The Book of Jewish Food Read online

  With my brothers, Zaki and Ellis.

  My grandmother Sarah Hara did not read or write, although everyone from her large extended family sought her advice on every matter. She said the rabbis in Aleppo had forbidden her to learn because she was a girl. It had something to do with girls becoming free and able to send notes to lovers. She had married a man much older than herself and was left a widow with many daughters to marry off. She wore a long brown dress called a habara. With a little envy, she mocked the new generation’s Frenchified ways.

  My maternal grandmother, Eugénie Alphandary, was from Istanbul. She was a grande dame who spoke French like a Parisian, quoted Voltaire and Victor Hugo and was fired by the ideals of ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’. The private language she spoke with my mother when they did not want us children to understand was Judeo-Spanish. She called it Castilian to differentiate it from the Judeo-Spanish that she described as a ‘degraded Spanish mix’ which some other people spoke. Hers was below French in her esteem, but to us it represented a mysterious lost paradise, a world of romance and courage and glorious chivalry which enmeshed us all in invisible threads of deep longing with its songs about lovers in Seville and proverbs about meat stews and almond cakes. That world was embodied by the little pies, sharp egg and lemon sauces, and meatballs incorporating vegetables that we ate at my grandparents’ home. Her cold vegetable dishes had a faint sweetness about them, the pastries an orange flavour. When we bit into a pie, we found mashed aubergine or spinach. Everything had a Spanish name, and many things had an affectionate ending, like ‘pasteliko’ and ‘borekita,’ which denoted that they were small.

  The friends and relatives my grandmother entertained had names like Sol, Grazia and Elvira, and family names like Pérez y Calderón, Santos, Abravanel, Rodrigues and Toledano. But she had called her children Yvette, Marcelle, Nelly, Germaine, Giselle and Joseph. Her father was a teacher at the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Istanbul. The Alliance was one of hundreds of Jewish schools, a charitable institution with headquarters in Paris, which brought French to all the Jewish communities of the Middle East. She had won a scholarship to their école normale (teachers’ training school) in Paris and was sent to Egypt to teach at the Alliance school there.

  Cairo’s Muski district, where Jewish men had their businesses.

  A few years ago, I found a book about the Jews of Egypt in the nineteenth century which contains letters by her father. He had been sent from Istanbul as a young man to assess the possibility of opening Alliance schools in Egypt and wrote back that the children spoke six languages but could not read or write and he doubted that they could ever be made to sit down. More than one school opened. My grandmother married as soon as she arrived. My grandfather Isaac, whose first wife had just died in childbirth, fell for her milky white skin and golden red hair.

  Until the end of the nineteenth century, the indigenous Jews and those from other Arab countries had spoken Arabic and worn Arab clothes (they were Arab but different) – the women the habara, the men galabias and kaftans with turbans, skull caps and tarbooshes (fezzes). The Europeanization and ‘emancipation’ of the Jews began with the building of the Suez Canal and the modernization of the economy. A Jewish middle-class bourgeoisie, educated first in Jewish schools, then by Christian and secular missions, grew out of the developing cotton trade and the capitalist explosion of the country. Jewish men went into cotton, banking, the stock exchange and industries like textiles, oil pressing and sugar refining. Many stayed behind in the small trades and handicrafts. All my relatives were merchants in general commerce. They called themselves ‘import-export’ but they were really ‘import-import’, dealing with everything from towels and underwear to china, sugar, coffee, and tea. They were khawaggat, Europeanized men who wore suits and tarbooshes. Some toured the villages by train. Their offices and warehouses were in the bazaar area of the Hamzaoui.

  My parents used to tell us how they pitied those of our relatives whose wives did not bother to give them proper breakfasts so they had to buy ful medammes (Egyptian brown beans), taamia (the Cairo name for falafel), and lentil soup from vendors at the bazaar. Later I heard from my relatives how they pitied my father because my mother did not let him eat out. It was a question of pride, not of religious orthodoxy. An account of a European Jewish traveller in Aleppo 100 years before expresses the shock he felt at seeing Jews eating food prepared by non-Jews at the bazaar. Our community in Egypt on the whole was even more lax in its religious practice, but the synagogue was an important part of our lives. It was a joyous place to meet and socialize.

  Every Friday evening and on high holidays, the Grand Temple was packed with people who came to hear Rabbi Nahum’s famous speeches in French. By tradition, the prime minister of Egypt always came for the Kol Nidre prayer. We also attended a small synagogue on top of a garage in the garden of a private house in Zamalek. It was packed with men swaying from side to side (not backwards and forwards, as Eastern Europeans do). They sang plaintive nasal chants in Spanish modulations and tunes from Morocco, Syria and Iraq, as well as some copied from the recitations of the Koran and the Egyptian national anthem. Every man started from the beginning of the prayer book, no matter when he arrived, so the result was a cacophony. The room glittered with chandeliers and velvet drapes embroidered with gold and silver thread. The women sat outside in the garden on golden chairs under a pergola. Dressed in coloured silks, perfumed and bejewelled, they exchanged the latest gossip about matches, dowries, and infidelities and visits to saintly tombs. Every so often, a face would appear at the window and shout ‘Taisez-vous les dames!’ (‘Shut up, ladies!’) and they would stop for a while and intone ‘Amen!’

  Jewish holidays were important occasions. They went on for days. Every member of the family was visited, the oldest first. There were always hundreds of people to kiss. The older relatives smelled of the rose water with which they washed. Depending on the time of day, sweetmeats and pastries or mezze (little salads and appetizers) were passed around. For the high-holiday dinners, tables were connected with planks. Huge quantities of food were prepared. Cooking went on for days. Housewives joined forces and brought their cooks. Itinerant cooks who specialized in certain dishes were also engaged.

  Every family had its own special dishes for festive occasions. Although in my day the community had become relatively homogenized and many delicacies had become obligatory on every party table, those dishes which reflected the origins of families were also there, and you could trace the family’s ancestry by looking at the spread on the table.

  Part of the appeal for me of working on this book is that there is more to Jewish food than cooking and eating. Behind every recipe is a story of local traditions and daily life in far-off towns and villages. It is a romantic and nostalgic subject which has to do with recalling a world that has vanished. It is about ancestral memories and looking back and holding on to old cultures, and it is about identity. It has been like that since Biblical times. The Bible recalls in Exodus the wistful longings of the Jews for the foods they had left behind in Egypt.

  At a gastronomic conference I attended in Jerusalem in September 1992 entitled ‘Gefilte Fish or Couscous?’ I was down in the basement kitchen with cooks from Poland, Georgia, Morocco, Iraq, Kurdistan and many other countries. We were preparing tastings and demonstrations of Jewish festive dishes from each of our communities while a black-bearded mashgiah (inspector) with a long black coat, black hat and forelocks looked over our shoulders to make sure that we did not infringe the dietary laws. I was making kobeba hamda, a Syrian Passover dish of ground rice and meat dumplings in a lemony soup, and a Persian lamb stew with quince, and I watched others prepare Sabbath, Purim, Hanukah and Rosh Hashanah specialities. The evening before, there had been a street festival with music and dancing, and the inhabitants of the street – Moroccans, Georgians and others – had brought out unending trays of food for tasting. Following all these amazing displays of dishes, the first subject for discussion at the
conference was ‘Is there such a thing as Jewish food?’

  I am always asked that question. When I was taken out to dinner by a cousin recently and told him I was still researching Jewish food, he said emphatically, ‘There is no such thing!’ A few friends keep telling me that. I have just put my hand on a paper I gave at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery in 1981 entitled ‘Cooking in Israel: A Changing Mosaic’, in which I said, ‘There is really no such thing as Jewish food. What is familiar here as Jewish food is totally unknown to the Jews of Egypt, Morocco and India. Local regional food becomes Jewish when it travels with Jews to new homelands.’ Thirty years ago, when all that was known in the West of Jewish food was the cooking of the Ashkenazi Jews, whose ancestors came from Eastern Europe and Russia, no one wondered if there was such a thing. Since Jews began to pour out of the Middle East and exotic places like India and Georgia from the mid 1950s, such a bewildering range of ‘Jewish’ dishes has come on the scene that the notion of a Jewish food culture has become questionable.

  But because a culture is complex this does not mean it does not exist. The French historian Fernand Braudel, in his book The Mediterranean, wrote that there was undoubtedly a Jewish civilization, but that it was so individual that it was not always recognized as one. He described it as a scattering of countless islands in foreign waters, its matter dispersed like tiny drops of oil over the deep waters of other civilizations, never truly blending with them yet always dependent on them. The Jews, he said, adapted and adopted but never lost their cultural identity.

  After years of researching the subject, I can say that each region or country has its own particular Jewish dishes and these are sometimes quite different from the local cuisine. Jews have adopted the foods of the countries they lived in, but in every country their cooking has had a special touch and taste and characteristic features and some entirely original dishes which have made it distinctive and recognizable. And in some countries their food was very different from that of the general population.

  One reason for the differences was the adaptation of dishes to comply with the Jewish dietary laws. Because of the prohibition of combining meat and dairy foods, Jews used different cooking fats. In the Middle East, you could tell a Jewish home by the smell of oil, which was used instead of clarified butter. The substitution for forbidden foods like pork and seafood created such specialities as goose salami in Italy and Alsace and whitefish soup in Livorno in Italy.

  In Jewish families, cooking has always centred around the Sabbath and religious festivals. All celebrations, whether they commemorate a religious holiday, an episode of Jewish history, or a moment in the cycle of life – a birth, a circumcision, a first tooth, a coming of age, a marriage, the inauguration of a new home, pregnancy, death – were once, and in some cases still are, ruled by tradition, and special foods were part of these traditions. The dishes chosen to celebrate these occasions became part of festive rituals and acquired embellishments as they acquired symbolic significance. They were glamorized to glorify the occasions, and that meant colouring with saffron or turmeric, sprinkling with raisins and chopped nuts, stuffing, enclosing in pie crust and pressing into a mould.

  Some dishes changed because of the special dietary requirements of particular holidays. At Passover, for instance, when any leavening agents and indirectly flour and wheat are forbidden, ground almonds, potato flour, matzo meal and matzos are used to make all kinds of cakes, pies, dumplings, pancakes and fritters. The laws of the Sabbath, which prohibit any work, including lighting fires and cooking, from sunset on Friday to Saturday evening, have given rise to a very wide range of meals-in-a-pot to be prepared on Friday afternoon and left to cook overnight for Saturday lunch. These complex dishes comprise a variety of foods to be served as different courses, from the soup-and-meat course to side dishes and sometimes puddings, all in the same pot. There is also an extraordinary variety of original dishes that are to be eaten cold on Saturday. Another feature of Jewish cooking is the many substantial dairy and vegetable dishes which constitute meatless meals.

  Apart from these differences, there was always, even centuries ago, a touch of otherness in Jewish cooking, a cosmopolitanism which broke even through ghetto walls. Jewish culinary interests were always wider than those of their immediate environment. Before the days of mass communication, Jews had their own network of communication. The vehicles of gastronomic knowledge were merchants and pedlars, travelling rabbis, preachers and teachers, students and cantors, professional letter carriers, beggars (who were legion) and pilgrims on their way to and from the Holy Land. They brought descriptions of exotic dishes in far-off lands, and sometimes even the exotic ingredients themselves, to the communities they stopped with, so that Jews, even in isolated places, became familiar with the foods of their foreign coreligionists.

  For centuries Jews had been international merchants, for a time the only merchants in Europe and the Middle East. As early as the seventh century they were the major channel of intercourse between East and West. As importers, middlemen and wholesalers, they played a great part in the Byzantine commerce, which brought Eastern goods to Europe. The camel-caravan trade was concentrated in their hands. Jewish ships sailed the Mediterranean, and Jewish traders were said to be waiting at every port. As converted New Christians, they were among the earliest arrivals in South America with the Conquistadors, and they dealt with the New World produce. Foodstuffs were always a major part of their trade, and that had an impact on their cooking.

  But the main influence on the development and shaping of their cuisine was their mobility – their propensity to move from one place to another. Jews moved to escape persecution or economic hardship, or for trade. Their history is one of migration and exile, of the disintegration and dispersion of communities and of the establishment of new ones. In their Diaspora, or dispersion, which began with the destruction of the Second Temple in the first century AD, Jews brought dishes from past homelands to new ones. The way these dishes changed and adopted new forms in a new environment created hybrids that were particular to them. It is the cooking of a nation within a nation, of a culture within a culture, the result of the interweaving of two or more cultures. The almost complete dispersion of the old communities has radiated their styles of cooking to different parts of the world. Jewish history spans more than three millennia and has touched most parts of the globe, but each dish represents a unique historical experience in a particular geographic location.

  Dishes are important because they are a link with the past, a celebration of roots, a symbol of continuity. They are that part of an immigrant culture which survives the longest, kept up even when clothing, music, language and religious observance have been abandoned. Although cooking is fragile because it lives in human activity, it isn’t easily destroyed. It is transmitted in every family like genes, and it has the capacity for change and for passing on new experience from one generation to another. It is possible, by examining family dishes, to define the identity and geographical origin of a family line.

  The anthropologist Joelle Bahloul writes in her study of the Algerian Jewish table, Le Culte de la table dressée: rites et traditions de la table juive algérienne, that every family has its own culinary code, which gives it its bearings vis-á-vis its regional origin, its personal identity and its position and prestige in the old country. The code attributes a menu, a dish, a flavour and a ritual, with different table manners and different forms of conviviality, for every occasion, be it festive or ordinary and everyday. Every feast has its own rites and its own dishes and can be remembered by its tastes and its smells. In the selection of dishes – rejected or adopted, appreciated or depreciated and given mythical, ethical or historical rationalization – there is a logic that combines mythological, historic and moral significance to create a symbol.

  This book was conceived as a grand comprehensive project. To finance visits to what was left of Jewish communities in various countries around the world, I took on other work and finished other b
ooks. But the more I researched and the more I discovered and the more I was fascinated, the more the project seemed impossible. I realized it could take me a life time and would fill several volumes. Scattered as the Jews have been over virtually the whole surface of the earth, residing in lands not their own for 2,000 years, part of different cultures and traditions, it was impossible to attempt to cover all their cooking, from Babylon to New York.

  Not only have there been Jews in every country, but the communities themselves were complex and subdivided into groups from different origins. When I visited the old Jewish Ghetto of Venice and met the ladies who cooked for the old people’s home and for the holiday meals for tourists and Venetian returnees, they explained that Venice did not have one style of Jewish cooking but four. They pointed to the three synagogues standing in the piazza, which had followed different rites – Spanish, Levantine and German – for hundreds of years. The cooking, they said, reflected those styles, and there was also an Italian cuisine, which was mainly southern Italian.

  In Tunisia, there are two communities – the ‘Livornese’, who came from Livorno in Italy, and the local ‘Tun’, of Berber and Arab origins – which have separate synagogues, schools and cemeteries. They do not intermarry, and there are differences in their cooking. Indian Jewry is the most complex, with at least three different communities that have always kept apart and whose histories and cooking are different. In many countries, including Italy, Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey and Greece, Jewish cooking varied from one city to another. The cooking of Jews who originated in Eastern Europe and Russia is relatively standard, but it has changed according to whether emigrants settled in America, Canada, Britain, South Africa or France.