In a cherished tribute to her mum Kitty’s cooking, Sydney-based writer Dinah Samuels has produced a cookbook of treasured family recipes. Titled Made With Love From Kitty’s Kitchen, the book contains 92 recipes that Kitty made her own, following her travels in Burma, India and Australia, as well as traditional Jewish favourites.
Dinah, 68, recalls how she helped stir the pot and chop veggies like a little ninja for her mum.
“Our home in Bondi was always open to all our family, mum and dad’s friends as well as my brother and my own friends,” Dinah remembers. “Every Sunday, we’d have people coming over and my mum would make delicious foods for them. I was by her side in our extremely small kitchen doing all the menial jobs – peeling potatoes, cutting onions and watching her create fabulous dishes.”
Lucky for her, being part of a Jewish kitchen meant her mum was precise with what she created. “Whatever dish she made was fantastic, as she simplified many recipes,” Dinah Samuels tells Indian Link. “I always wanted to try and recreate them.”
Through the cookbook, Dinah has followed her mum’s wish to keep up her family’s heritage and traditions, passing on the Jewish food culture to future generations, as well as the flavours she so loved in her formative years.
The story of Kitty’s life is worth telling.
She was born in Rangoon, Burma.
Dinah shares, “At 13, mum left Rangoon with her mother and four brothers. She completed her Senior Cambridge (General Certificate of Education examinations held in India during the British regime) and went on to be a secretarial assistant for the manager of British manufacturing company Lever Brothers. In Mumbai she met my dad Jack, who was in the British Army. They wed at Byculla’s Magen David Synagogue.”
Kitty and Jack left Mumbai for Sydney in 1948. Dinah was born in Bondi.
She worked in the travel industry for 35 years, visiting Mumbai and all the places her parents loved – Colaba Causeway, Regal Cinemas, and so on.
Retiring at 60, Dinah Samuels began the job she had promised her mum when she herself had turned 60 – recording the recipes that had made memorable family meals through the years.
“This was fun, as everything (ingredients) was ‘a pinch of this’, ‘a handful of that’,” Dinah laughs. “I had to convert this into imperial as well as metric measurements!”
When Kitty turned 87, she made Dinah promise her that she would convert this collection into a cookbook. “This was very important for me,” an emotional Dinah says.
She’s kept the promise faithfully, but sadly her mum didn’t live long enough to see the published version. Kitty passed away at 91.
So what is her mum’s dish that Dinah remembers even today, we ask.
“She made the best Ohn No Khao Swe (Burmese chicken and noodles) and Mohinga (fish soup from Myanmar).”
While she was alive, aloo bonda (potato snack), pholouries (fried dough ball) and vegetable samosas were common on Sundays. “Her dinners were fabulous – mahashas (stuffed vegetables with mince), alu chops (potato and mince cutlets), chicken curry, and we loved khichdi with alu bartha and fish fry. As we had a mango tree in our back garden, mum would make aamchur pickle too.”
Dinah started collating the recipes in 2020 during the Covid-19 lockdown. It took nine months for the book to be proofread, edited and designed.
“So far, I have sold 280 copies – some at London and Los Angeles.”
The proceeds are donated to the Sephardi Synagogue in Sydney in memory of her parents.
Priced at $30, the only way to order a copy is through Dinah Samuels directly. Write to her dinahs@bigpond.net.au
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