Ada B. Turner, 96, founder of Turner Kosher Caterers and a longtime resident of Hyde Park, died on Monday, Oct. 16, in University of Chicago Hospitals. Mrs. Turner immigrated to the United States from her native Ukraine at the age of 15, traveling with her younger sister after their mother died, according to her son, Philip Turner. She married her husband, Nathan Turner, in 1923. Her cooking career started in the 1930s when she worked in a kitchen to help pay her daughter’s way through Hebrew school. “I don’t know where she got her ideas, because when I was a child she was a terrible cook,” Philip Turner said. “But she learned.” Despite having received just a 4th-grade education in Ukraine, her son said, Mrs. Turner had a keen sense for business and cultivated fiercely loyal customers. “She would cook for a bar mitzvah, then that boy’s wedding, then for his child’s bar mitzvah. It was generations of people,” he said. One of her favorite dishes to cook was a cake made of chocolate balls that she arranged in a pyramid. Mr. Turner said one of his mother’s proudest accomplishments was sending him and his late sister, Estelle Turner Lefkowitz, to the University of Chicago. In addition to her son, Mrs. Turner is survived by a sister and a granddaughter. Services were held Oct. 18.
