‘The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook’ Was Ahead of Its Time

Until the 1960s, every generation had to discover vegetarianism and non-procreative sex on its own. Logically, you might assume that when our ancestors encountered either another naked human body or a meal of nothing but vegetables and legumes, they didn’t always close their eyes and think of England and then swallow quickly. They might have, like us, enjoyed the experience.

But deep down most of us don’t really believe this. Why else would we get so excited when we find evidence that people in the olden days had sex and avoided meat because both of those things made them happy?

So here’s a fun fact: Vegetarianism not only existed in 1930s Lithuania, it was celebrated, especially in Vilnius, where one of the hippest restaurants in town was Dieto-Jarska Jadłodajnia, loosely translated as the Vegetarian Bistro.

Some of this devotion to vegetables came from necessity. Vilnius was roughly one-third Jewish from the late 1800s until the outbreak of World War II. Many of those Jews kept kosher, which required a strict separation of dairy and meat and, by necessity, some meatless meals. But the Great Depression had also hit Vilnius hard. People were starving. Beggars stationed themselves on the doorsteps of restaurants and cafes. The American historian Lucy Dawidowicz, who studied Yiddish there in the late 1930s, wrote in her memoir that she basically lived on root vegetables and legumes; green vegetables were scarce and kosher meat was even more so, especially after authorities shut down the kosher slaughterhouses in 1935. Even beverages were terrible; coffee was made from chicory, and the milk was unpasteurized and needed to be boiled.

But Fania Lewando, the chef at Dieto-Jarska Jadłodajnia, wasn’t a vegetarian because she couldn’t get ahold of meat or didn’t feel like maintaining two separate kitchens in order to accommodate kosher laws. Lewando was a true believer in vegetarianism, and she was determined to show everybody in Vilnius that vegetables weren’t just a placeholder for meat. They were a healthier choice, and a more moral one: They didn’t require killing. Most importantly, vegetables were delicious — festive, even.

Lewando used every opportunity to demonstrate the power of vegetables: in her restaurant, in the cooking classes she taught, on the luxury cruise across the Atlantic where she prepared all the meals, in the recipes she attempted to sell to the H.J. Heinz company in England, and especially in the cookbook she wrote. She was a force. Visitors from as far away as Los Angeles and Buenos Aires ate at Dieto-Jarska Jadłodajnia. The restaurant, which was owned by Lewando’s husband, Lazar, was a favorite of local artists, writers, and intellectuals who wrote about it and quoted one another about how good it was. I imagine it as sort of like Dimes, though based on the limited photographic evidence, the customers were less good-looking. But hey, it had Nobel Prize winners and Marc Chagall, and they all signed the guestbook! (Do not look for depictions of Lewando or her kitchen in any of Chagall’s work. The painter apparently only visited once and wrote this in the guestbook: “They say the food here is delicious, but unfortunately I came with a delicate stomach and was only able to taste a tiny bit, and it was delicious nonetheless.”)

The guestbook and a blurry photograph, unfortunately, are about the sum of what we know about Dieto-Jarska Jadłodajnia. We know slightly more about Lewando. She was short and stout, and had a kind face and an air of authority. She was born in Poland around 1889 and stayed behind when her family immigrated to England in 1901. She and her husband settled in Vilnius around 1920 and opened their restaurant. Despite several attempts to get visas to the U.S. or England, including the business with Heinz, they were trapped in Vilnius after the start of World War II, when Lithuania was annexed by the USSR. The Nazis invaded in June 1941 and, that September, ordered all the Jews to move into a ghetto. Lewando and her husband tried to escape and were captured by the Soviets. No one in Vilnius ever saw them again.

Lewando published her one and only cookbook in 1938. She called it Vegetarish-Dietisher Kokhbukh: 400 Shpeizen Germakht Oysshlishlekh fun Grisn (Vegetarian-Dietetic Cookbook: 400 Recipes Made Exclusively From Vegetables), and claimed that it was the first vegetarian cookbook ever published in Yiddish. This was not true. That honor goes to Vos zol men esn?: Vegetarishes kokhbukh (What Should One Eat?: A Vegetarian Cookbook), a 30-page pamphlet published in 1907 by N.J. Kvitner. But Lewando’s book was more substantial and attractive: It was illustrated by brightly colored portraits of vegetables from old seed packets. Also Kvitner was prone to dubious pronouncements such as “the more scrofular and tubercular the meat, the tastier and juicier it is,” so maybe Lewando was trying to make a point.

Even at the time of its original publication, Vegetarish-Dietisher Kokhbukh was a rare item due to its limited print run. It became even rarer after the war virtually exterminated Lithuania’s Jewish population and culture. But somehow a single copy found its way to an antiquarian bookstore in England, where it was discovered in 1995 by a married couple who bought and donated it to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York (which, incidentally, had existed in Vilnius at the same time as Lewando and her restaurant but had migrated in 1940). There it remained for nearly 20 years, until Barbara Mazur and Wendy Waxman, two members of a YIVO book group, came across it during a visit to the rare book room.

Mazur and Waxman were struck both by Lewando’s story and the book’s glorious illustrations, and they arranged to have it translated into English by Eve Jochnowitz, a Yiddish scholar and culinary ethnographer. Once they could actually read it, they were further impressed by the modernity of the recipes. It was more than a relic: It was a book that a person in the 21st century could actually cook from. There were the expected kugels and cholents and stewed cabbage, yes, but there were also fresh salads, frittatas, and pre-Vitamix-era juices. The world needed to see it.

After a little research, Mazur and Waxman discovered that Joan Nathan, the queen of Jewish cookbooks in America, would be giving a lecture near them in Westchester County, and they chased her down in the parking lot so they could literally put the manuscript in her hands. Nathan was also impressed by Lewando’s book and used her connections to bring it to the attention of Schocken Books.

The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook (re)appeared in 2015 with a new introduction by Nathan, a biographical essay by Lewando’s great-nephew who happened to be a literature professor in Israel, and a few choice excerpts from the Dieto-Jarska Jadłodajnia guest book (“It did not destroy my dear little liver”). Schocken recreated the restaurant for the publication party, complete with a klezmer band, and the menu featured cold blueberry soup, eggs stuffed with marinated mushrooms, and rye honey cake with candied orange peel, which seemed to prove everyone’s point about how the 80-year-old book could still speak to contemporary tastes.

“With words that still ring true today,” Nathan wrote in her introduction, “Lewando created a Jewish culinary palette that celebrated nature’s bounty. In meatless meals, long viewed as indicators of hardship and sorrow, Lewando found bright flavor and the key to health and well-being.”

The original Yiddish text was much less self-congratulatory. Lewando’s introduction, addressed “to the housewife,” lays out her basic argument that vegetarianism is a more healthful and moral way to eat and includes a few simple ground rules: “The produce must be of the best quality,” “Throw nothing out; everything can be made into food,” and, finally, “Prepare everything precisely as instructed in the recipes, and do not rely on others.” This is followed by an article by a Dr. B. Dembski, reprinted from a Yiddish magazine, called “Why Are Fruits and Vegetables So Important for the Organism?” and a brief essay called “Vegetarianism as a Jewish Movement” written by two Dieto-Jarska Jadłodajnia regulars who include themselves in a list of prominent vegetarians. (It reads like the work of high school students who cribbed heavily from Wikipedia.)

And, finally, the recipes! The translator Jochnowitz acknowledges in her own introduction that this is not a book for people who don’t already know how to cook, at least a little. The recipes are all brief, and Lewando didn’t bother to include little things like oven temperatures — Jochnowitz advises readers to assume 350 degrees unless told otherwise — or prep instructions, like how small to chop an onion or how to roast beets for borscht or how to cook crepes and fold them into blintzes; obviously, her readers would already know. Every recipe in the frittata chapter ends, somewhat endearingly, “cook like a frittata.” Because how else would you cook it?

I like to think that this cookbook was actually Lewando’s own personal recipe file, mostly because it resembles my own. It begins, in the salads and soups chapters, with an earnest attempt to provide a complete and organized list of recipes, but it quickly devolves into haphazard groupings: blintzes, stuffed foods (is a blintz not a stuffed food?), puddings, substantial puddings. The longest chapter by far, aside from soup, is miscellaneous dishes, which ranges wildly from rice with strawberries to beefsteak, from fresh mushrooms to raspberry mousse, as though Lewando couldn’t think of anyplace else for these recipes to go. And, in what seems like a grudging concession, there are just eight recipes for Passover. One of those recipes is a torte, because some things are eternal. (There is also wine soup, in case you happen to have an extra bottle of Manischewitz.)

The thing that really makes me think that this book started life as a recipe file, though, is how repetitive it is. This must have been by necessity in a time when most produce was seasonal and everyone relied on things that could be stored for long periods, like potatoes, cabbage, and dried mushrooms. Lewando had a seemingly infinite number of ways to combine them with eggs, milk, and flour and turn them into blintzes or dumplings or noodles or soups, sort of like the way Taco Bell has created an enormous menu from various combinations of beans, cheese, ground beef, and tortillas. What a lifesaver for a frustrated balabusta with nothing in the pantry besides a bushel of aging potatoes!

Still, most of the dishes I made from The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook depressed me. None of them could be described as “bright.” They all had a bland sameness, something I blame entirely on the lack of seasoning. If only Lewando had access to chile peppers! Salsa would have done wonders for some of those egg dishes. And imagine a little grated lemon peel mixed with the farmers cheese in the blintzes (and forgive me, Fania, I disobeyed you and consulted the internet to learn how to make a crepe). Even a smidge of garlic, please? Also, the only leavener that Lewando apparently had access to was yeast; if you use this book, be prepared to whip a lot of egg whites, even if you’re making blintzes or an omelet.

My favorite part of The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook was reading about things I know I will never, ever make, like the special bread for a stomachache. I know I will never make it because the recipe calls for 55 cups of whole-wheat flour and I don’t own a vessel large enough to mix that much dough, let alone to give it enough room to rise. (Jochnowitz didn’t test it, either, but in an editor’s note, she invited readers to share their findings.) But I like the idea of it. A mini loaf of fresh baked bread sounds so much nicer than a saltine.

Even more impressive are the recipes for pickles and preserves, all of which begin with the instruction to drag a barrel to the cellar and fill it with whitewash (a paint made from slaked lime, or calcium hydroxide, that has mild antibacterial properties; Lewando probably didn’t have sterilization equipment or refrigeration). How much cabbage would you need to fill the sauerkraut barrel? How many eggs would get your family through the winter? Maybe this is, in itself, simultaneously a practical argument against meat — life is hard enough without it — and a celebration of the women of valor who filled those barrels year after year. It also provides all the satisfaction of the homemaking scenes in the Little House books: You can enjoy a sense of accomplishment without doing any actual work yourself.

Which makes you think: Maybe the most impressive thing is not that vegetarianism existed in 1930s Vilnius but that one woman still had the energy to promote and write a cookbook about it.

Aimee Levitt is a freelance writer in Chicago. Read more of her work at aimeelevitt.com.