Every Sunday, Debbie Fund’s father took out a peculiar pan. It was divided in two and designed to be flipped, producing the kind of cheese omelet that arrived at the table perfectly formed. He made them for anyone in the family who wanted one. Decades later, Debbie does not begin by describing the pan or the technique. She begins with the taste.
“I promise you,” she says, “I can still remember the taste of his omelets.”
That is the first thing to understand about Debbie, the writer behind Kosher from Jerusalem: food is never confined to the food. A cheese omelet can be a Sunday morning with her father. A challah recipe can become a lesson shared with a grandchild. A weekly blog post can travel into a stranger’s kitchen just before Shabbat. Recipes are practical, but what they carry is not easily measured—voice, memory, welcome, affection.
Debbie calls food “a powerful connector.” Her life has given her reason to believe it.
She grew up in Forest Hills, Queens, in a family where curiosity had a place at the table. Her father was, in her words, “a true foodie before foodies existed.” At the supermarket, he would choose unfamiliar and exotic foods simply to see what they tasted like. Debbie was usually the only person in the family willing to join him.
Her grandmother offered a different education. She stood beside Debbie in the kitchen and showed her how certain family recipes were made. There was no ambiguity about what was happening: her grandmother understood cooking as a way of passing on tradition. Because she was deeply beloved, the recipes arrived already attached to a person. Learning them was an act of closeness.
The two influences—her father’s appetite for discovery and her grandmother’s devotion to continuity—still meet in Debbie’s cooking. One taught her to taste beyond the familiar. The other taught her that what comes from home deserves to be carried forward.
“Food is love, friendship and connection. It’s meant to be shared.”
Marriage made Debbie conscious of becoming a keeper. She could learn new recipes without abandoning the old ones. But aliyah enlarged the assignment. In Jerusalem, the Jewish table became a cornucopia: Moroccan, Syrian, Yemenite, Iraqi, Persian and Turkish traditions, among many others, each with its own flavors and histories.
Debbie asked people for recipes. Almost invariably, they were delighted to share. That response mattered. A recipe offered freely is more than a list of instructions; it is an opening. It says: this is how my family does it. This is what we eat when we gather. Here is a piece of our table—take it to yours. To share a recipe is to pass along something made with love—and to create a connection that may outlast the meal.
Some of those recipes now live on her blog, alongside the Ashkenazi dishes of her childhood and ideas gathered through travel. They do not sit there as museum pieces. Debbie is notorious, by her own account, for making small and large changes. She streamlines a method, simplifies a preparation, adjusts a recipe until it works in an ordinary kitchen and an ordinary week.
For her, evolution is not the enemy of tradition. It is evidence that a tradition is still being used.
Kosher from Jerusalem began because Debbie’s son Yehuda saw a form that suited her before she did. As she began stepping back from her professional career, he told her that a food blog was “tailor-made” for her.
He had grown up watching her experiment in the kitchen while the children contributed their opinions. He also knew that the recipes would come with Debbie’s “patter”—the running conversation, observations and humor that make instruction feel like company.
He was right. Over roughly six and a half years, the blog grew to more than 2,000 subscribers. Readers often tell Debbie that they can hear her voice when they read. She finds that almost more flattering than praise for the recipes, because the voice is not decorative. It is how she opens the kitchen door.
One reader told her, “I’m never going to make a single one of your recipes, but I love reading what you write.” Another—a fellow food enthusiast she did not even know was a subscriber—said he waits for her post each week so he will have something new to make for Shabbat.
These readers are looking for different things, yet both have accepted the same invitation. One comes for the pleasure of Debbie’s company; the other carries her recipe directly to the Shabbat table.
A recipe offered freely says: This is how my family does it. Here is a piece of our table—take it to yours.
Debbie’s generosity is especially clear when something goes wrong. A reader writes in a panic before Shabbat: the cake did not rise, the dough looks strange, the recipe appears to be heading toward disaster. Debbie answers. She includes photographs of imperfect stages that polished food media often removes. She wants the person cooking to recognize the process, not feel judged by the finished picture.
There is an ethic in that choice. Expertise can create distance, or it can reduce it. Debbie uses what she knows to make the kitchen less intimidating. Her blog is not a showroom. It is a working kitchen where questions are welcome and mistakes remain visible long enough to teach someone something. Her philosophy is simple: mistakes belong to the process. Cooking is meant to be enjoyed, not merely endured on the way to a perfect result.
That same ease follows her beyond the blog. In Tbilisi, a taxi ride turned into a conversation about recipes. Messages arrive from readers in places as different as Arkansas and Singapore. Geography changes; the opening remains familiar. Ask what someone cooks, and soon you are hearing where they came from, whom they miss, what their mother made, what appears on their table when the family gathers.
Food does not erase difference, but it gives difference somewhere hospitable to sit. It is a shared language—one that can begin a human connection before two people know much else about each other.
The most revealing word in Debbie’s description of her legacy may be “hearing.” Her children all make her challah recipe. Some of her grandchildren already visit the blog, prepare her food and join her in the kitchen to learn challah while they are young. She is pleased that the practices themselves are moving forward.
But when she imagines those grandchildren returning to the blog many years from now, she hopes they will read her notes and enjoy “hearing” her.
Her grandmother passed on tradition by standing next to her. Her father survives in the remembered taste of an omelet. Debbie’s grandchildren may inherit both the recipe and the commentary surrounding it—the cadence of her thinking, the aside she could not resist, the reassurance that a dough is supposed to look that way. The blog allows presence to travel farther than a kitchen lesson could.
This is what makes Debbie Fund a keeper for the present moment. She does not confuse keeping with guarding. She keeps by circulating: an old recipe through a new hand, one Jewish food tradition into the home of another, a reader’s question back into confidence, a family voice into the future.
The dishes will change. Debbie expects them to. Someone will simplify a step, substitute an ingredient or carry a flavor to a place it has not been before. But if the recipe still brings one person toward another—if it prompts a story, steadies a nervous cook, or places something new on a Shabbat table—then it has kept what matters.
