A fascinating study that will appeal to both culinarians and readers interested in the intersecting histories of food, Sephardic Jewish culture, and the Mediterranean world of Iberia and northern Africa.
In the absence of any Jewish cookbook from the pre-1492 era, it requires arduous research and a creative but disciplined imagination to reconstruct Sephardic tastes from the past and their survival and transmission in communities around the Mediterranean in the early modern period, followed by the even more extensive diaspora in the New World. In this intricate and absorbing study, Hélène Jawhara Piñer presents readers with the dishes, ingredients, techniques, and aesthetic principles that make up a sophisticated and attractive cuisine, one that has had a mostly unremarked influence on modern Spanish and Portuguese recipes.
Jews, Food, and Spain: The Oldest Medieval Spanish Cookbook and the Sephardic Culinary Heritage
Discussion Questions
Hélene Jawhara Piñer’s book, Jews, Food, and Spain: The Oldest Medieval Spanish Cookbook and the Sephardic Culinary Heritage, is an engrossing work of historical research that draws upon a thirteenth-century collection of recipes to examine the multicultural and multilingual traditions in which Jewish culinary traditions developed in the Iberian Peninsula. The author of that medieval cookbook was Andalusian and of Arab origin, and may have been either Muslim or Jewish. What is fascinating is that certain foods in the cookbook were marked as Jewish, most notably eggplant, an intriguing topic that Piñer explores in depth as she takes readers on a food journey from medieval times to the present day, showing how certain dishes found in the medieval cookbook continue to be central to Spanish Sephardic cuisine. Food and heritage are inseparable, and as Piñer notes, “Ignoring people’s food is to ignore what defines them.” Food must be taken seriously, as Piñer does. With a doctorate in Medieval History and the History of Food, and also as a chef, she brings that vast wealth of knowledge and years of experience in the kitchen to her enlightening historical study. Indeed, she suggests that the book be paired with her cookbook, Sephardi: Cooking the History: Recipes of the Jews of Spain and the Diaspora from the 13th Century to Today.
For readers interested in learning about the complex ways that food came to be a core part of Sephardic identity, this book is indispensable.
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