Food coverage is supported by a generous donation from Susan and Moses Libitzky.
Mira Stern’s website describes her as a community builder, educator, consultant and ritualist, as well as a “queer Jewish mama” dedicated to equity and collective liberation. She has a toddler and is visibly pregnant with her second child.
There is nothing about food listed — but there should be.
Stern, 38, has been hosting a monthly Jewish supper club in her Oakland home for about a dozen people since Rosh Hashanah. The group meets on a date near each new moon.
She creates her menus and dishes based on the Jewish calendar, a novel approach for a supper club. I attended the May 19 gathering, where Stern introduced the month of Sivan and explained how Shavuot is tied to the concept of “reception.”
“It’s the month where we celebrate Shavuot and the receiving of the Torah, this Divine book that is supposed to bring light and joy and sweetness into our lives,” she said. “One of the reasons we eat so much dairy” — or vegan dairy, she noted — on Shavuot, “is to symbolize the sweetness of mother’s milk and the way that Torah is likened to that.”
At the supper, guests shared their positive and negative experiences from the past week and sought to answer the question: “What do you need to clear or to release in order to receive?”
For Stern, the supper club is about much more than all of the dishes she prepares for her guests.
“Cooking is the ultimate way to nourish people, to tend to them and break down every potential barrier that humans have created,” she said. “There is something so sacred and real about it. Food should be centered at every conflict mediation in the world.”
She added that as someone who is “deeply into pleasure as medicine, food is in the top category of potential avenues for giving and receiving pleasure in this existence.”
Stern wears her Jewish identity on her body and on her car. I knew I was at the right house when I spotted the “BUBALEH” license plate. She also has the Hebrew word “chesed,” or “loving-kindness,” tattooed on her lower arm and has co-hosted a “multisensory” seder for the past two Passovers.
A fourth-generation San Franciscan now living across the Bay, Stern told me that she grew up on frozen food and only began teaching herself how to cook in college. She began to feel the desire to nourish not only herself but others and soon she got the nickname “Martha Jew-art.” She later learned that her maternal great-grandmother, who emigrated from Poland to Portland, made bagels and pletzels (onion flatbreads) and sold them at the market.
“This was the ancestral crew I was looking for,” she said. “It skipped two generations.”
Stern loves learning about food, especially on social media. “My algorithm knows me so well. I have hella food tutorials and trad wives hosting and cleaning their houses,” she quipped, referencing women who embrace traditional gender roles. “I always joke that my true goal in my next chapter is to be a lefty, Jewish, queer, trad wife.”
For the May club, the menu was built around dairy. Appetizers included bread with an edible-flower-covered log of compound butter with basil and chives from her garden; a spread with artichoke hearts, olives, scallions, feta, mint, dill, lemon, jalapenos and pistachios; and a smashed cucumber salad with dill and lemon.
The main dish was chicken marinated in spiced yogurt, served over chickpeas and topped with slivers of raw red onion and a Lebanese toum (garlic yogurt sauce). A side of roasted beets was covered with pistachios, mint, Aleppo pepper and a honey dijon vinaigrette and served on a bed of whipped ricotta.
There was also a green salad with English peas and snap peas. And for dessert, she served a blackberry lavender cake with crème frâiche frosting and homemade peach ice cream made from peaches from one of 24 fruit trees in her yard.
Her guests, who found her supper club through friends and Instagram, have paid for a year’s worth of meals on a scale ranging from $65 to $115 per month. The group is set for the year and, after several months of gatherings, has coalesced.
The chance to meet with the same people month after month is a draw for many, though Rachelle Padgett of Berkeley acknowledged that the idea of someone cooking for her initially was the motivating factor.
“I had met Mira briefly and thought she was the coolest, and her food is outstanding,” said Padgett. “Because I cook for a living part time and because my whole social life is Jewish potlucks, I was like, ‘Yes, I will pay money to show up and eat incredible food in someone’s home where I don’t have to bring anything.’ The new friends are wonderful, but that was my primary reason for joining.”