New Jewish cookbook arrives just in time for High Holy Days
‘Sephardi’ is culmination of five years of research.
My first Jewish cookbook was Joan Nathan’s “Jewish Holiday Kitchen,” and it became my kitchen bible while I was living in Israel from 1983 to 1991.
It covered not just the food of Jewish holidays, but also history and cuisine from countries around the world. It informed me of a vast Jewish culinary heritage and gave recipes for every Jewish occasion. I came to understand that there was a lot more to Jewish food than the matzo ball soup and gefilte fish of my youth, and I wanted to learn all about it.
With the coming Jewish High Holy Days, which started with Rosh Hashanah at sundown Monday and will end Sept. 29 with the conclusion of Simchat Torah, I am immersed in the small trove of recipes that I have curated especially for this time of year.
Many of them come from now-tattered cookbooks that fill my bookshelves. From Edda Servi Machlin’s “The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews,” I learned about Italian Jewish foods such as carciofi alla Giudia (deep-fried artichokes that look like a crispy chrysanthemum) and polpette di pollo e matzo (chicken-matzo meatballs). I learned about Sephardic cookery from Copeland Marks’ tome “Sephardic Cooking,” and found recipes for dishes I had eaten in Israel like Yemenite jachnoon (baked bread-like rolls with whole eggs), borekas (savory pastries filled with cheese, spinach or potatoes) and koobeh (stuffed dumplings). I also learned about Middle Eastern cuisine from Claudia Roden’s “A Book of Middle Eastern Food.”
Over the years, more of Roden’s and Nathan’s Jewish food books found their way to my bookshelves, as did Joyce Goldstein’s “Cucina Ebraica,” where I found recipes for spinaci con pinoli e passerine (spinach with pine nuts and raisins), fritelle di zucca (squash fritters from the Veneto) and peperoni ripieni (peppers stuffed with eggplant), and her
“Sephardic Flavors,” from which I still make gayna al orno (roast chicken with apples and pomegranate).
More recently, Leah Koenig’s “The Jewish Cookbook” has a beautiful jeweled rice dish, studded with dried fruits, pistachios and pomegranate seeds, and a roast chicken with honey and thyme that is as simple as it is delicious and works for holiday and everyday meals alike.
I swore off bringing home new Jewish cookbooks — and cookbooks in general — because my bookshelves were overflowing and I didn’t feel like passing off new books as furniture or an art installation.
But I was unable to resist reading about them, and I’ve been intrigued by Hélène Jawhara Piñer’s “Sephardi: Cooking the History, Recipes of the Jews of Spain and the Diaspora, from the 13th Century to Today,” published in June.
The recipes are gleaned from the history of the people of Spain, from court testimony given during the Spanish Inquisition and from Arabic and Catalan cookbooks dating back to the Middle Ages.
Piñer holds a PHD in medieval and culinary history from the French University of Tours. “Sephardi” is the culmination of five