Originally published in the Detroit Jewish News, August 8, 2008.

Cooking Course

A pair of brothers team up to teach college students the art of a good meal

Written by Keri Guten Cohen
Photographs by Steve Klein and Kate McCabe

Chefs Max and Eli Sussman are products of their environment - a home in Huntington Woods with no junk food, no bottled salad dressing and a mother who cooked inventive meals from scratch nearly every night. The brothers went from sous chefs in their mom’s kitchen to revolutionizing the “cuisine” at their childhood camp to professional cooks to published cookbook authors.

Eli (left) and Max Sussman check out the produce.

Freshman in the Kitchen: From Clueless Cook to Creative Chef (Huron River Press; $17.95), which hits bookstores this month, is a hip, thoughtful, good-humored primer for novice cooks - an idea that developed from Eli’s experience living at Michigan State University with roommates who had little clue how to cook while he whipped up accomplished meals with ease.

Offering recipes ranging from BBQ chicken and Ultimate Chocolate Fudge Cake to sushi and tzatziki in a manner that takes the mystery out of home cooking, Max, 25, and Eli, 23, provide clear step-by-step instructions (boiling pasta), explanations about cooking tools (choosing the right knife) and techniques (how to clean leeks), time requirements, tips for buying locally produced food - and savvy, humorous, personable commentary.

While writing the book, the brothers - who shopped their concept to only two publishers before landing a deal just a year ago - bounced e-mails and phone calls between Eli in Los Angeles, where he is a part-time chef for catering companies and a full-time assistant media buyer at advertising agency the Gary Group, and Max, a cook at Zingerman’s Delicatessen in Ann Arbor who spent five months of the year as a sous chef at a fly-fishing resort in Patagonia in southern Chile. Before that, he honed his skills at eve - the restaurant, also in Ann Arbor.

“We both bring unique abilities to the table,” says Eli. “Max has a more high-end culinary background, where I have experience working in fast breakfast and lunch joints where speed is a necessity, but the quality is still high.”

Working summers in the kitchen at > >Habonim Dror’s Camp Tavor in Three Rivers, Mich., was the beginning of the culinary teamwork. “I started to truly become passionate about cooking when we worked together at camp,” says Eli. “We would go through our meats and produce and then stand in the kitchen and brainstorm, bouncing ideas off each other and the rest of the staff.

“Max was the brains behind the operation, and I was his sounding board. I would tell him what I thought we could accomplish in the time frame we had because Max always wanted to do something crazy like make a three-course Indian meal with only a few hours to spare before dinner.”

With that same give-and-take relationship, the brothers targeted Freshman in the Kitchen to their contemporaries. “Most kids entering college are coming straight from living with their parents,” explains Eli. “If kids realized they could cook delicious food for themselves and not spend all their money eating in average restaurants, they’d probably start cooking more.”

Adds Max, “I think people are becoming interested in knowing where their food comes from, who makes it and how to prepare it. The Postville incident [the Iowa kosher meatÐsupplier scandal] is a good example of this,” he says. “If we knew half the things that go on in large food processors like that, we’d want to meet the people who grow our food and buy directly from them at farmers’ markets as much as we could.”Ê

The brothers are the sons of Lynne Avadenka, a book artist (who tested recipes for the book), and attorney Marc Sussman, well known in certain circles for his homemade challah and Passover lamb stew. The pair, who still live in Huntington Woods and are members of West Bloomfield’s Congregation B’nai Moshe, outlawed junk food at home while the boys were growing up - a serendipitous decision. “They were always adventurous eaters, willing to try what was put in front of them. That made it more fun for me,” says Avadenka. Adds Marc Sussman, “They wanted the book to look good and be functional; they thought about all that.”

The best part? “We thought it was great they did this together, especially since Eli moved to L.A.,” says Avadenka. “It’s a way for them to stay close, and we’re happy to see it.”