On being a badass and a balaboosta at the same time
By Jodi Rudoren September 15, 2023
When I left The New York Times four years ago, my staff gave me two treasured gifts: A big coffee mug emblazoned with the Yiddish word “Balaboosta” and a hot pink apron that says, “Badass boss lady.”
I thought the pair aptly and hilariously represented two distinct parts of my personality. Until this week, when the Israeli chef Einat Admony — whose Manhattan restaurant and first cookbook are called “Balaboosta” — showed me they’re actually synonyms.
I’d asked Admony, whose parents are from Iran and Yemen, why she picked an Ashkenazi term with the old-fashioned and unsexy definition “perfect homemaker.” Turns out it grew out of a conversation with a non-Jewish chef as they were preparing a pop-up before the restaurant opened in 2010.
“She said, ‘What is a badass woman?’ I’m like: ‘Balaboosta.’ All the kitchen was, ‘Yay!’ Everybody loved that name,” Admony recalled. While an older generation might think of “Balaboosta” as “a little bit oppressive, woman in the kitchen,” she added, as a mother of two teenagers who has run multiple restaurants, “for me, it’s a very different thing.”
“There is something very strong and even spiritual about the Balaboosta in my head,” Admony explained. “It’s not just about, ‘Oh, this woman can cook and clean so well she’s a balaboosta. A lot of times, it’s the woman that brings the family together, she makes peace. It’s that woman that people can trust.”
I met Admony, who is 52, over Labor Day weekend, when I splurged to take my teenage foodie to a fundraiser for the James Beard Foundation that the chef hosted at her country home in Kerhonskon, New York.
Called “Nine Chefs, One Table,” it was an indulgent 13-course tasting menu served to perhaps 100 guests at, yes, one long table under a tent in a large field by Admony’s new pool. Many of the ingredients and the flowers adorning the table were plucked from Admony’s ample garden on the property. Her chickens and ducks strolled the grounds.
It was an impressive professional operation, duly documented by Instagram influencers. But what I really wanted to know was what goes on in the kitchen when no one is watching. Specifically, what would Admony — creator of the Taim falafel chain, James Beard finalist and two-time winner of the Food Network’s Chopped — be cooking for Rosh Hashanah?
When we spoke via Zoom on Monday, she had just gotten chicken from a farm in the Catskills that she planned to roast stuffed with pomegranate and rice. There would also be goat shoulder braised in her Middle Eastern spin on manchamanteles mole (hint: add harissa). The chicken is something her mom used to make; the goat is rooted in a food memory about lamb.
“My dad, right before Rosh Hashanah, used to go and slaughter a lamb,” Admony explained. “And he took me when I was 5 or 6 years old to the farm to choose, and I thought it was the most repulsive thing. I don’t know how I did not become vegan right there at that moment.
“Then the family used to fight over the best part — the brain, the spine, the head, all the stuff Americans hate,” she added. “And especially the head, because on Rosh Hashanah, you want the head on the table for the blessing.”
Admony was referring to the Sephardic custom (which many of us Ashkenazi Jews have also adopted!) of a Rosh Hashanah “Seder” in which distinct blessings are recited over eight symbolic foods — apples and honey, dates, leeks, beets, beans, gourds, pomegranates and the head of the a ram (or fish). The head is always the hardest part, especially for vegetarians. I once attended a Rosh Hashanah dinner where the head was represented by fish-shaped ice cubes made of pomegranate juice as part of a signature cocktail — Yum! But I digress.
Admony was also planning a vegan tanzia, a Moroccan dish of her famous couscous with a lot of caramelized onion, roasted butternut squash, parsnip, celeriac; dried fruit including apricots, raisins and prunes; almonds and cashews. And, of course, homemade challah — and not just round for the holiday, but braided and then baked around a little ceramic dish, so there’s a hole in the middle, where she would put a dish of honey for dipping at the table.
She was expecting 20, or perhaps 22 — her brother, a cousin from Costa Rica, some Colombian Jewish friends. “I think it’s not going to be too many,” she said.
Admony, whose kids are now 14 and 17, splits her time between Brooklyn and Kerhonkson, which is about 100 miles north. She grew up secular in Bnei Brak, a now-Haredi town near Tel Aviv, was a cook and a driver in the Israeli army, and spent a few years wandering around Germany before coming to the U.S. in 1999.
She said she originally wanted to be a dancer, but realized at some point that cooking “is the one thing I can do forever — I never get tired of it.”
Her mother, who made aliyah as a child of 10, was a big food influence, as well as a Moroccan lady who lived across the hall in their apartment building and was like “a second mom,” Admony said. Also, “Doda Chana” — her mother’s sister, who also lived in Bnei Brak, in a ground-floor apartment that was as busy as a train station.
“My aunt was the one that did not just cook, she really enjoys cooking,” Admony explained. “Like, that was the essence of life: cooking. And she is very poor, with five kids, got divorced very fast, now I think she has, like, 30 grandkids. And Chana always has pots on the stove.
“So, always when I used to come visit her, there is always people in and out,” she continued. “She always feeds people. I think that’s the one person I always was so related to, because I always want to feed people.”
“Then the family used to fight over the best part — the brain, the spine, the head, all the stuff Americans hate. And especially the head, because on Rosh Hashanah, you want the head on the table for the blessing.”
– Chef Einat Admony
Me, too. I’ve got 16 people for lunch tomorrow. Brisket, salmon, squash soup, massaged-kale salad with grilled peaches, avocado and pickled onion; a grain salad with dates, pomegranate seeds, roasted beets and frizzled leeks; homemade challah served with applesauce and peach chutney made from the fruit we picked while upstate for the Admony fundraiser. Multicolor carrots roasted with hot honey, green beans to fill out the Rosh Hashanah Seder symbols.
I asked Chef Einat, who grew up secular and remains so, why it’s so important to her — to us — to cook for the holidays.
“This is something that always keeps us together,” she said. “I don’t want to follow rules because most of these rules are not applied to me, I am not relating to them and they make no sense whatsoever. But Friday night was always, like, sacred for me. It’s the one day a week that nobody does anything but sit together and have a real dinner.”
I also asked what 5784 has in store for her. She said she is working with her brother-in-law to write a 17,000-word “love story” for the digital publisher Scribd, based on how she met her French husband, Stefan Nafziger, who is also her business partner.
“It’s a very good story, a great story, we make it funny and crazy,” Admony said. “And it’s also going to be through the lenses of cooking and the industry at this time. Yeah, a little bit about my upbringing and a little bit about now.”
She also recently went to Albania with a film crew, as part of a TV series she is developing in which she would travel around the world and cook with people using local ingredients and traditions, focusing on sustainability and the role of women.
“A little bit like Anthony Bourdain, although character-wise it’s day and night, I’m very warm with people,” Admony said. “It’s a lot about how to see women that are very, very strong in their own communities”
The working title is Finding Balaboosta.
Thanks to Odeya Rosenband and Angelie Zaslavsky for contributing to this newsletter, and Adam Langer for editing it.
Shana Tova and Shabbat Shalom!
Questions/feedback: rudoren@forward.com
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