then called her aunt to drive to her grandmother’s apartment and measure the water in the cup. They all laughed over the phone at how they had no idea what exactly went into the dish.

Realizing that everybody only knew recipes by memory and feel instead of exact measurements, Luber sought to put their feelings into writing with numerical portions of each ingredient.

“Recipes turned into stories and the recipes had backstories,” Luber said. The Jewish Kitchen was created not only to record her Jewish family’s recipes, but also to help mourn the loss of her father. As she started collecting recipes, she learned that each one had its own personal story. Whether it was family, friends, friends of friends, or even complete strangers, no recipe was without a tale to tell.

She described the experience, “I couldn’t even get the recipe out of anybody because they all had 10 other things to tell me”. Within only a couple of years, she gathered thousands of recipes and posted them to her website, each with their own unique story.

In addition to recipes personally collected from others and submitted voluntarily by people, Luber also adds her own original creations. She considers this as her favorite part of her culinary ventures as she enjoys feeding people. “It’s not work, but just pure joy,” Luber said.

Because of the huge gathering of recipes, her collection is a diverse portfolio beyond Kosher dishes, including non-Kosher, Italian, and Chinese meals. She claimed most other Jewish cooking websites strictly post Kosher recipes and her diversity differentiates her website from the rest.

As the website becomes more popular, Luber has called on the help of her students (some COM alumni) on several occasions. For example, Priscilla Peralta is responsible for much of the website’s photography while John Kinde, Jessica Hogan, Kerri Rubino, and Julie Gould have all helped create recipe videos. Similar to Luber’s recipes, The Jewish Kitchen website is a product of many people’s efforts coming together.

With such endeavor, both the recipe collection and the website are in prosperity. Luber currently has a stack of recipes sitting on her desk that she has yet to add to her website. Among them is a recently discovered bagel recipe in her father’s writing, detailing how to make thousands of bagels.

Visit The Jewish Kitchen website here: https://thejewishkitchen.com/