Steven Morris has always cooked. Rick Morris Pushinsky has always eaten. On 16 October, their distinctive skills combine in the publication of Just Not Kosher – a collection of recipe cards featuring 21 dishes lovingly created by Steven and playfully photographed by Rick.
Steven and Rick are father and son. For each of them, food means more than just a meal; it’s the glue that bonds families together, a maker of memories, and a statement of both cultural and personal identity. Steven is neither a professional chef nor a nutritionist with a diet plan to peddle; he’s a Jewish dad with a talent for crafting timeless dishes that people remember and talk about long after the plates have been cleared; a storyteller with a spatula. In a world dominated by celebrity chefs and flash-in-the-pan food fads, Steven Morris’s recipes represent a return to home cooking and eating as real people enjoy them; the cornerstones of family life.
Just Not Kosher began as a family recipe archive – a written record of Steven’s 60 years of ‘making a mess in the kitchen’. For Rick, however, this repository was not just a set of instructions for his father’s favourite dishes; it represented the entire story of his family, told one tablespoon at a time. These were recipes that harked back to their Ashkenazi heritage; adapted hand-me-downs from long-gone relatives; home re-creations of dishes from restaurants he visited as a child and countries they explored on family holidays. Rick wanted to turn this archive into something lasting, pay tribute to his father and share these winning recipes with the wider world.