24 | DECEMBER 1 • 2022 

W

hen Vera Newman 
decides she wants 
something, she 
makes it happen.
She’s started several 
businesses without formal 
training, run a catering 
business with no prior 
experience, written, illustrated 
and published a bestselling 
cookbook with no formal 
culinary education, and 
recently started a floral design 
company with no previous 
training.
Newman’s drive and 
determination were evident 
when she decided it was time 
to marry.
She grew up in an observant 
Jewish family in Panama. 

Her mother’s roots were both 
Sephardic and Ashkenazi, and 
her father’s family, of Syrian 
and Moroccan ancestry, had 
lived in Israel for generations.
After high school, Vera 
attended a women’s seminary 
in Jerusalem for six months, 
and when she returned to 
Panama, she decided it was 
time for a shidduch (a match). 
She set up an account on a 
Jewish dating site, Saw You at 
Sinai, and quickly established 
a relationship with Jacob 
Newman, who had grown up in 
West Bloomfield. His parents, 
Judy and Rob Newman, now 
live in Farmington Hills.
Jacob visited Panama 
several times over the next 

few months while the couple 
communicated daily by phone 
and email. They got engaged 
a few days after Vera arrived 
in Michigan to meet Jacob’s 
family. They married in 2012 at 
the Dearborn Inn, when Vera 
was 20 and Jacob was 25. The 
day after the wedding, they 
moved into the Oak Park home 
where they still live.
Children quickly enlarged 
their family. Dinah is now 8, 
Levi, 7, and Yosef, 4; the baby, 
Aliza, was born in August 
2021.

TEACHING 
HERSELF TO COOK
Newman says it’s no 
exaggeration that she didn’t 
have to cook Shabbat or 
festival meals for two years 
after the wedding because she 
and Jacob were always invited 
out by family, friends and 
neighbors. When it was time 
to reciprocate, she had to teach 
herself to cook.
“I wasn’t working at the time, 
so my job was to take care of 
my young kids and ‘play’ in 
the kitchen,” she said. “I would 
invite people for Shabbat, 
and our guests were always 
impressed with my food and 
how I presented it.”
She loved developing recipes 
for the Sephardic dishes she 

remembered from childhood as 
well as international fare.
Cooking and serving food 
on beautiful table settings 
allowed her to express her 
artistic nature, and friends 
raved about her holiday meals 
and parties. In 2016, she started 
a private catering business 
and, a year later, a recipe blog 
on Instagram, which quickly 
gained thousands of followers.
The name of her blog derives 
from the marble she had used 
to redecorate her kitchen and 
incorporated in other rooms 
as a design element. She came 
up with @marblespoon for the 
Instagram account, which now 
has close to 14,000 followers. 
When Newman started work 
on the cookbook, Marblespoon, 
a name well known to her 
Instagram fans, was an obvious 
choice for the title. 
Newman says her husband 
pushed her to produce the 
book. She wrote it and took 
the photographs illustrating it 
during the COVID slowdown, 
even as she guided her older 
children through online school. 
Newman knew the book 
would need photos of the 
featured dishes. With small 
children at home, it wasn’t 
practical for her to bring 
prepared dishes to a photo 
studio several times a week 
for a formal shoot. Nor 
did she want a professional 
photographer in her home 
taking pictures of every dish 
she prepared for the cookbook. 
She was thrilled when Miriam 
Pascal Cohen, another kosher 
food blogger, flew to Detroit 
from Lakewood, N.J., to coach 
Newman on food photography.
The Marblespooon Cookbook, 
published by Menucha 
Publishers in Brooklyn, came 
out in 2020 and has been a 
great success, selling close to 
5,000 copies. It is available 

NEXT DOR

VOICE OF A NEW GENERATION

Self-taught cook creates popular 
kosher cookbook and blog.

BARBARA LEWIS CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Self-taught cook creates popular 

Flair in
the Kitchen

TEACHING 

few months while the couple 

LEFT: A page dividing 
chapters from the
Marblespoon Cookbook