If you were asked to pick the most quintessential Jewish food, what would you choose? Chicken soup? Matzah? Smoked salmon and cream cheese? What about adafina, yebra or Jacob’s lentil stew?
This was the challenge for Alana Newhouse and her team when putting together her recently released book The 100 Most Jewish Foods (A Highly Debatable List). And a challenge it was. The book started life as a website, the idea for which came two years ago and took a year to bring to life. “It took us a while to get it underway,” admits Newhouse, “and even conceive how we would go about it.”
Coincidentally, the morning that I call (New York-based) Newhouse, editor in chief of the American Jewish online magazine, Tablet Magazine, she has spoken to someone else. “We just got the news we were nominated for a James Beard award!” she tells me breathlessly. The website has been placed in the ‘innovative story-telling’ category of this prestigious food award and Newhouse describes the nomination as an “unbelievable honour”.
You can see why it was nominated. The website’s landing page is one big interactive revolving table full of Jewish dishes – in fact the 100 Jewish dishes explored in the book - and it is truly a feast for the eyes. Click on any dish and you are presented with a history of the dish, why it was chosen for this final dining table and a recipe. This is the information which ultimately made it into the book – after lots of ‘Jewish-style’ negotiations.
“We wanted a lot of outside voices — chefs and historians and writers and artists. But the real challenge happened when we realised that we didn’t want to numerate the list from the most important to the least important. It didn’t make any sense and it wasn’t how we saw the food.”
Newhouse is clear that the book is about the ‘most’ Jewish food not the ‘best’ Jewish food – so for any of you looking at the website's list and shaking your heads — that’s something to bear in mind. (Also worth noting is that this is definitely an American list – I doubt any list compiled in the UK would include Chinese food, Oreos or Hebrew National hotdogs).
“Just because a food isn’t important [now], or isn’t even made today, doesn’t mean it’s not important or even more significant than some of the foods we eat now.”
One of the more surprising entries in the book is treyf. When I ask Newhouse if this was a controversial pick she immediately answers me “sure”. But then backtracks slightly. “Yes it’s controversial but not conceptually.”
“You can’t say: ‘we’re going to organise this book with an understanding that these foods were made by the contingencies of Jewish history and Jewish religion’ and then ignore the very strong psychology that developed around the foods that you can’t eat as a result.”
As Liel Leibovitz, the Tablet journalist who wrote the treyf entry, explained when he pitched his idea: “it’s like having Harry Potter without Voldemort.”
Newhouse is also clear that the book isn’t about ‘kosher’ foods; maintaining that ‘Jewish’ and ‘kosher’ can be distinct.
This might also explain why there are three separate matzah-related dishes (no chametz here) and also an apple. Not an apple crumble for dessert on Shabbat. Not even Rosh Hashanah’s apple and honey. But the original apple from the Garden of Eden. Where I suppose you could argue that the Jewish pre-occupation (obsession?) with food began.
For Newhouse, who is of mixed Ashkenazi (on her father’s side) and Sephardi (on her mother’s side) descent but grew up in a very Sephardi-leaning household, or at least kitchen, the dish that had to make it into the book was adafina. “My mother hated Ashkenazi food. She cooked all the dishes from her community. Food was in some way an assertion of her ethnic inheritance.”
And so the Moroccan Shabbat stew that takes its name from the Arabic for ‘hidden’ is the first entry in the book. Adafina is the stew that Iberian Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity made on a Friday, hiding the fact that it did not include the ubiquitous salt-pork that government inquisitors required to be in most meat dishes at the time.
“For me in some sense the whole rigour of the book is in that entry. The idea that food is an ancillary part of our lives may be true of us now, but that’s only because we’re lucky. A lot of Jews throughout history – the food that they ate was an integral part of their Jewish identity and their Jewish experience, whether they liked it to be or not. And that felt very, very important to me.”
There are other surprising entries on the list: yebra (Syrian stuffed grape leaves) or malida (a sweet porridge made from flattened rice flakes flavored with jaggery and cardamom pods) for example, both of which Newhouse admits many readers will not have heard of — “and lots of the Jews in India who make malida would never have heard of Entenmann’s doughnuts”.
Equally, Jacob’s lentil stew is a dish from the bible — literally the stew that Jacob sold Esau in Genesis — rather than a contemporary recipe book. But this was also part of the design of the book, which isn’t just about food, but rather one about history.
“There should be foods on the list that it doesn’t matter whether you’re Jewish or not that seem both completely obvious and also completely unexpected,” says Newhouse.
So this culinary journey through history may be about Jewish foods but is it more cultural than religious? For Newhouse these concepts are not distinct, but rather “more like a venn diagram with a lot of overlapping circles” showing how “these foods exist as one big inheritance for Jews”.
“If you zoom out and look at Jewish history they’re really not separable, the idea that a secular community could have come out of anything other than a tight-knit Jewish community.”
Newhouse was meticulous when it came to the history of the dishes and the recipes included, using food historians and chefs to test everything. “The recipes needed to be authentic to their history,” she tells me – otherwise why write the book? And also, of course: “it needed to be good.”
The 100 Most Jewish Foods: A Highly Debatable List by Alana Newhouse, Editor in Chief, Tablet Magazine
