It’s hard to imagine Chaya Rappoport not knowing how to cook or bake. As a professional food stylist, she’s responsible for stunning salads in cookbooks and towering onion burgers in national magazines. But Chaya says she distinctly remembers a sleepover when she was 13 at her family’s home in the religious community in Monsey, New York. When her friend suggested they make eggs together, Chaya said: “We can’t do that, we’ll burn the house down.” Her friend countered: “Girl, you need to learn.” 

As Chaya mastered cooking eggs, she felt proud of her new-found self sufficiency. Her first forays into the kitchen also opened a door to something deeper — a way to connect with her home in Switzerland. Her family moved to the U.S. from Zurich a few years earlier and she missed the flavors of the country and her grandmother Judith’s kitchen, where she spent many Friday afternoons. 

Her grandmother’s family moved to Switzerland in 1904 from Kishinev, Moldova to escape pogroms and find work in the embroidery industry first in Basel and later in St. Gallen, a small city in the east of the country near Lichtenstein. There’s a legendary story in the family from their time there, Chaya says, of a Jewish traveler who came to St. Gallen and asked a police officer where he could find a Jewish tavern. The officer pointed him towards her great-great-grandfather’s home. He came in and ate a meal and when he asked how much he should pay, he was told that this was simply the family's home and they were happy to feed him. 

That commitment to hospitality was passed down. When Chaya was little in Zurich, she would walk the 15 minutes to her grandparents home on Shabbat. As members of the Chabad community (a Hasidic sect known for its outreach within the Jewish community), their Shabbat table on Friday night and at Saturday lunch was always busy with guests. But the third meal of Shabbat known as Seudah Shlishit, was typically just for family, Chaya says. 

On a white tablecloth, her grandmother often served a Swiss spread of cheeses like appenzeller, gruyere, camembert, alongside butter, lox and herring, and her carrot salad. To go with the meal, there was challah, and other breads like dinkelbrot and laugenbröt, a lye bread that can also be shaped into pretzels. 

When Chaya’s family moved to the U.S., it was hard to find the cheeses and yogurts her family loved from Switzerland with a kosher certification strict enough for them to eat. “That really prompted me to start learning how to cook and to bake. I think I was really motivated by a desire to bring a taste of home, to bring Switzerland with me to New York,” she says. Chaya started reading cookbooks and watching Youtube videos, calling her grandmother for recipes, and consulting her mom. When she was around 16, she started making her grandmother’s famed Swiss plum tart. To make sure the family had a good supply of Swiss staples, Judith sent care packages of lye for bread, Swiss chocolate, pearl sugar, and jam.

Despite mastering some of the Swiss recipes from her family, Chaya still relies on her grandmother for the full Seudah Shlishit spread when she visits Zurich. On a recent trip for a family wedding, “we all went back and had Seudah Shlishit. It was beautiful,” Chaya says.

The visits are a homecoming for Chaya, but not without complexity. As a Jew, “In Switzerland, you really feel your otherness,” she explains. “I don’t feel so connected to the Swiss people; I don’t feel like there are my people and this is my nationality. But at the same time, it’s my home.”