From the kitchen with joy, Israel 1982, Museum collection
Must Know
Ruth Sirkis is one of the most influential people in cooking in Israel. She has written about 20 cookbooks, some of them has been translated into many languages. She has also participated in radio programs, has written many newspaper articles and columns, and has received Lifetime Achievement Award at the Food Awards Ceremony in Israel. She began her culinary career by writing a column about her culinary experiences in Israel and in the US in the Israeli magazine “At”. In 1975, she published her first book “Mehamitbach Beahava” (in english “From the Kitchen with Love”) in hebrew which had become a bestseller over the years. The book was written after the Yom Kippur War, during a period when Israel sought to leave behind the culture of austerity and opened for new places. Sirkis collected various recipes and adapted them to the kashrut and to the supplies available in shops at that time. Sirkis introduced an innovative, diverse, and global culinary kitchen to the Israeli public in clear and understandable standard hebrew.
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In 1962, she travelled to the US because of her husband’s work and got acquainted with the television cooking shows of Julia Child, one of the most influential women in American food culture at that time. Child introduced new forms of cooking and baking and new types of ingredients and even published a belly fat diet cookbook without pictures. Sirkis prepared the recipes, authorized them as kosher, translated them, and took picture of the result. In Israel, she had difficulty publishing her cookbook due to the recession, because people did not have money and many products were not available in the grocery stores in the country. In 1967, she started to write regular columns on food-related issues in the Israeli “At” magazine. The editor of the magazine was Tommy Lapid who later worked together with Sirkis on a cookbook. She continued to write the column even when she returned to the US for the second time. During this second stay in the US, she wrote a weekly column in english for a Jewish newspaper and published two cookbooks in english, “Popular Food from Israel” and “A Taste of Tradition”, which were translated into many other languages and were marketed as souvenir books for tourists. In 1975, she published the book “Cooking for Children” that introduced a revolutionary idea at that time: children cooking in the kitchen. Sirkis created recipes with simple and clear explanations and illustrations that also children can prepare on their own. The book became a bestseller. Today she is releasing another children’s book which is distributed as a part of the program Sifriyat Pijama. In 1983, she and her husband started a publishing house and published many books in the fields of lifestyle, food, and hospitality. She is still active and publishes cookbooks today.
