The Jewish table and cuisines

There is no single Jewish cuisine, but Jewish cuisines — in the plural — shaped by two thousand years of dispersion and by fidelity to a shared foundation of laws. The Jewish table is at once the most universal and the most particular of institutions: universal, because it everywhere obeys the same dietary prescriptions inherited from the Torah; particular, because each community in exile has wedded those prescriptions to the products, spices, and techniques of the land that received it. From Vilna to Baghdad, from Salonika to Marrakech, from Cochin to New York, the Jewish pot has by turns simmered the herring of cold seas and the couscous of the oases, the stuffed carp of Polish ponds and the saffron-scented lamb of Persian courts.

This diversity nonetheless rests upon a common grammar. The laws of kashrut (kashrut) trace the boundaries of the permitted and the forbidden; the liturgical calendar imposes its rhythms, its fasts, and its feasts; the weekly Shabbat commands a cuisine of rest, simmered the day before so as not to transgress the prohibition against kindling fire. Within these constraints, women — the foremost guardians of the alimentary hearth — invented solutions of prodigious ingenuity, transmitted not through learned writing but through gesture, the pinch, the scent, and memory.

The present work intends to be a journey through this "living archive." For Jewish cuisine is a geography of exile: every dish recounts a climate, a market, an encounter, a trade route, sometimes an expulsion. To eat Jewish is to carry in one's mouth the memory of a displacement and the persistence of a fidelity.

At the root of all Jewish cooking lies kashrut, the body of rules determining which foods are permitted (kosher, "fit," "compliant") and which are forbidden. These laws draw their source from the Torah, principally in the books of Leviticus (chapter 11) and Deuteronomy (chapter 14), before being extensively developed by the rabbinic literature of the Talmud and then codified in compendia such as the Shulchan Aruch of Joseph Caro in the sixteenth century [Encyclopaedia Judaica, Dietary Laws].

Three principles structure the whole. First, only the meat of ruminant mammals with cloven hooves is permitted — beef, mutton, goat — along with certain poultry; pork, but also the hare and the camel, are prohibited. As for sea products, only fish bearing fins and scales are eaten, which excludes crustaceans, mollusks, and eels [Leviticus 11; Shulchan Aruch, Yoreh Deah]. Second, ritual slaughter (shechita), performed by a trained slaughterer (shochet), must be painless and accompanied by the removal of the blood, itself forbidden for consumption. Third, the verse "You shall not boil a kid in its mother's milk," repeated three times in the Torah, grounds the rigorous separation of meat (bassari) and dairy (halavi), which entails distinct utensils, dishes, and sometimes kitchens [Exodus 23:19; Encyclopaedia Judaica].

From this third rule flows the major invention of Jewish cooking: the category of parve — neutral — which gathers foods that are neither meat nor dairy (eggs, fish, vegetables, fruits, grains) and permits all combinations. It is this category that explains the extraordinary Jewish creativity around butterless pastry, vegetable fats and oil, and the central place of fish in festive meals. Constraint, far from sterilizing the cuisine, has been its inventive engine. According to many food historians, it is precisely the obligation to substitute permitted equivalents for prohibited ingredients that gave rise to some of the most characteristic preparations of the Jewish table.

No moment shapes the Jewish table more than Shabbat, the seventh day, during which thirty-nine categories of work are forbidden, including the kindling and tending of fire. How, then, can a hot meal be served on the day of rest? The answer gave rise to one of the most widespread archetypes of Jewish cuisine the world over: the single simmered dish, prepared on Friday before sunset and kept warm throughout the night, until Saturday's lunch [Encyclopaedia Judaica, Sabbath].

Among the Ashkenazim of Central and Eastern Europe, this dish is called tcholent (sometimes cholent): a thick stew of beans, barley, potatoes, and beef, slowly braised. Its name has often been connected to the medieval French chaud-lent, an appealing etymological hypothesis that linguists nonetheless still debate. In Sephardic and Eastern communities, the same principle takes the name hamin (from the Hebrew ham, "hot") or, in the Maghreb, dafina ("the covered," "the hidden"): here one finds chickpeas, wheat, potatoes, eggs hardened in the cooking—the famous huevos haminados, whose shells slowly brown—sometimes meatballs and dates.

Beyond the simmered dish, the Shabbat table opens with precise food rites: the wine of blessing (kiddush) and the two braided breads, the hallot (singular halla), recalling the double portion of manna gathered on the eve of Shabbat in the desert. Fish holds a place of honor there, both for its symbolic value of fertility and for its convenient parve status. Thus Shabbat, an abstract liturgical framework, became embodied in a culinary materiality of remarkable stability across the continents.

Ashkenazi cuisine is that of the Jews who settled from the Middle Ages in the Rhine valley, then migrated toward Poland, Lithuania, Galicia, Hungary, and the Russian Empire. It bears the imprint of a harsh climate and relatively scarce resources: it makes use of turnip, cabbage, beetroot, potato, geese, and pond carp, with a fondness for sweet-and-savory pairings and for goose fat (schmaltz) as a substitute for butter in meat dishes.

Several preparations have become emblematic. Gefilte fish — minced, seasoned fish poached as dumplings or stuffed back into the skin — answers a double imperative: to stretch a costly foodstuff and to allow the eating of fish on Shabbat without having to remove the bones, a gesture akin to forbidden labor. Beetroot bortsch, kreplach (stuffed dumplings akin to dim sum, possibly the fruit of ancient commercial exchanges), latkes (fried potato pancakes eaten at Hanukkah), and kugel (a sweet or savory baked dish of noodles or potatoes) make up a repertoire recognizable above all others.

Ashkenazi pastry, for its part, traveled until it became, in the twentieth century, a part of American food culture: the bagel, a bread boiled and then baked, and the babka, a twisted brioche with chocolate or cinnamon, attest to the worldwide spread of a heritage born in the shtetls of Eastern Europe. The destruction of these communities during the Shoah turned their cuisine into a site of memory: to preserve a grandmother's recipe from Lodz or Vilna is often to perpetuate the only tangible vestige of an annihilated world.

The term Sephardi (from Sefarad, Spain) refers first to the descendants of the Iberian Jews expelled in 1492, who scattered across the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, the Netherlands, and Italy. By convenience, the so-called mizrahi (« Eastern ») communities, which never passed through Europe, are often included: Jews of Iraq, Yemen, Persia, Kurdistan, and the Caucasus, whose presence in the Near East sometimes goes back to the Babylonian exile of the sixth century BCE.

These cuisines of the warm lands differ radically from their Ashkenazi cousins. Olive oil replaces animal fat; spices — cumin, coriander, turmeric, saffron, cinnamon — abound; stuffed vegetables, dried fruits, and lamb reign supreme. The Jews of Salonica and Istanbul preserved in their cooking, as in their Judeo-Spanish language (ladino), the memory of medieval Spain, through dishes such as boyos, flaky bourekas, and quince preserves. In the Maghreb, the Jewish table shared couscous with its neighbors, while imposing upon it its kosher variants and its festive customs.

Several preparations that have become world-famous find their roots or their relays here. Falafel and hummus, long common to the entire Levant, were adopted by the mizrahi communities and then elevated into culinary symbols of the State of Israel. Harissa, Tunisian briks stuffed with egg, and the Iraqi t'bit — the local version of the Shabbat simmered dish, made with stuffed chicken and rice — illustrate this southern inventiveness. The Jewish cuisine of the East thus reminds us that, long before Europe, Judaism was deeply rooted in the Mediterranean and Mesopotamian basin.

If Shabbat sets the rhythm of the week, the annual cycle of festivals orchestrates a culinary dramaturgy in which every dish carries meaning. Jewish cooking is, in this sense, a symbolic language as much as a matter of nutrition.

The most codified rite is that of Pessah (Passover), which commemorates the Exodus from Egypt. For eight days, the hametz — any trace of fermented grain — is banished from the home, carefully removed, and replaced by unleavened bread (matza), baked in haste as the Hebrews did when fleeing Egypt. The Seder meal lays out the memory-foods on a single plate: the bitter herbs (maror) of slavery, the harosset (a paste of fruit and wine evoking the mortar of the bricks), the salt water of tears, the bone recalling the paschal sacrifice [Encyclopaedia Judaica, Passover]. Each community adapts these symbols according to its own produce: the Ashkenazi harosset blends apple and walnut, while the Eastern versions add dates, figs and spices.

The other festivals have their own delicacies. At Rosh Hashanah, the new year, the apple is dipped in honey to augur a sweet year, and one eats foods whose names or shapes are auspicious. At Hanukkah, the festival of Lights, fried foods — potato latkes among the Ashkenazim, sufganiot (doughnuts) among Israelis — recall the miracle of the oil. At Purim, one savours hamantaschen (“Haman's ears”), triangular pastries filled with poppy seed or jam. Fasting, finally, is part of this grammar of taste in the negative: at Yom Kippur, total abstinence precedes a breaking-of-the-fast meal, and it is in the hollow of hunger that the Jewish table also affirms its spirituality.

Jewish cuisine has been transmitted along a singular path: not through great treatises, but through the home, and most often through women. For centuries, recipes were scarcely written down; they passed from mother to daughter, by the pinch and the glance, in a gestural orality where exact measurement gave way to the memory of the right taste. This domestic transmission made cooking a privileged site of identity continuity, at times more resilient than religious practice itself: many assimilated families kept the festive dishes long after abandoning the rite.

The historiography of this cuisine is recent. It is hardly before the nineteenth century that printed Jewish cookbooks appear, including the famous Jewish Manual attributed to Lady Judith Montefiore (London, 1846), often cited as the first collection of Jewish cooking in the English language. In the twentieth century, authors such as Claudia Roden, with her monumental Book of Jewish Food (1996), undertook to gather, in the manner of ethnographers, recipes threatened with oblivion, thus saving the culinary memory of dispersed or vanished communities [Claudia Roden, The Book of Jewish Food].

For Jewish cuisine is, perhaps more than any other, an archive of exile. Every dish is a map: it tells where one comes from, by which roads one passed, which peoples one lived alongside. The displacement of communities in the twentieth century — the exodus from Eastern Europe, the mass departure of Jews from Arab countries toward Israel and France after 1948, immigration to the Americas — brought about an unprecedented intermingling of these traditions. In contemporary Israel as in the diasporas, gefilte fish and couscous, bagel and bourekas now sit side by side on the same tables, recomposing a plural heritage. To preserve a recipe is thus to perform an act of fidelity: to ensure that, in the aroma of a dish simmered on a Friday evening, the memory of an effaced geography endures.

At the end of this journey, Jewish cuisine appears as a fertile paradox: profoundly one through the Law that governs it, infinitely plural through the lands that have nourished it. Kashrut provides its grammar; Shabbat and the calendar of festivals impose its syntax; but the vocabulary varies according to climates and exiles, from the Baltic herring to Persian saffron. No other culinary tradition bears so visibly, in its cooking pots, the entire history of a people and its dispersions.

What the Jewish table ultimately reveals is the power of domestic transmission. Where empires have scattered, where persecutions have annihilated entire communities, the family recipe has survived, fragile and tenacious, in a mother's gesture or the memory of a fragrance. Cuisine, a living archive, thus preserves what written archives have not always been able to safeguard: the tangible savour of a world, and the obstinate fidelity of a memory.