The Serious Side of Jewish Cookbooks

A decade ago I wrote a less than honest review of Claudia Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York. I said, “This cookbook is possibly the greatest popular Jewish history published in the 20th century.” I did not say that I couldn’t bring myself to read much of The Book of Jewish Food at any one time.

Roden is a remarkable cookbook author not only because her recipes are intelligently chosen and actually work, but also because she describes their social and historical contexts in writerly prose. No matter where she wanders in The Book of Jewish Food—a Jewish quarter of Istanbul, say, or London’s East End in the late 19th century, she evokes these places—their look, feel and smell—with great clarity. But while reading The Book of Jewish Food, I realized I was again and again encountering communities that had vanished. Roden’s ability to resurrect these people and places only sharpens the reader’s sense of collective loss. I can’t think of another book that I so admired and so often set aside.

Roden wasn’t the first author of a Jewish cookbook to enrich recipes with narrative. In 1979, Joan Nathan’s Jewish Holiday Cookbook introduced us to “eighty-four-year-old Ada Baum of Boston [who] would never think of making her weekly hallah without first separating some dough,” and told us that “Jacob Licht, father of Rhode Island’s former governor, Frank Licht, has been a master matzah-brei maker all his life.” However, Nathan’s skillful, almost sociological, approach didn’t stray far into Jewish history. In her Holiday Cookbook, Nathan tells us, for example, that she ate “crunchy-on-the-outside, chewy-on-the-inside” macaroons at the “home of Greek Jews in Boston.” She doesn’t tell us what became of Greek Jews in Greece.

By giving glimpses of the lives and personalities behind Jewish recipes, Nathan unlocked a door that Roden later thrust open. The Book of Jewish Food’s success demonstrated that cookbooks could be more than instruction manuals for cooks or escapist reading for gourmets and gourmands.

This was perhaps inevitable. For Jews, food has never been a simple matter of weighing and measuring and technique. I now understand that a truly Jewish cookbook can’t accomodate itself to the cookbook’s traditional form. Following The Book of Jewish Food’s publication, at least one significant difference between Jews and non-Jews has become obvious: non-Jewish cookbooks don’t talk a lot about exile and death.

“The Trevino community was eradicated in the Gran auto de fe on April 11, 1649, Mexico’s bloodiest, in which 109 crypto-Jews were condemned to death,” reports A Drizzle of Honey: The Lives and Recipes of Spain’s Secret Jews (St. Martin’s Press, 1999) by way of introducing a simple recipe for roasted eggs. Authors David Gitlitz and Linda Kay Davidson scrutinized hundreds of Inquisition testimonies and confessions in order to recreate dishes cherished by conversos, Jews who outwardly converted to Roman Catholicism, some of whom continued to maintain Jewish lives at home. A seemingly endless parade of blabbermouth servant girls and tattletale peasant boys provided the culinary scuttlebutt that inquisitors used as pretext for visiting horror on “secret Jews.” To eat cold meat on Saturday, we learn, was enough to invite the Church’s wrath. Prefacing a recipe for liver and egg sausage, A Drizzle of Honey tells us that conversa Beatriz Nunez, who confessed to not eating “scaleless fish,” was found “guilty of being an unrepentant heretic and [was burned] alive in 1485.”

A Jewish-Hungarian cookbook entitled A Taste of the Past (University Press of New England, 2004) would necessarily touch on similar themes. Written by émigré architect Andras Koerner, this 420-page work recreates the homelife and homecooking of Koerner’s great-grandmother, Riza Baruch, who died, mercifully, in 1938. Despite the Mitteleuropan charm of Koerner’s pen-and-ink illustrations, and Riza’s geshmak recipes for cholent dumplings and almond-studded sweet-and-sour meatballs, A Taste of the Past doesn’t present an entirely cozy world. Koerner informs us that “one of the last major blood-libel show-trials, where Jews were accused of killing Christians in order to use their blood, was held in Hungary in 1882.” Near the end of his cookbook, Koerner tells his readers that after World War II, only five Jews remained in Moson, the Hungarian town where his great-grandmother lived and where his mother was born and raised. “Most of the more than 700 Jews who lived there before 1939 were killed; the rest moved away.”

One rainy afternoon, after perusing a dozen recent Jewish cookbooks, I reached for Olive Trees and Honey: A Treasury of Vegetarian Recipes from Jewish Communities Around the World (Wiley Publishing, 2005), a title which at first glance suggested an absence of bloodshed. I opened to a random page: “Europeans prefer the textural feel of firmer green lentils in their soup, while Middle Easterners favor the smoother taste of red lentils,” writes author Gil Marks. So far, so good. I opened to another page: “Franco-Germany emerged as a major center of Jewish learning and life. Subsequently, the Jews of the area suffered a series of anti-Semitic attacks, including the Crusades, the Rindfleisch massacres (1298-99), the Armleder massacres (1336-37), and the Black Death massacres (1348-50).”

For much-needed contrast, I turned to the 50 or so non-Jewish cookbooks I own. My 1997 edition of The Joy of Cooking limits its potentially disturbing material to recipes for armadillo, muskrat, porcupine, and woodchuck. (About the woodchuck: “Watch for and remove 7 to 9 small kernel-like glands under the forelegs.”) My copy of Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art (Kodansha International, 1980), a canonical text in the cookbook world, makes no mention of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Marcella Hazan’s famous Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking (Knopf, 1992) discusses neither fascism nor Mussolini. Martin Yan’s Chinese Cooking for Dummies (For Dummies, 2000) keeps mum on, among other topics, the Cultural Revolution and the Rape of Nanjing. False Tongues and Sunday Bread: A Guatemalan and Mayan Cookbook (Donald I. Fine, 1985), steers clear of the violence that consumed Guatemala, and its indigenous population in particular, during the 1980s. In this 400-page book, author Copeland Marks, a food historian who has lectured at the Smithsonian and New York University, alludes to Guatemalan misery in only one sentence, “Then there was the time our Indian bus was surrounded by leftist guerillas and there was a shoot-out as I tried to clarify a miniature tamale recipe given me by an Indian woman cowering, with me, on the floor of the bus.”

At 128 pages, Chantal Clabrough’s A Pied Noir Cookbook: French Sephardic Cuisine From Algeria (Hippocrene Books, 2005) wouldn’t appear to have room for sorrow. Along with intriguing recipes—chocolate cookies made with olive oil, beef shanks cooked with saffron and thyme—Clabrough offers chapters entitled “Spanish Inquisition: Massive Exodus” and “An Algerian Jew: Memories of World War II.” Clabrough also describes the day in July, 1957 when her family, in response to anti-Jewish terrorism, fled Algeria: “The whistle announcing the departure of the boat sounded three times. Time seemed to stop. All those who boarded the boats crowded the decks and stared at their last image of Algiers, tears pouring from their eyes, screams ringing in their ears.”

The Rindfleisch massacres. The Armleder massacres. “Screams ringing in their ears.” In these cookbooks you find little-known Jewish recipes and little-known vistas of Jewish tsurris. Edda Servi Machlin fills Classic Italian Jewish Cooking (HarperCollins, 2005) with seductive recipes for dishes like “Jewish-style fennel” and “kosher-for-Passover pasta soup.” Reading Machlin’s recipes you understand, on a gut level, how Jewish and Italian sensibilities made for a mutually enjoyable co-existence. For a long while, they did. Machlin writes that Jews lived in Pitigliano, her Tuscan hometown, for more than six hundred years. “A love of good food and dedication to the culinary arts were common ground upon which the Jews and Gentiles of Pitigliano met, mingled, and made friends.... Until the lamentable day of Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler, our life in Pitigliano had been integrated and as happy, or unhappy, as anyone else’s.”

By the mid-1930s, stripped of their civil rights and assailed by anti-Semitic propaganda, Pitigliano’s Jews were decidedly unhappier than their non-Jewish neighbors. In the fall of 1943, when Fascists started hunting down the Jews, 17-year-old Machlin, along with two of her brothers and a younger sister, escaped and joined the partisans. Machlin’s telling of this particular anecdote points to the impulse behind Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food and many of the Jewish cookbooks written since its publication. It’s the same impulse we find throughout Jewish faith, tradition and ritual: defiance.

“You don’t know how difficult it was to get the idea of Jewish cuisine to be taken seriously in the first place. For so many years, it was the butt of so many jokes,” Susan Friedland, for sixteen years the director of cookbook publishing at HarperCollins, says about the evolution of Jewish cookbooks. “During the course of my career, I probably edited a half-dozen, which is a lot more than most people ever do. I took on a lot of those projects because I believed they were important. I wrote three Jewish-focused cookbooks myself that did very well. But as recently as the mid-1980s, publishers didn’t take the idea of Jewish cookbooks seriously,” she adds.

During the Passover seder, while we drink wine and eat, we talk and talk about things that few non-Jews would consider fit for dinner-table conversation: blood, skin lesions, diseased animals, infanticide, more blood. Latkes are as central to Hanukkah as “Ma’oz Tzur,” a cheerful song about vengeance. On Purim we eat little pastries that remind us of a genocidal oppressor. Since the first telling of the Adam and Eve story, eating has been for us an act of defiance. It was by eating, we are told, that we learned to distinguish good from evil.

The recipes recorded in the history-heavy cookbooks inspired by Joan Nathan and Claudia Roden aren’t pretexts for recounting sorrow. They are a practical and entirely traditional means of claiming, of salvaging, what was good from a past that would otherwise urge us to damn the world rather than bless it.