The Book of Jewish Food Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE BOOK OF JEWISH FOOD

  ‘Far and away the best food book of the year… A work of devoted scholarship, written with love and a most becoming humility, it has already achieved the status of a classic’ Paul Bailey, Daily Telegraph

  ‘Much more than a cookery book with delicious-sounding recipes, some centuries old, drawn from throughout the Jewish world. She crams this fascinating treasure-house with history, personal memories and anecdotes and, as with the best teachers, entertains as she informs’ Claire MacDonald, Mail on Sunday

  ‘Curried chicken with capsicums served with coconut rice, tagliatelle with roasted chicken and pine kernels and Moroccan couscous in various forms can all lay claim to being as Jewish as, well, chicken soup. All these dishes, and many more, have been lovingly researched, collated and compiled by cookery writer Claudia Roden over a period of fifteen years’ Simon Round, Jewish Chronicle

  ‘Learned, evocative, very well written – and eye-opening to anyone who thinks of Jewish food as salt beef sandwiches and chicken soup’ Richard Ehrlich, Independent on Sunday

  ‘We are not just given instructions on how to make, say, chopped liver; each dish comes with a short commentary on where it came from in the first place, which allows for regional differences… Claudia Roden has come up with the goods’ Jay Rayner, Observer

  ‘Roden never loses sight of what makes Jewish food Jewish, whether it is in Aleppo, Rome or New York. If ever a cookbook proved that food is one of the best introductions to an understanding of a culture, this is it’ Rowley Leigh, Guardian Weekend

  ‘For the intellectual cook, you can’t better Claudia Roden, last of the scholar/cooks in the tradition of Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson: her books are learned, loving, delicious, The Book of Jewish Food is definitive’ Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  A New Book of Middle Eastern Food

  Coffee: A Connoisseur’s Companion

  Mediterranean Cookery

  The Food of Italy

  Everything Tastes Better Outdoors

  Tamarind and Saffron

  THE BOOK OF JEWISH FOOD

  AN ODYSSEY FROM SAMARKAND AND VILNA TO THE PRESENT DAY

  Claudia Roden

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, OntarioCanada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL England

  First published in the United States of America by Alfred A. Knopf 1996

  Published in Great Britain by Viking 1997

  Published in Penguin Books 1999

  10 9 8

  Copyright © Claudia Roden, 1996

  Illustrations copyright © John Spencer, 1996

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  CIS Publishers: Excerpts from Pathway to Jerusalem: The Travel Letters of Rabbi Obadiah of Bertinoro, translated by Yaakov Dovid Shulman, copyright © 1992 by CIS Publishers.

  Reprinted by permission of CIS Publishers. Commentary and Allen Mandelbaum: The poem ‘From the Hungry, Praise’ by Immanuel ben Solomon of Rome, translated by Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Commentary, 1951). All rights reserved.

  Reprinted by permission of Commentary and Allen Mandelbaum. International Universities Press, Inc.: Excerpts from Life is With People: The Culture of the Shtetl by M. Zborowski and E. Herzog (1952).

  Adapted by permission of International Universities Press, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192851-7

  In memory of my parents, Nelly and Cesar Douek,

  and my brother Zaki.

  For my children, Simon, Nadia and Anna,

  and my grandchildren, Cesar, Peter and Sarah,

  with love.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  INTRODUCTION

  A Celebration of Roots: Of Generations Past, Vanished Worlds and Identity

  The Jewish Dietary Laws of Kashrut

  The Food of the Ancient Hebrews – in the Bible and the Talmud

  The Sabbath and Festivals – the Jewish Calendar

  THE ASHKENAZI WORLD

  The Development of an Ashkenazi Style of Cooking

  APPETIZERS AND SALADS

  The American Story

  SOUPS

  BREAD

  FISH

  POULTRY

  France – a Mix of Alsatian ‘Vieille France’, Eastern Europe and North Africa

  MEAT

  The New York Deli

  NOODLES, KUGELS AND GRAINS

  VEGETABLES

  DESSERTS AND PASTRIES

  Anglo-Jewry

  DRINKS

  Israel – Forging a National Style with Gefilte Fish and Couscous

  THE SEPHARDI WORLD

  Many Styles of Sephardi Cooking, with Echoes from Ancient Baghdad, Medieval Spain and the Ottoman World

  SPICES AND FLAVOURINGS

  PICKLES, RELISHES AND CHUTNEYS

  COLD VEGETABLES, SALADS AND APPETIZERS

  Georgian Feasts

  SAVOURY PIES

  Salonika

  SOUPS

  Yemen

  FISH

  POULTRY

  The Three Jewish Communities of India

  About My Aunt Régine

  MEAT

  The Babylonian Jews in the Land of the Two Rivers

  OFFAL

  DAFINA AND HAMIN – THE SABBATH POT

  Tunisia – Berbers and ‘Livornese’

  GRAIN – RICE, BULGUR, PASTA AND COUSCOUS

  Persia

  Bukharan Jews

  Jewish Italy

  Morocco – Legacies from Baghdad and Andalusia in the Berber World

  VEGETABLES

  A Judeo-Spanish Stronghold in Turkey

  BREADS

  DESSERTS

  Aleppo (Syria) Was the Pearl of the Jewish Kitchen

  PASTRIES, SWEETMEATS AND FRUIT PRESERVES

  The Lost Jews of China

  DRINKS

  Ethiopian Jews

  WINE IN THE JEWISH WORLD

  Select Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The best part of working on this book was meeting and getting to know people in many different countries. People gave me recipes, invited me to eat with them and to watch them cook, told me about their lives and those of their parents and grandparents, and about their trades. They sent me articles and other source material, lent me books and photographs, invited me to hear lectures and attend conferences, gave me all kinds of advice and information, and pointed me in the right directions. Having begun m
y research more than sixteen years ago, I am indebted to so many people that trying to acknowledge all those who have helped is impossible. But I would like them to know that their contributions have been precious and valued, that they have made the book what it is, and that they will always be remembered fondly and with enormous gratitude by me. Some will find their names in the text.

  I would also like to thank my children, close friends, and other relatives who have encouraged me and sustained me with their enthusiasm for the project. Of these I have special thanks for my brother Ellis, my son-in-law, Clive Wolman, and my friends Ella Almagor and Sami Zubaida, all of whom read bits of first drafts, and for Danny Almagor, who found me poems and proverbs and references on Jewish law. I owe special thanks to my one-time neighbour Esra Kahn, librarian at Jews’ College, London, who found me useful books and read and commented on my manuscript.

  I have a special debt of gratitude to International Universities Press for allowing me to use material from Life Is With People: The Culture of the Shtetl, by Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, and to Gerard Silvain for helping to choose photographs from his huge collection of Jewish postcards (he has more than 50,000) at the last moment, as we were going into print.

  My warmest thanks are for my editor, Judith Jones, who encouraged me throughout the years, advised and guided me, and brought out the best in me, with sympathy and intelligence. I have fond memories of spending time with Judith and her wonderful husband, Evan: in New York, walking to their apartment from the office and meeting Evan half-way, stopping to pick up some goodies, standing in the kitchen while they cooked; at their home in Vermont, exploring the countryside, eating in grand style on the porch overlooking the lake after a swim; and in Paris, walking the streets with them and exploring the restaurants together. That was part of the pleasure of working on the book.

  INTRODUCTION

  A CELEBRATION OF ROOTS: OF GENERATIONS PAST, VANISHED WORLDS AND IDENTITY

  Every cuisine tells a story. Jewish food tells the story of an uprooted, migrating people and their vanished worlds. It lives in people’s minds and has been kept alive because of what it evokes and represents. My own world disappeared forty years ago, but it has remained powerful in my imagination. When you are cut off from your past, that past takes a stronger hold on your emotions. I was born in Zamalek, a district of Cairo with palm trees, pretty villas and gardens with bougainvillaea, scented jasmine and brilliant red flowers we called ‘flamboyants’. On the map it looks like a cocoon clinging to the banks of the Nile. For the first fifteen years of my life, it was the cocoon from which I never ventured unaccompanied. I lived in an apartment building with my parents; two brothers, Ellis and Zaki; and our Yugoslav-Italian nanny, Maria Koron. Awad, the cook, who came from Lower Egypt, lived on the roof terrace, where servants had rooms. From the windows we could see the Nile and feluccas (sailing boats) gliding by. The sounds were the muezzin’s call and the shouts of street vendors. It was a world full of people. It ended in 1956, after Suez, as a result of Egypt’s war with Israel.

  My father died in 1993 at the age of ninety-four, a few months after my mother. They had spent the last years holding hands, switching from one radio station to another listening to the latest world events, and talking passionately about their life in Egypt. They lived near me in London, and I was the audience for their constant dramatized re-enactments of the stories of all the people they had known. These stories were capable of endless change as new interpretations were explored. At 16 Woodstock Road, it seemed that we had never left Cairo.

  The smell of sizzling garlic and crushed coriander seeds in the kitchen, or of rose water in a pudding, and my mother’s daily meals, reinforced the feeling.

  When I look through the old notes and recipes given by relatives and friends soon after they left Egypt, it rekindles memories of our old life in a vivid way. They are written in French and interspersed with remarks about who gave the recipe long ago in Egypt, how much the dishes were appreciated by a certain person, and the occasion on which they were served. Each recipe has a name. There is ‘kobeba Latifa’, ‘fromage blanc Adèle’, ‘hamud Sophie’, ‘pasteles Iris’, ‘blehat Rahel’, and so on. Most of the people are dead now. They were my parents’ generation. But their recipes keep their memory very much alive, at least for me.

  Our Cairo had been two cities that turned their backs on each other. One looked like Paris, because Khedive Ismail, who ruled in the middle of the nineteenth century, had wanted to pull Egypt into Europe and had brought in European architects to build it. The other had narrow meandering streets, mausoleums, and public baths; fountains with curvy iron grilles and windows screened by wooden lattices; Coptic churches and mosques with minarets rising into the sky like delicately embroidered candles. But our cooking was also from other cities. We made Istanbul pies, Aleppo cracked wheat salads, Castilian almond and orange cakes, egg flans from Fez.

  The Egypt I knew was a French-speaking, cosmopolitan Mediterranean country in which life for the better-off was a sort of continuation of the Belle Époque in an annexe of Europe, with colonial-style clubs, opera and ballet and entertaining on a grand scale. Egypt had been part of the Ottoman Empire and a British protectorate. It was led by a foreign (Albanian) dynasty, a court made up of exiles from the Turkish aristocracy, and a royal council that spoke limited Arabic. The Jewish community had a happy and important place in the mosaic of minorities – which included Copts, Armenians, Syrian Christians, Maltese, Greeks and Italians, as well as British and French expatriates – living among the Muslim majority.

  Established mainly in Cairo and Alexandria but also in a number of small towns and villages, the Jewish community was itself a mosaic of people of different origins. The original community, which was as old as antiquity, had been joined by several waves of immigrants, and these had all kept up their different cultures and identities into the twentieth century. We gave ourselves the fictional name of ‘Basramite’ to characterize our mixed backgrounds (no one knows where it came from). There were the Arabized inhabitants of the Haret el Yahoud – the Jewish quarter of Cairo, which we called the hara or simply le quartier, and which was built as early as 389 – and of the equally ancient Souk el Samak (fish market) in Alexandria. Descendants of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula came in the sixteenth century and then again in the nineteenth from Salonika, Smyrna, Istanbul, the Balkans, and North Africa. They were called Espagnoli and Kekeres, the latter because of the way they asked ‘Qué quieres?’ (‘What do you want?’) Immigrants from Yemen and North Africa started coming in the Middle Ages. There were a few Ashkenazim. They were called Schlecht, meaning ‘bad’ in Yiddish. They claimed this was the local deformation of the word ‘select’, but nineteenth-century accounts reveal that they were so labelled because when they first arrived as escapees from pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe they exclaimed in horror upon seeing the hara: ‘Schlecht! Schlecht!’ There were Italians who followed the old ‘Italki’ rites, and Italians from Livorno, who followed Spanish rites, and people from Iraq and Syria. My own family was from Syria and from Turkey.

  The community was polyglot. Our main language was French. We spoke it with an unorthodox grammar and special intonations, infected by all the jargons of the Levant and reinforced by gesticulations and facial expressions. We used many Italian words, such as falso and avvocato. We called our grandparents nono and nona, rag-and-bones was roba vecchia (old things), taglio bianco (white cut) was veal. We were great talkers, switching from one language to another. Every gathering was a fight to be heard. People shouted across the room and across conversations. Strangers thought we were quarrelling. It was a closely knit community, and it felt as though we were all related. Our families were large and extended – almost tribal clans.

  My two grandfathers, Elie Douek and Isaac Sassoon, had come from Aleppo at the end of the nineteenth century. My great-grandfather Haham Abraham ha Cohen Douek was the chief rabbi of that city when it was part of the Ottoman Empire. His portrait in turba
n and kaftan wearing medals given to him – ‘personally’, my father said – by the Sultan Abdul Hamid II, still hangs in the synagogue in Aleppo. The same photograph looks down at me from my study wall, as it does from the walls of many of my relatives around the world. My family in Egypt always kept the key of the synagogue. When my great-uncle Jacques went to Aleppo on his honeymoon in the 1930s, he was able to open the door with it. His widow, Régine, who now lives near the Champs-Élysées, had thought Aleppo a bit of a disappointment after his build-up. She managed to get for Jacques a place in the Jewish cemetery of Versailles – a rare privilege, because it is full – and a red-carpet funeral treatment, by telling the Paris rabbis that he was the son of Haham Abraham.

  Both my grandfathers left when Aleppo ceased to be the centre of the camel-caravan trade because of the opening of the Suez Canal, and when the canal and the development of the cotton trade had turned Egypt into an ‘El Dorado of the Nile Valley’. Both went to live in a newly built quarter of Cairo called Sakakini, in the Daher, where everyone was Jewish (my father insisted that I must distinguish it from the hara, where only the very poor were left by the time his family arrived). It was built on drained marshland by Sakakini Pasha. The streets converged like the spokes of a wheel towards a baroque rococo palace with turrets and carved angels where the Sakakini family lived. There were several synagogues, Jewish schools, ritual baths and kosher butchers. When I asked my father what their everyday life had been like, he said, ‘We spent our time on the balcony talking to passers-by. The men went to work, the women prepared the meals.’

  With my parents, Cesar and Nelly Douek, and my brother Ellis in 1939.

  Their cooking was Aleppan. It was considered the pearl of the Arab kitchen – refined and delicate. It was labour-intensive, with a lot of pounding, hollowing, stuffing, wrapping and rolling into tiny balls and fingers. The women prided themselves on their skills and – so my father said – were happy to spend hours in the kitchen. They cooked in company, and that was part of the fun. They filled chickens with meat and pine nuts, stuffed lamb with rice, rolled vine leaves and filled pastries with mashed dates. Their crowning glory was kibbeh, which was a world in itself, with dozens of varieties. Basically, it had an outer shell of pounded wheat and meat and a spicy meat and onion filling. The apartment resounded constantly with the ringing of the metal pestle and mortar with which they pounded the meat and wheat. It smelled of mint and spices and sizzling lamb, of tamarind and orange blossom.