Encyclopedia of Jewish Food

by Gil Marks

  Very special thanks go to my family— Beverly and Harold Marks, Rabbi William and Sharon Altshul, Rabbi Elli and Dr. Efrat Zipporah Schorr, Moshe Raphael Schorr, Adira Tova Schorr, Meira Bracha Schorr, Nechemia Yitzchak Schorr, Penina Miriam Schorr, Rabbi Asher Yaakov and Anat Altshul, Shira Tifara Altshul, Talia Adi Altshul, Rabbi Naftali and Ora Rivka Derovan, Elchanan Matanya Derovan, Shiri Tehila Derovan, Esther Chana Altshul, Aryeh Dov and Zahava Altshul, Emunah Altshul, Merav Shalva Altshul, Adam and Eliana Bracha Pomerantz, Rabbi Jeffrey and Shari Marks, Shlomo Yosef Marks, Miriam Malka Marks, Efrayim Marks, Tehila Marks, Ashira Marks, Rivka Leah Marks, Rabbi Arthur and Aviva Marks, Rivka Marks, Moshe Marks, Leah Marks, Shmuel Marks, Ahron Marks, Yeshai Marks, Yakov Marks, Daniel Marks, Devora Marks, Rachel Marks, Rabbi Labby and Carol Vegh, Yosef and Chana Tzipora Steinberg, Dovid Steinberg, Menashe and Shifra Miriam Berger, Batsheva Bracha Berger, Avrohom Boruch Vegh, Elisheva Vegh, Yisroel Vegh, Adina Rivka Vegh, Moshe Yakov Vegh, Akiva Shabsi Vegh, and Menachem Meir Vegh— who bore the brunt of my culinary development and experimentation.

  Very special thanks go to my dear friend and agent, Rita Rosenkranz, for her perseverance and counsel.

  I want to express my gratitude to all the people at John Wiley & Sons involved in the production of this book. Most especially I want to thank my editor, Linda Ingroia, for her professionalism, enthusiasm, encouragement, insight, and advice; the Encyclopedia of Jewish Food sprang from Linda's vision and trust in me. I would like to thank Alda Trabucchi, the production editor for her attention to detail and care with keeping this book on schedule, Jeff Faust for his beautiful cover design, Deb Glasserman for an attractive interior design that makes so much information enjoyable to read, and Micaela Walker for her diligent photo research.

  Miriam Rubin not only served as a skilled line editor, but also a confidant and counsel during the editing stage. My gratitude also goes to Carrie Bachman for handling the publicity with cheer and dedication.

  I also want to acknowledge the hundreds of people I have interviewed and cooked with from Jewish communities around the world for their insights, recipes, and memories of Jewish food from their perspective. All these people were indispensable in transforming a two-decade dream into reality.

  Photo Credits

  Alamy: Argan Oil, Hamis / Cabbage, Stuffed, Steven May / Etrog (Citron), PhotoStock- Israel / Gulab Jamun, Dinodia Images / Halva/Halvah, Alex Segre / Hamantasch, VStock / Kanafeh/Kadayif, PhotoStock-Israel / Khachapuri, Eddie Gerald / Khobz, Nikreates / Kiddush, Radius Images / Knish, Eightfish / Kolach, Isifa Image Service s.r.o / Kubaneh, PhotoStock-Israel / Lagman, RIA Novosti / Ma'amoul, Tim Hill / Makroud, AA World Travel Library / Malida, PIFood / Manti, Dbimages / Pita, Jon Arnold Images Ltd / Pita, Giles Robberts / Pogácsa, Funkyfood London, Paul Williams / Radish, Rebecca Erol / Rahat Lokum, Peter Chambers / Rosca, Gastromedia / Rose Water, Blickwinkel / Sabra, Israel Images / Sachlav, PhotoStock-Israel / Schnecken, Lightworks Media / Shakshuka, PhotoStock-Israel / Strudel, Funky Travel, Paul Williams / Tagine, Bon Appétit / Tea, Image Source / Varenik/Varenikes, Oleksii Sergieiev / Warka, Bon Appétit / Zalabia, David Gee.

  Art Resource, NY: Cookbook, The Jewish Museum, NY / Etrog (Citron), Menorah with Lulav and Etrog, Art Resource, NY, Erich Lessing / Gefilte Fish, The Jewish Museum, NY; photo by Richard Goodbody / Goat, La vie paysanne (Peasant Life) © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; ADAGP, Paris; Albright-Knox Art Gallery; Marc Chagall / Hanukkah, Bild archiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz; Daniel Moritz Oppenheim; Art Resource, NY / Kosher, The Jewish Museum, NY; Don Eddy: photo by John Parnell / Passover (Pesach), Erich Lessing / Pomegranate, Erich Lessing.

  Badè Museum: Chicken, Badè Museum, Pacific School of Religion

  Bridgeman Art Library: Purim, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel / Sabbath/Shabbat, Private Collection / Sukkot, The Stapleton Collection / Wine, Browse & Darby, London, UK / Yeast, DaTo Images.

  Chameleon's Eye/Rafael Ben-Ari: (both images): Falafel / Mufleta / Watermelon

  Corbis: Bagel, Thomas A. Kelly / Baklava, Norris, photocuisine / Cheesecake, Bettmann / Israel, Morton Beebe / Kaak, Alaa Badarneh, epa / Lahuh, Richard T. Nowitz / Latke, Owen Franken / Olive Oil, Paul Almasy / Phyllo/Fila, Sudres, photocuisine / Pizzarelle, Stefano Scata, Grand Tour / Wedding, Richard T. Nowitz / Whitefish, Alessandro Della Bella, Keystone.

  Forward Association: Cholent/Schalet, Alter Kacyzne / Passover (Pesach)

  Fox's U-Bet Chocolate Syrup: Egg Cream.

  Getty Iimages: Cucumber, David Silverman / Date, Pankaj & Insy Shah / Maror, Linda Lewis / Me'orav Yerushalmi, Menahem Kahana.

  Levy's®: Arnold Products, Inc., a subsidiary of BBU, Inc.: Rye.

  Sercaz, Moshe Lev: Fig.

  Stockfood Munich: Jacket cover, title page: Pomegranate, Michael Paul.

  Introduction

  "But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection."

  —Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (1913)

  To any individual or community, food is more than merely the fuel sustaining life and more than a matter of sensory stimulation. Culinary habits are an expression of a community's history and culture, an accumulation and expression of its environmental influences, experiences, conventions, beliefs, aspirations, and behavior. Food is an enduring element of individual and collective memory. Like its history and culture, each community's food is distinctive. It is a part of and a window to who a community is, how that community came to be, how it exists at a particular moment in time, and what it values in the present and hopes for in the future. No other aspect of existence more closely touches and reveals a community's life— both its everyday routines and its periods of celebration— than food. The contents of the dining table, engendered by a myriad of environmental, technological, demographic, and cultural influences, bespeak the experiences, capabilities, and sensibilities of the population. To know a community is to know its food.

  Jewish life is a series of moments of ritual and tradition, bearing evocative symbolism and crucial life lessons; these experiences fill our existence with security, connection, continuity, and meaning. Associated with these Jewish rituals and traditions is food. Jewish food is a matter of affection, necessity, identity, and ritual. It is viewed as a source of both physical and spiritual sustenance. Food is essential to the observation of the Sabbath and Jewish festivals, establishing and enhancing the spirit of the day. Through food Jews internalize each holiday. For many assimilated Jews, food remains one of or sometimes the only anchor to Jewish culture. Food is an essential part of the collective memory that connects all Jews to their ancestors as well as to contemporary Jews. The accumulation as a whole of current Jewish culinary habits tells the story of the Jewish people over the past two and a half millennia, a tale of unique and influential culinary transformation and transmission.

  Differences and Diversity

  What Jews eat today bears little or no relation to the food prepared in biblical Israel, for it was in the Diaspora that modern Jewish cooking came to be. The central feature of Jewish cooking in the Diaspora has been adaptation. In every location in which they settled, Jews adopted and modified local dishes, adapting foods to their dietary laws, lifestyle, and tastes— often improving them in the process— while symbiotically sharing their traditional dishes and culinary touches with their new neighbors. The dishes, ingredients, techniques, cooking utensils, and food rituals in the homes of Jews generally reflected their social and cultural milieu. When Jews fled an area due to persecution or poverty, they carried their foods to new homes, thereby repeating the process of gradually adopting new fare while spreading their own culinary wealth to many diverse locales. Thus historically the Jewis
h role in cuisine was never innovation per se, but rather transforming and transferring, processes occurring over and over throughout the past two millennia and continuing today.

  American Jews, who are primarily descended from eastern European immigrants, generally associate only their ancestors' customs and foods with being Jewish. In a similar egocentric vein, Americans tend to divide the Jewish world between two European groups— Ashkenazim who originated in Franco-Germany and Sephardim who originated in Iberia— who were forced from their respective homelands and subsequently became the two largest and most widespread forms of Jewish culture. As a result, the sizable Jewish ethnic groups of Mizrachim (Easterners), such as Yemenites (Taimanim) and Persians, are frequently subsumed under the label of Sephardim, while Italians (Italkim) are often tagged as either Ashkenazim or Sephardim. Yet the Jewish communities of Persia, Yemen, and Italy predate those of Iberia and Franco-Germany, and all of these communities produced cultures different from those to which they are mistakenly ascribed. In actuality, a mosaic of enduring Jewish cultural communities of varying sizes and antiquity grew up across the globe— including in Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Ethiopia, Georgia, Greece (Romaniotes), India (Calcutta, Cochin, and Mumbai), Iran (Persia), Iraq, Italy, Kurdistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan (Bukhara), and Yemen— based on neither the Ashkenazic nor Sephardic models, but on their own unique histories, customs, and cuisines.

  Further complicating matters, even the two predominant forms of Jewish cuisine are far from monolithic. Among the areas in which refugees from Spain and Portugal settled were the Levant (Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria), the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia), Bulgaria, Egypt, Greece, Libya, Turkey, and western Europe (England, France, and Holland). Jews from Franco-Germany relocated to Alsace, Austria, the Baltic States (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia), Belarus, Bessarabia, the Czech Republic, Galicia (now southern Poland), Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Ukraine. In their various new homelands, Sephardic and Ashkenazic food developed differently.

  Most of the Sephardim settled in the Mediterranean region and their food retained a commonality. Fifteenth-century Spanish Christian writers noted the distinctive marks of Jewish cooking— long-simmered stews, the pervasiveness of vegetables, the use of olive oil for frying, the frequent appearance of fish, and the prevalence of onions and garlic in meat dishes. Today, these culinary practices, now emblematic of the Mediterranean diet, remain the basis of Sephardic cookery. Yet Sephardic food from the Maghreb is quite different from that of western Europe, the Levant, the Balkans, or even northeastern Africa. Since it was primarily in the Ottoman Empire that the Spanish-Portuguese refugees found haven, the synthesis of Iberian and Ottoman cuisines emerged as the most conspicuous form of Sephardic cooking.

  The areas in which the Ashkenazim settled had similar produce, or lack thereof, and there was constant interaction between these communities through expulsions, trade, rabbinic discourse, and marriages. Jews living in the original home of the Ashkenazim in northern France and southwestern Germany demonstrated none of the Slavic influences of eastern Ashkenazim. Yet they shared many dishes, customs, and a rabbinic and cultural heritage. Since the ancestors of the majority of Ashkenazim came from the Slavic regions of eastern Europe (Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, and Ukraine), it is this form of Ashkenazic cooking that is most widespread and which most Americans associate with Jewish food.

  There were once small Jewish communities in other countries, such as in Kaifeng and Canton in China, but the descendants of those Jews do not actively identify themselves as Jewish and do not participate in Jewish cultural life. Therefore, although American Jews demonstrate a pronounced love of Chinese food, Chinese dishes per se are not part of cultural Jewish food.

  Consequently, defining Jewish cuisine is not a simple task. Borscht, brisket, buckwheat, and bagels comprised a prominent part of the Jewish diet in Poland; couscous, tagines, lamb, and salads dominated the menu in Morocco; and bulgur, shorabit khodar (vegetable and legume soups), and kibbeh (ground meat dishes) were basic in the Levant. The cooking fat of choice was schmaltz in northern Europe, olive oil in the Mediterranean region, and lamb's tail fat or sesame oil in central Asia. Even different parts of Poland developed quite distinct gastronomy, each affected by neighboring countries as well as local developments. In addition, the cuisine of urban areas inevitably differed greatly from the rustic dishes of even nearby rural sites, while typically the cookery of one village differed to varying degrees from that of another.

  Jews may literally eat anything from the petite madeleines so cherished by Marcel Proust— his mother was a member of an Alsatian Jewish family— to the grilled organs so beloved by James Joyce's classic Irish Jewish character Leopold Bloom. Jewish food may be the meager fare of the impoverished masses that struggled to survive in the shtetlach of the Russian Pale (the only portion of czarist Russia in which Jews were permitted to live, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea). Or it can be prepared by Marie-Antonine Carême, one of history's most important chefs— he was regarded as the founder of La Grand Cuisine and his last position was with Baron James de Rothschild in Paris. Some wealthy Jewish families even educated their chefs in the intricacies of kosher cooking and traditional Jewish dishes. After two thousand years of living in almost every country and culture, Jewish cuisine is the cuisine of the world.

  Is There a Jewish Food?

  If food in general is basically fusion, and the foods Jews eat are adopted from their locales and constantly evolving and changing, is there actually such a thing as Jewish food?

  Jewish comedians have long based a good deal of their material on food. Humorist Allan Sherman, in his 1962 parody "There Is Nothin' Like a Lox," sang, "We got herring sweet and sour. We got pickles old and young. We got corned beef and salami and a lot of tasty tongue. We got Philadelphia cream cheese in a little wooden box. What ain't we got? We ain't got lox! We got cole slaw, freshly made, and chopped liver, also fresh. And a lot of things to please a man whose name is Moish or Hesh. We got plenty pumpernickel. We got bagels hard as rocks. What ain't we got? We ain't got lox!"

  Sherman touched on fare associated with and enjoyed by mid-twentieth-century Ashkenazim in the United States, none of which the Jews really invented or could claim to be exclusively theirs. Around the same time, comedian Lenny Bruce, in one of his better-known routines, ruminated on the contemporary nature of Jewish culture in 1960s America: "If you live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish. It doesn't matter even if you're Catholic; if you live in New York, you're Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you're going to be goyish even if you're Jewish. Kool-Aid is goyish. Evaporated milk is goyish even if the Jews invented it. Chocolate is Jewish and fudge is goyish. Fruit salad is Jewish. Lime Jell-O is goyish. Lime soda is very goyish. All Drake's cakes are goyish. Pumpernickel is Jewish and, as you know, white bread is very goyish. Instant potatoes, goyish. Black cherry soda's very Jewish, macaroons are very Jewish."

  The items that Bruce identified as goyish had superficial style but were lacking in excitement, while the Jewish ones had less panache but more chutzpah. Bruce was taking aim at the Jewish propensity to see the world as starkly divided between Jews and non-Jews, as well as at Jews who were ashamed of their Jewishness in the face of Waspish society in general. Yet Sherman's and Bruce's lists could be revised to reflect any place or time, past or present, because Jews have always gravitated to and accepted particular items. Certain things, certain foods, "feel" Jewish. Why? Certainly, because they are used by Jews. Yet more than that, particular foods become enmeshed in Jewish life, culture, and identity. Throughout most of history, Jews proved adept at adopting and Judaizing traditions from the non-Jewish societies in which they lived without assimilating into the wider culture.

  In particular, over the many centuries, the dietary laws contributed to the survival of the Jewish people; they shaped and defined the Jewish identity and, in the process, helped to determine Jewish fare. Observa
nt Jews could not simply adopt all of the dishes of their new homelands. The dietary laws exclude taboo foods— notably pork (and any mammals that are not ruminants), lard, and shellfish— as well as the mixing of milk and meat. Therefore, Jews replaced these items with others. The dietary laws produced a culinary commonality within each Jewish community, as well as social networks connecting diverse Jewish communities.

  In addition, the Jewish lifestyle— shaped by Sabbath prohibitions, holiday traditions, Torah study, and life-cycle events— produced uniquely Jewish dishes that, although usually based on local foods, often manifested similarities to Jewish dishes and customs from other locales. Wine and bread are ubiquitous elements of Sabbath and holiday meals. Fish on the Sabbath is a tradition dating back to at least the time of the Talmud. Hot dishes slow-heated for many hours for Sabbath meals are found in all the Jewish communities. Since many other dishes were prepared ahead to be served cold on the Sabbath, in the days before the advent of artificial refrigeration, vinegar was commonly added as a preservative and often sweeteners and/or raisins were included to counter the acidity of the vinegar. As a result, cold and sweet-and-sour dishes proliferate in the Jewish culinary repertoire throughout the globe. The various Jewish communities incorporate items mentioned in the Bible or suggested by the Talmud— such as almonds, apples, dates, raisins, honey, and wine— as symbolic ingredients in assorted festival dishes. Thus the plov (rice pilaf) made by the Jews of Uzbekistan differed from that of their non-Jewish neighbors not only because the Jews omitted butter, but also because they included apples, quinces, and raisins.