So You Think You Know From Jewish Food?

THE BOOK OF JEWISH FOOD: An Odyssey From Samarkand to New York By Claudia Roden (Alfred A. Knopf: $35; 668 pp.)

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Can anyone imagine a more confusing moment at which to compile a panoramic survey of Jewish food? In America, the old outlines of Jewish cooking were weirdly redrawn when schmaltz-and-chopped-liver cuisine fell into dietary disrepute and a large, sublimely ignorant non-Jewish audience discovered miracles like blueberry-pecan bagels.

Forty or 50 years ago, most people in this country would have defined Jewish cooking as the food of the Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazic Jews whose families came here from northern and eastern Europe between about 1880 and 1920.

Not that this cuisine appeared all of a piece to those reared on it. It represented many pockets of tradition from Cologne to Kiev.

As they put down roots, the immigrants tended to suspect not just the food of non-Jews but that of other Jews. Even those who didn’t keep kosher homes were quick to close ranks against outsiders. A telling passage of Mimi Sheraton’s “In My Mother’s Kitchen” mentions the Seder food of one relative by marriage:

Wilma was Hungarian, and I would hear my mother say “they” did such terrible things as putting ground almonds in the gefullte fish, which made it heavy, and grated carrots, which made it sweet.

For a long time, the major Jewish communities of the big Northern cities were intensely parochial. They generally ignored the presence of non-Ashkenazic Jews and often found it hard to imagine that Jews existed in strange places such as the American South.

Then came eye-opening changes. First was the example of Israel, where a stirring and inharmonious reunion of many peoples scattered by the Jewish Diaspora began nearly half a century ago. Waves of American immigration from unfamiliar sources dealt further shocks to their notion of Jewishness.

Suddenly the descendants of the already miscellaneous Ashkenazic Jewish community faced multiple invasions from the former orbit of the Sephardim. These were the Spanish and Portuguese Jews who found refuge from the Inquisition in North Africa and the Middle East and eventually traveled as far east as India.

It has not been easy for those who hark back to visions of borscht-circuit blowouts and people just off the plane from Iraq, Iran, North Africa, Syria or Uzbekistan to recognize each other’s cooking as “Jewish.”

The person who could do justice to all this would have to be quite a researcher--and something more. The unique difficulty and joy of the subject lie in the way Jews have belonged yet not belonged to every land ever affected by the Diaspora. The writer able to bring these complexities to life has to be not just a traveler but a true exile.

I would not slight various authors who have produced recent international Jewish recipe collections of merit. But in all honesty, none remotely approaches the qualifications of Claudia Roden, a Sephardic Jew who was driven out of Egypt not several millenniums ago but as a very young woman during the 1956 Suez crisis. Her parents fled to England, and eventually she married into an Ashkenazic family from Russia. She writes that her father’s family viewed this sort of intermarriage as “a mesalliance and a major catastrophe” and that her new mother-in-law “announced at once that she was sorry but she would not eat my fancy food.”

“The Book of Jewish Food” is thus the work of a quintessential outside-insider, someone who has seen parochial (and great) worlds collide. More than 16 years in the making, it has much to say to American Jews precisely because Roden devotes most of her attention to other traditions. People who go looking for their own special corner of this immense historical mural may not see just what they expect, but that’s the point.

The recipes are divided into two large groupings, each introduced by a lucid and thought-provoking historical essay. The second section, “The Sephardic World,” contains about three times as many dishes as “The Ashkenazi World.” This in itself will startle many American purchasers. More surprises are in store as they page through the Ashkenazic section and discover what is and isn’t included.

Borscht and schav (sorrel soup) are disposed of with one recipe apiece and little talk of their niceties or many variants. Forget about sablefish, whitefish salad, onion rolls, Linzer cookies or sour cream coffee cake.

Many of the Ashkenazic recipes are from France, England or elsewhere, e.g., oignons aux marrons, poule-au-bouillon, fried gefilte fish (found only in Britain) and a version of teiglach (hard pastry nuggets coated with honey syrup) attributed to Lithuanian Jews in South Africa. Familiar American Jewish dishes become unfamiliar in Roden’s handling: Her rye and pumpernickel breads have little in common with our favorite bakery versions, and touches like putting fast-acting yeast into bagel dough may draw indignant complaints.

In other words, many American Jews who pick up this book will rapidly have to “see ourselves as others see us.” That Roden has more on her mind than the tribal ways of Delancey Street or Miami Beach is clear when you glance at the interspersed historical sketches of various communities and find “The American Story” sharing honors in the Ashkenazic section with “France,” “Israel” and, very conspicuously, “Anglo-Jewry.” (We are told that the epochal British marriage of fish and chips is traceable to 19th century Jewish fishmongers.)

Already the author has given reader-cooks more fuel for trans-cultural insight than anyone else I can think of, and the best is yet to come.

When Roden turns to the Sephardic world, one feels a new sense of engagement and eagerness. The portrayals of historical Jewish outposts are more varied--Aleppo, Salonika, Istanbul, Bukhara, three Indian communities, Tunisia, many corners of Italy--and more intricate. Everything in the recipes of this section seems to click with everything else. It’s a feast for anyone, whether strictly kosher or not even Jewish, who loves the varied cuisines of North Africa, the rest of the Mediterranean basin and the Middle East extending toward India.

Although Roden has worked intelligently to bring together many strands of the Ashkenazic legacy, it’s plain that her heart lies with, as she describes it, the “sunny, hedonistic” world of the Sephardim. The reason isn’t hard to see; until as recently as her childhood, many Sephardic Jews could happily assume that amity and free cultural interchange with their Muslim neighbors were the normal state of affairs. The beleaguered ghetto or shtetl mentality and the strict piety it fostered among the northern Jews are not Roden’s heritage. For them, as she sees it, “food was the link between the holy and the profane,” while the food of the unabashedly worldly Sephardim was and is “of a kind that lifts the spirits.”

Whether this is the whole truth (and surely we can expect some demurrals), the author’s passionate affinity with the food of places like Cairo, Aleppo and Baghdad fairly leaps off the pages. Admirers of her celebrated “A Book of Middle Eastern Food” (first published in 1968) will recognize parts of this material as a kind of companion piece or sequel. The connection between the two works is crucial and touching.

“The Book of Jewish Food” is filled with lemony cold vegetable salads, multiple pilafs and pastas, several dozen savory pies or pastries, many variations on couscous, assorted “Sabbath pots” that would be put into a baker’s oven late Friday and retrieved the next day, inventive fruit pastes and jams, a treasury of small nut-enriched sweetmeats. Nearly all of these dishes proclaim how deeply the Sephardic Jews belonged to the general culinary melting pot of the old Ottoman Empire.

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This section is all about the linking influence of food in a fragmented world. Something very important comes to life when Roden notes that Muslim friends in Egypt have told her they miss a Jewish version of the Arab maamoul (little cookie-like pastries with date or nut fillings) that apparently vanished after the Suez crisis. It is an affirmation of bonds that are more than gastronomic.

Anyone thinking of buying “The Book of Jewish Food” should realize that it doesn’t pretend to absolutely encyclopedic status. Roden declines to pursue all scholarly conundrums or dig into the cuisines of all Jewish groups ever recorded on the planet. Much as I’d like to see something about Jews in Latin America or to get more lowdown than Roden provides on the food of the Ethiopian or “lost” Chinese Jews, it would be unrealistic to cavil. The richest books, like this one, are rich precisely in that they leave you with a sense of still more worlds left to discover.

As for the actual recipes: They are neither super-perfectionist (Roden is quite happy with instant couscous and uninterested in guiding you to some absolutely authentic type of ground red pepper) nor greatly concerned with details like pan sizes and exact timings. I think the publishers could have helped American users with such untranslated British terms as “curd cheese” and “Demerara sugar,” but skilled cooks should be able to cope well enough.

I was mostly delighted with the handful of recipes I tried--mostly because I’m still trying to figure out why the ordinary long-grain rice I used for a coconut-enriched pulau with green peas took such a phenomenally long time to cook. Otherwise, everything I tested was good or excellent: an agreeably soupy, delicately spiced saffron chicken with thin pasta; a wonderfully brisk and non-gloppy coleslaw; a plain, slightly lemony cheesecake that’s a refreshing contrast to the usual sludgy American versions; chewy and satisfying sweet-and-sour meatballs; a luscious masala chicken from the Bene Israel community of India.

Unfortunately, the index of this important work is an inconsistent mess (under “stew” we get none of Roden’s lamb stews and just a couple of the beef ones) and there are numerous copy editing flubs (the word “water” was left out of the aforementioned pulau directions). It pains me to report that after less than four months, the binding of the beautifully designed volume is already coming apart.

Nevertheless, I expect to be using it with gratitude and pleasure for another 30 years--in one piece or half a dozen.