Jewish-Viennese Shabbos Stew: “Ritschert,” The Lost Cholent of Vienna (Vegan Recipe)

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Beyond the Blech: A Secular Reconstruction of the Viennese Ritschert

To speak of the Jewish-Viennese kitchen is to navigate a landscape of ghosts, starch, and the persistent, paradoxical scent of smoke without fire. It is a phrase used here with a heavy, literal weight. The domestic fires of the Mazzesinsel, the hearths that once flavored the Ritschert with smoked meats and communal warmth, were extinguished and replaced by the industrial death’s fires of the extermination of the Jews of Europe. Today, we are left with a culture that exists as an “absent presence,” a lingering, smoky aroma of a traditional life that persists in our recipes even though the living community that ignited them was turned to ash.

In the Leopoldstadt, the so-called “Mazzesinsel” (the “Matzo Island”) nestled between the Danube Canal and the sprawling, slightly sinister whimsy of the Prater, the Sabbath meal was never merely sustenance. The Prater itself stands as a monument to this uncanny duality. It was a pleasure ground that served as the city’s lungs, where the Riesenrad (the Giant Ferris Wheel) turned with a slow, mechanical indifference. It was a Jewish enterprise, like so many of the Prater’s wonders, and it outlasted the neighborhoods that birthed its patrons. To look out from the Mazzesinsel toward the Ferris wheel is to see a structure that survived while the people who built it were erased. It is an urban skeleton of a joy that has become, in the post-war years, deeply haunted.

Take, for instance, “Susi” (Susanne Ingeborg) Guttmann, of blessed memory. The specific contours of the Ritschert I describe here come to me through the memories of her son, Davies Guttmann. He shared the stories of his late mother, the Ritschert of her childhood, and the “Burech Jankef” in his father that demanded the traditional flavors of a lost world. In her apartment on Ausstellungsstraße, overlooking that very Ferris wheel, the air on Friday evenings was thick with the weight of assimilated expectations. Susi’s husband, Jakob, called “Buji,” a diminutive that smoothed the edges of the traditional “Burech Jankef,” had, like so many of his generation, lost his faith in the camps. Nonetheless, he remained tethered to the ritual objects of his youth. While the God of the East was gone, the “Burech Jankef” in him still demanded the Romanian-Hungarian Cholent of his childhood.

Susi, ever the adaptive daughter of Vienna, went so far as to enlist tutors to teach her the foreign, rustic alchemy of a cholent. She had to. There was no internet then, and certainly no digital archive like this one to offer her the mushroom cholent or the traditional meaty rendition that her husband craved. Her mother-in-law, along with most of Jakob’s family, had not survived the horrors of the Holocaust. There was no one left to lean over her shoulder and whisper the secret timing of the beans or the exact pinch of salt that tasted like home.

The Broken Archive

This desperate seeking of tutors highlights a profound rupture: the “Women’s Kitchen Archive” had been burned. For centuries, the transmission of Jewish culinary identity was a silent, matrilineal baton pass, a matter of “feeling” the dough or “knowing” the spice by scent. It was a domestic Torah, never written down because it was never meant to be forgotten. When Susi had to hire someone to teach her how to cook her own husband’s heimishe food, she was navigating the debris of a broken chain.

In the wake of the Shoah, the Jewish kitchen in Vienna became an archaeological site. Women like Susi were no longer just cooks. They were curators of a vanishing vocabulary, forced to reconstruct through study what should have been theirs by blood. This wasn’t “grandma’s cooking.” It was a frantic, scholarly attempt to re-animate a corpse through the medium of beans and fat.

Our reconstruction of the Ritschert is to confront its dual citizenship in the Alpine landscape. Long before it was a Viennese Shabbos staple, it was a common tongue spoken across Slovenia, Croatia, Bavaria, and the Austrian hinterlands. In Ljubljana, they call it ričet, a word born from the Styrian German ritschet. Etymologists suggest a lineage tied to the German rutschen—to slip or slide—an allusion to the “slippery” texture of a dish slicked with the cooked barley and the grease of cured meats.

There is a biting historical irony here: in the secular world, the Ritschert was the quintessential “un-festive” meal, a thick, utilitarian porridge of barley, beans, and root vegetables often relegated to the drab halls of prisons. It was a dish for those in bondage. Yet, in the alchemy of the Jewish home, this “slippery” sustenance was redeemed. What was elsewhere a prisoner’s ration was transformed by the Jewish-Viennese into a celebratory pillar of the Sabbath, a meal that tasted of freedom because it was eaten in the sanctuary of the home.

As Susi served the cholent stew to her children at the Shabbat table, she performed a quiet act of Viennese subversion. “I made sure to throw in a healthy handful of Gerschtln,” she would say, using the diminutive Viennese for barley that carries both affection and a certain structural rigidity. Barley is the Ritschert’s dominant ingredient. There is an old culinary geography at play here. The closer a Cholent travels toward the mahogany and marble of the Vienna coffeehouses, the more the bean yields to the grain, making it more and more Ritschert-like. The Ritschert, this Viennese shabbos stew, is less a bean stew than a precarious 2-to-1 equilibrium of pulse and barley. (In some homes, it is even a one-to-one ratio). In Susi’s pre-war home, the Ritschert was fortified with the traditional smoked meats and marrow bones, a reach for the warmth and “wholeness” of a pre-modern life that could no longer be fully inhabited.

The Café as Counter-Temple

This transition from the heavy, eastern beans to the refined Viennese barley mirrors the movement of the community itself, from the shul to the coffeehouse. The Ritschert we reconstruct here finds its true form as a Parve dish, a nod to a very specific, slightly cynical Viennese pragmatism. The story, as relayed by my friend Davies over coffee, concerns the elder Rabbi Grünfeld. His sons represent the diverging paths of the diaspora. One leads the remnant of the Tempelgasse community, while the other serves as Rav at the Chernobyl court in Bnei Brak. But the father presided over the Grünangergasse shul in the city center, and it was he who decided that the communal Ritschert had to be strictly Parve, thus containing no meat and no dairy.

The rationale was found not in the heavens, but in the Flâneur culture of the inner city. Some congregants would leave the synagogue and migrate directly to Café de l’Europe on the Graben, their true second home, just blocks away. In the Viennese imagination, the café functioned as a secular counter-temple. Before the extermination of Viennese Jewery, these spaces were so deeply integrated into Jewish life that in some, at the appointed hour of prayer, the clinking of spoons would cease and the corner table would briefly become a shtender.

The café offered a different kind of communion: marble tables instead of altars, newspapers on wooden rods instead of scrolls, and the “regular’s table” (Stammtisch) as a form of sacred belonging. By mandating a meatless Ritschert, the Rabbi was acknowledging this social architecture. He ensured that a congregant could move from the holy service to the secular ritual of the Melange without a halachic crisis, acknowledging that while milk and meat are never to be mixed, the six-hour wait between a beef stew and a dairy coffee was a bridge too far for the Viennese urbanite. The meat was excised so the butter and cream of the Sachertorte could be embraced. It is the classic paradox. The law is maintained precisely so it can be circumvented at the next street corner.

The Gesture Persists

Fast forward to today’s kitchen. A pot begins to steam. The person stirring it may not even be Jewish. They may have found the recipe on this blog or through a fragmented family story. They are using an Instant Pot, an appliance whose sealed, regulated efficiency would probably have baffled Susi as much as it reassures us, yet they are performing the same 2-to-1 ratio of barley to beans. The chain of transmission is still broken, held together now by digital threads and intellectual curiosity rather than communal memory.

To cook this dish now is to participate in an act of “secular teshuvah,” a return to a place that no longer exists. Traditionally, teshuvah implies a homecoming to the divine or the ancestral, but here it is a movement toward a void. We are using ingredients that mimic a smoke we can no longer legally or morally produce.

“Legally,” because the communal world that once authorized the slaughter and smoking of these meats, the hechsher of the neighborhood and the butcher who knew your name, has been litigated out of existence by his Viennese neighbors. “Morally,” because for the secular cook, the act of summoning “smoke” in a post-Auschwitz kitchen carries an unbearable weight. In a century where smoke became the final, haunting trace of a vanished people, to intentionally fill a room with the scent of burning wood and charred animal fat feels like a devastating sensory overlap. To use these literal materials to recreate the taste of a murdered culture can feel like a hollow, perhaps even grotesque, mimicry—as if we are trying to mask the silence of the void with the very smells that defined its creation.

Yet, here lies the defiant counterargument of the living. As the saying goes, the world has a tragic tendency to “love dead Jews” more than living ones—to prefer the frozen, sanctified image of the victim over the complicated, hungry reality of the survivor. We are still here. We are not ghosts, and our palates have not been cauterized by history. We love the deep, transformative power of smoke as much as any of our neighbors.

So, in this Jewish vegan post-Shoah kitchen, we do not banish the sensation entirely; we reach for the tin of smoked paprika and for the block of smoked tofu. But we do so with a shifted consciousness. We use it not as a literal reconstruction of the old world’s lard and marrow, but as a conscious choice of the new. It is smoke without the “industrial machine,” a way to reclaim the sensory joy of our ancestors without being consumed by their tragedy. We seek a “clean” umami through the fermentation of miso and the earthiness of fungi, spiked with the bright fire of the spice. It is a return via the laboratory and the garden rather than the slaughterhouse hearth—a way to honor the ghost and feed the living without disturbing the ash. As the barley swells and the miso dissolves, the gesture persists.

To this garden-based umami, we add the secret aromatic of the Alpine kitchen: Lovage. Known in the vernacular as Liebstöckel or Maggikraut, it is a plant that performs a natural mimicry of its own. It carries the savory, high-glutamate punch of industrial bouillon, yet it remains rooted in the earth. For the Viennese cook, it is a way to replace the heavy, lingering ghost of smoked meats with a bright, herbal vitality that still honors the deep, salt-of-the-earth profile this stew demands.

The Ethics of the Machine

There is a final, perhaps more silent, tension in this pot. To choose a vegan path for a traditional Jewish dish is to confront a controversy that sits uncomfortably at the edge of our historical memory. It is the question of the “industrial death machine” itself.

To a Jewish audience, this comparison is fraught. We must be careful never to equate the specific, genocidal horror of our ancestors’ fate with any other system, to avoid the trap of relativizing a singular tragedy. However, we cannot ignore that the Shoah forever altered our relationship to industrial slaughter. Having seen what happens when life is processed through a mechanical, unfeeling apparatus of death, many find it increasingly difficult to sit down to a meal birthed from a similar, if biologically different, industrial complex. Many find it unacceptable to accept food produced by systems that share its logic, even if not its crime.

By removing the animal from the Ritschert, we are not just avoiding a halachic wait for a coffee. We are performing a quiet protest against the reduction of living beings to mere “material.” It is an act of radical, post-traumatic empathy. We choose the miso and the bean not out of a trendy asceticism, but because we know, in our very marrow, the weight of the machine. In this secular kitchen, the absence of meat is a refusal to participate in the logic of the assembly-line end. We honor our dead by choosing a life for our table that is as far removed from the “industrial” death as the modern world allows.

Thus, our use of red miso and dried porcini is more than a vegan hack. It is a structural replacement for the “lost” marrow, honoring a tradition defined by its loopholes. This is a stew for the secular age: a dish that acknowledges the tragedy of the 20th century while refusing to skip dessert. It is a meal that exists in the tension between the memory of the shtetl and the reality of the café, between the rigid commandment and the whipped cream of the Graben.

The Ultimate Vegan Ritschert (Recipe)

A High-Protein, Plant-Based Stew

This recipe is a masterclass in plant-based umami and texture. By utilizing a specific 2:1 ratio of white beans to regular barley and a precision pressure-cooking method, we achieve a dish that is both heart-healthy and incredibly satisfying.

The secret to this dish is the starch release. While the 10-minute pressure cycle cooks the ingredients, the velvety, thick consistency emerges fully after the stew is allowed to rest and then be reheated or slow-cooked.

Yield: Approximately 4 Liters (10–12 servings) Hardware: 5.7L Instant Pot (or equivalent pressure cooker) Timing: 10 Minutes (High Pressure) + Natural Release + Your Preferred Finish

Ingredients

The Grains and Pulses

• 500g White Beans (Cannellini or Great Northern)
• 250g Regular Barley (Hulled Barley, not Pearl Barley)
• Note: The beans and barley must be soaked together overnight in a large pot of water, then drained and rinsed before cooking. Regular barley is used here for its superior fiber content and lower glycemic index compared to pearl barley.

The Vegetable Base (Aromatics)

• 450g Yellow Onions, finely diced
• 200g Carrots, diced
• 250g Celeriac (Celery Root), peeled and cubed
• 150g Leek (white and light green parts), sliced
• 40g Fresh Garlic, minced

The Umami & Spices

• 40g Dried Porcini Mushrooms (rehydrated in hot water, liquid strained and saved)
• 5g Dried Marjoram
• 2g Dried Thyme
• 2 Bay Leaves
• 5g Black Peppercorns, coarsely ground (approx. 1.5–2 teaspoons)

The Finishers (Added before serving)

• 400g Smoked Tofu, diced into 1/4 inch (1/2cm to 1cm) cubes
• 150g Red Miso Paste (adjust to taste)
• 40g Extra Virgin Olive Oil
• 1 small bunch Fresh Lovage (Liebstöckel/Maggikraut), finely minced or kept as whole sprigs for garnish.

Instructions

1. The Overnight Soak

Combine the 500g of white beans and 250g of regular barley in a large bowl. Cover with ample water and soak for 8–12 hours. Drain and rinse thoroughly.

2. Sauté and Caramelize

Set the Instant Pot to SAUTÉ. Sauté and reduce the onions, carrots, celeriac, and leeks until caramelized (use oil or the “water-sweat” method). Add the garlic during the final 60 seconds.

3. The Pressure Cycle

Add the soaked/rinsed beans and barley, the chopped porcini (plus their soaking liquid), bay leaves, dreid marjoram, and dried thyme to the pot. Add fresh water until the total volume reaches the 2/3 “Max Fill” line of your inner pot.

• The Oil Barrier (Mandatory): When cooking pulses and grains at this volume, the surface will foam. Add 1 teaspoon of neutral oil or extra virgin olive oil to the surface of the water before sealing. This breaks the surface tension of the starch bubbles, preventing “foam-up” into the pressure valve.
• The Sealing: Close the lid and ensure the steam release valve is set to the SEALING position.
• The Timing: Set the Instant Pot to PRESSURE COOK (High) for 10 Minutes.
• The Critical Safety Phase: When the timer ends, do not touch the valve. You must allow for a full Natural Pressure Release. This will take approximately 25–35 minutes due to the high thermal mass of the 2/3-full pot. Only open the lid once the float valve (pin) has dropped on its own.

4. The Finishing Phase (Choose Your Method)

To achieve the legendary velvety, thick texture, the stew must undergo a final stage of starch transformation:

• Method A: The Secular Reheat – Allow the pot to cool completely. When ready to eat, gently reheat the stew to a simmer.
• Method B: The Modern Slow Cooker – After the pressure release, set the Instant Pot to SLOW COOK (Low) for 12–18 hours.
• Method C: The Traditional Blech (Frum method) – Transfer the contents to a heavy ceramic or cast-iron pot and place on a blech (warming plate) or in a 95°C oven overnight.

The Science of the “Velvet”: Starch Retrogradation The reason this stew requires a rest and reheat cycle is a process called starch retrogradation. During the initial pressure cook, the starches in the beans and barley gelatinize. As the stew cools, these starch molecules (specifically amylose and amylopectin) physically reorganize into a structured, crystalline network. Upon gentle reheating, this network creates a stable, thick, and “velvety” emulsion—the “unified gravy”—that is far superior to the thin liquid produced immediately after boiling.

5. The Vitality Finish

Crucial: This final step should be done off the heat (Kli Sheni).

1. Emulsify: In a small bowl, whisk the Red Miso and Extra Virgin Olive Oil, and the coarsely ground black pepper with a ladle of the hot liquid until smooth.
2. Incorporate: Stir the miso-oil mixture and the diced smoked tofu into the pot. Finally, add a generous handful of finely minced fresh lovage. If following our preferred presentation, reserve a few choice leaves to crown each bowl just before serving, as the heat of the stew will instantly release the herb’s intense, savory perfume.

Why off the heat?

• Science: Boiling miso destroys the delicate probiotic enzymes and alters the complex flavor profile. Adding the extra virgin olive oil at a lower temperature preserves its heart-healthy polyphenols.
• Tradition: This method honors the halachic memory of Shabbat cooking. By adding these fresh ingredients to a “secondary vessel” (Kli Sheni) that is no longer on the flame, we respect the ancient prohibition against “cooking” on the day of rest.

Nutritional Benefits

• Whole Grain Regular Barley: Retains the bran and germ, providing higher levels of B vitamins and double the fiber of pearl barley. This ensures a lower glycemic response and sustained energy.
• Flavor Depth: The synergy of red miso and porcini creates a “meat-like” depth of flavor without the inflammatory properties of animal fats or the need for processed thickeners.

Look closely at the lovage garnish crowning this Ritschert. In a moment of culinary synchronicity, the triple-lobed leaf forms a natural Hebrew letter Shin (ש). This is the very letter that marks the doorposts of traditional Jewish homes, symbolizing the Divine protector. Here, however, it is not inscribed on a mezuzah but resting on a bed of barley. It is a “S(c)hibboleth” in the truest sense: a cultural marker that designates this space as Jewish-Viennese. Like my logo, it evokes the “W” for Wien (Vienna) while whispering of an identity that persists through the subtle and the nuanced. It is a culinary key, unlocking a story that is both local and eternal.

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