It looks like a cookbook. It calls itself a cookbook. But don’t be fooled: “Russ & Daughters: 100 Years of Appetizing,” is so much more than a collection of recipes.
Written by smoked fish royalty Niki Russ Federman and Josh Russ Tupper — cousins and the fourth-generation owners of Russ & Daughters, the Lower East Side’s iconic appetizing institution — together with journalist Joshua David Stein, the book, out Tuesday, is a treasure trove of food history and Jewish storytelling inspired by one of the city’s oldest businesses.
“This is our heartfelt attempt to try to capture [the first] 111 years of this tradition and this legacy,” Federman, 47, said.
The salmon-colored book — get it? — has more than 100 beautifully photographed and crafted recipes of the kind of food you will find at Russ & Daughters, like their chopped liver sweetened with a touch of sugar or their hot borscht brightened with sauerkraut.
There are also archival images from the business’s earlier days, back when it was a single shop on the Lower East Side. (Today, there are additional Russ & Daughters locations at Hudson Yards and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, as well as a sit-down restaurant on Orchard Street.) In addition, the book serves as a reference guide to the preserved fish that Russ & Daughters sells: 10 kinds of smoked and cured salmon, six varieties of herring and eight types of caviar and roe.
Finally, it is the story of the Russ family, tracing their roots from the shtetl of Strzyov, Poland to the opening of the store in New York in 1914, all the way to the present, with an inside look into the challenges of keeping a multi-generational family business going.
“In the U.S., less than 1% of family businesses make it to a fourth generation, so we are in a small club,” Federman said. (Most sources say 3%, but that’s still pretty low.)
The seeds for “Russ & Daughters: 100 Years of Appetizing” were planted in 2020, during the dark months of the COVID-19 lockdown.Their mail-order business thrived during the pandemic, and remains a significant source of revenue today.
“The pandemic heightened our awareness that Russ & Daughters exists way beyond its footprint or our physical spaces,” Federman said. “People want to connect to Russ & Daughters even if they are at home in Oregon. How do we do that? Bagels are perishable but a book isn’t. The book is a way to allow people to connect and extend that experience in their homes.”
Russ & Daughters traces its roots to 1907 — 118 years ago — when Federman and Tupper’s immigrant great-grandfather, Joel Russ, began peddling schmaltz herring from a barrel on the Lower East Side before upgrading to a pushcart.
In 1914, Russ opened Russ’s Cut Rate Appetizing — originally J. Russ National Appetizing — at 187 Orchard St., a small slip of a shop from which he sold pickled herring, dried Polish mushrooms called borowik and smoked whitefish. A few years later, the intensely salty belly lox — salmon that was caught on the West Coast, filleted, packed in salt to preserve it and shipped East — joined the roster.
The cover of the new Russ & Daughters book, and a historic photo of the appetizing shop, which opened in 1914 moved to 179 East Houston St. in 1920, where it remains in business today. (Courtesy Flatiron Books; courtesy Russ & Daughters; design by Jackie Hajdenberg)
“The classic appetizing trio of bagel, cream cheese and lox came about because the original lox was so salty that you needed the dairy of the cream cheese and the bread of the bagel to mellow it out,” Federman said. “Bagel and lox is a purely American and New York invention that has come to symbolize New York and become so common. It speaks to the Jewish American experience of being in a new place and trying to have a connection to the tastes and flavors of home but also having to work with the ingredients and the new culture.”
By 1920, Russ moved to 179 East Houston Street, where the business remains today. He changed the name a few years later, fto Russ & Daughters, iconoclastic for a time when “daughters” was never included in a business name.
“It might have been Russ & Son, but the first child, Morris, died of typhoid shy of his second birthday,” Federman said. Later, Russ had three daughters — Hattie, Ida, and Anne — who all worked at the shop and eventually became full partners.
Over the decades, Russ & Daughters expanded their product line to include tinned fish, sweets, halvah, breads, soups and a variety of preserved fish and fish roe. But through it all, as Tupper writes in the cookbook, “We’ve tried to keep all innovation unobtrusive.”
As Tupper, 50, explains, the store’s innovations have been subtle, honoring the food traditions of Ashkenazi Jews while also evolving to satisfy modern tastes. Take Russ & Daughters’ Gaspé Nova, which the cousins describe in the book as “the archetypal New York style lox.”
“When I started 23 years ago, Gaspé was the most popular salmon and it was fatty, silky and mild,” Tupper said, adding that in response to customers’ changing tastes, “it has gotten smokier, silkier and less mild.”
There are no instructions on how to smoke your own fish in “Russ & Daughters: 100 Years of Appetizing.” But there is a recipe on how to assemble Daughters’ Delight, one of the cafe’s most popular sandwiches, made with cream cheese, capers, Gaspé, red onion, sliced tomato and salmon roe. Other recipe highlights in the book include kasha varnishkes, mushroom barley soup and chocolate babka.
Russ & Daughters is celebrating the release of the book with a host of events, including Russ & Daughters Day on Sept. 20, a day of free events including walking tours, giveaways and discussions, planned in conjunction with local indie bookstore P&T Knitwear. Federman and Tupper will also make an appearance at the Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center on Thursday, Sept. 11, and they also have speaking engagements in other cities, including Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Miami and Washington, D.C.
For now, the cousins are keeping mum about what they’re up to next; they declined to comment about a possible scripted TV show in the works about the business and the family who runs it.
As to whether or not there will be a fifth generation to continue the Russ & Daughters legacy, it’s too soon to say. Federman’s children are 9 and 13; Tupper’s are even younger.
But for what it’s worth, Tupper thinks Federman’s teenage daughter is developing the requisite skill. Last week, the family had an 80th birthday party at the Russ & Daughters’ Hudson Yards location for Federman’s father.
“I find myself talking to Niki’s 13-year-old — we’re talking about quality, we were talking about the cake, and she said, ‘Yeah it wasn’t so good, it’s a little dry,’” Tupper said. “I appreciate that. She’s developing a palate.”
The New York Jewish Week brings you the stories behind the headlines, keeping you connected to Jewish life in New York. Help sustain the reporting you trust by donating today.
