Is this the most Jewish food on earth?

For food historian Joel Haber, the “most Jewish food on earth” is cholent, or hamin, the Shabbat hotpot prepared and cooked on Friday and kept warm to enjoy for Saturday lunch. It expresses the genius of rabbinic Judaism: just because the Torah forbade us from cooking on the Sabbath didn’t mean we were condemned to celebrate it with cold food.

Haber is putting the finishing touches to a book he has written on the history of the dish. “When you travel around the world, almost every Jewish community has some version of a Shabbat stew,” he says. The ingredients and names may vary but they are “versions of the same dish,” he argues. “I use it as a way of tracing the routes of Jewish migrations through the diaspora.”

A graduate of New York’s Yeshiva University, he made aliyah in 2009 and began running tours of Jerusalem’s Machane Yehuda market.

“The shuk is really how it starts for me.” In research for his tours, he began delving into the stories of the foods that were displayed there - “that kind of opened up the world of food history to me”.

Having originally planned a book on Jewish food, he realised it was too large a subject for a single volume, so he settled on cholent.

The history man: Joel Haber is looking into the story of Jewish foods[Missing Credit]

“We have references that indicate a very early desire by Jews to keep food warm so they could have hot food on Shabbat,” he says. There is a reference in the Mishnah, for example, to insulating hot food for Shabbat use.

“We also have non-Jewish sources, Juvenal and the Church Father Ignatius, both of them are mocking Jews for running around on Friday to get straw to keep things warm or something like that. But that doesn’t tell us what they were keeping warm.

“From various connecting of dots, it appears that the most likely candidate for the very first Shabbat stew is something called harisa. Not the spicy paste but a simple porridge of wheat and lamb cooked together, then pounded into this thick porridge.”

Often it will contain onions, with melted fat and cinnamon drizzled over it. Still eaten around the Middle East, it is also known as haleem. “Certain Muslims will use haleem as their Ramadan breakfast. It is a simple dish — it has a grain and a meat which you find in almost every single iteration of the Shabbat stew. And from medieval Arabic cookbooks that have tons of recipes about harisa because it was a very beloved dish, and from historical sources, it is clear that the Jewish version was different.

Shabbat staple: cholent (hamin) is the original one pot meal Photo: Getty ImagesGetty Images/iStockphoto

“It would appear that the main difference is that they would make it immediately and we would leave it cooking overnight.”

White Jews in Yemen, Iran, Egypt, Kurdistan would eat the culinary descendants of harisa, in Iraq they developed their own hot pot, tbeet.

Haber believes the dish really began to take off after the rise of Karaism in the eighth century and its fundamentalist interpretation of the Torah which believed the prohibition on kindling fire on the Shabbat ruled out any use of it at all. “So rabbinic Jewry, to push back against Karaism, said you better have something hot on Shabbat to prove your rabbinic bona fides,” he explains.

The first real changes to harisa, he thinks, began in Spain and Portugal where they added “more ingredients — chickpeas and things of that nature”. And as more ingredients entered the pot, so the dish evolved.

“In Spain, it gets two new names — adafina and hamin de trigo [hot dish of grains]. Adafina is based on Arabic name for burying or insulating because that’s how they would keep it warm, they would bury it under coals.”

Hamin was eaten mainly in the north of the region, adafina in the south.

When the Inquisition struck and Jews were expelled from Spain, “most of the northerners end up fleeing across southern Europe, and most of the southerners flee across North Africa. So hamin becomes used frequently in places like Italy or Greece or even Turkey. The southerners who were living more in an Arabic-speaking world in North Africa, they took adafina — and it became dafina or t’fina, depending on exactly where you were.” Skhina is also an alternative name in Morocco. And the name of Ashkenazi cholent is thought to derive from the old French word chalt (hot).

It's not just the name that changes — the staple ingredients of meat and grain also varied according to geography: in northern Europe, you would have barley, or sometimes spelt, and beef; in Asia, chicken and rice; in North Africa, lamb and some kind of wheat, such as couscous or freekeh.

But there also came what he calls “bonus foods” -— like hamin eggs, or kugel or stuffed kishke or helzel that were originally cooked in the pot but then would be taken out and eaten separately.

While different communities might retain their own traditional name for the dish, in modern Israel hamin tends to be used as a catch-all term. And in the cosmopolitan world of today, the dish has become a melting pot where new ingredients can be tried.

Making a cholent may not require great technique but “where the artistry comes from if you are being creative is first of all thinking will an ingredient hold up well to a long, slow cook. You don’t want something that falls apart and is just a big mush,” he says.

Market trader: Haber leads tours of Jerusalem's Machane Yehudah[Missing Credit]

The latest trends in cholent demonstrate a kind of “irreverence”, he says. In the USA it might involve “putting in all sorts of non-traditional things like barbecue sauce or hot dogs. In Israel, irreverence comes more from cooking versions that are not from your specific background like a Moroccan who is cooking Hungarian stew. Or a blending of those things - I have Moroccan friends who put jachnun [a Yemenite pastry] into their skhina because their kids like it.”

And cholent has broken out of its Shabbat boundaries. He knows of a Hungarian restaurant that has created a cholent dumpling. An Israeli chef in Philadelphia has perfected a cholent pot pie. And in Max and Mina’s parlour in New York, you once could buy cholent-flavoured ice cream (non-meaty, of course).

For more details: chulentbook