Review: Sephardi, Cooking the History
Imagine if your cooking endangered your life. Not because of careless food handling, or food poisoning, or toxic ingredients, but because what you cooked identified you as an illegal person.
That was the case for Sephardi Jews during and after the Spanish Inquisition of 1492, which finally expelled remaining Jews (and Moslems) from Spain. Some Jews stayed on, converts to Christianity in theory, but in practice remaining Jewish. The crypto-Jews, or conversos, or Judaisers (as they were known), maintained their culinary habits. No cooking on the Sabbath, no cooking with pork or lard, special dishes. And what they cooked meant they were often dobbed in by neighbours or servants, and were then charged. The trials of the Inquisition are one of the sources of Jewish eating in the 15th and 16th centuries. This or that person was seen eating chicken during Lent, this woman cooked a dish of silverbeet with chickpeas.
Those Inquisition trials are among the sources used by Helene Jawara Piner in her book Sephardi, Cooking the History, along with early Arabic and Catalan cookbooks, and the Regimen of Health by Maimonides, the great 12th century Jewish scholar, philosopher and physician. This extraordinary work of food scholarship gives recipes of the Jews of Spain and the Diaspora from the 13th century to today.
There are distinctive dishes. There are the recurring ingredients and flavours: silverbeet, eggplant, chickpeas, eggs, cinnamon, pies, long-cooked dishes. In Inquistion times, there were no tomatoes, peppers, potatoes or chocolate – they all came from the Americas. So most of the recipes do not include those ingredients, although Helene Jawara Piner does add tomatoes and peppers to a dish of noodles with tuna, saffron and mint.
Some of the recipes are complex, some are not entirely suited to modern tastes, and some are irresistible gastronomic ties to centuries past. Maimonides’ sauteed green vegetables, anyone? Or the spinach mina (a kind of pie)? And perhaps the two converso pies, the meat and the fish. And most certainly the baked mugabbana, the little cheese pies that have culinary cousins throughout the Jewish and Arabic world.
What this book shows in so many ways is how much food matters to cultural and religious identity. It’s an exceptional work of practical scholarship that enables readers to cook and eat history, and to realise that historical knowledge cannot be tucked away in the past. Sephardi is a living history book.
It is not alone, and the author is at pains to point out her debt to David Gitlitz, who wrote the preface. He and Linda Kay Davidson were the authors of A Drizzle of Honey, about the lives and recipes of Spain’s secret Jews.
Sephardi Cooking the History, recipes of the Jews of Spain and the Diaspora, from the 13th century to today. Helene Jawhara Piner. (Cherry Orchard Books, 2021)