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.

“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........

© The Times of Israel