Sephardic Food and Recipe Cards: Song and Interview

Sarah Bunin Benor

Sarah Aroeste

Flory Jagoda

2025

https://saraharoeste.bandcamp.com/track/chiko-ianiko

Sarah Aroeste, “Chiko Ianiko,” from the album Savor, released April 21, 2023

The fourth track off of Savor, an entire Ladino album about food! This one, written by the great Flory Jagoda, is about baking burekas in the kitchen with different generations. My kids make a cameo on this one!

Lyrics

Music and Lyrics: Flory Jagoda

Chiko Ianiko (Little Ian)
Komu il pashariko (Like a birdie)
Ya mus fazi las burekas (He’s making burekas for us)
Kun il kezu i la manteka (With cheese and butter)

Chiko Ianiko (Little Ian)
Komu il pashariko (Like a birdie)
Kun la fleche i la farina (With a rolling pin and flour)
Sta faziyendu masa fina (He’s making a fine dough)

Interview excerpt:

Masadiku is sort of like [ . . . ] an empanada, a doughy consistency with potato and cheese. Some people might think it's like a boreka, but it is a half moon pie shaped. In my family, our borekas are triangle with filo dough, so it was not the same type of boreka that I think other people had. Our masadiku was very specific to Monastir. You could not find a holiday that did not have masadikus or tadlikus everywhere, and even non-Jewish holidays. Every time we got together, whether it was Rosh Hashanah or Thanksgiving, we would always have tadlikus and masadikus. [ . . . ]

Bimuelos, you can make, some people make them during Passover with matzah meal, but we eat them on Hanukkah. And they are like fried dough, and they are delicious. And in my house, we have a little competition every year for the best [ . . . ] syrups. So my specialty is cardamom rose water syrup. [ . . . ]

We have recipe cards that have been passed down for almost 60, 70 years that I've inherited. So I have on very, very yellowed index cards, these wonderful recipes with boyikos, bimuelos. [ . . . ]

And they didn't have measurements. So you would have a handful of this and a little pinch of that. And when they ended up in Rochester, New York. I love in the recipe cards that they would make a distinction between the cheeses that they had in the old country with where you could find them in America. So they would say, you know, the best place to get this ingredient is at the Italian store on the corner of, they would put the street names in the recipe card.

Credits

Sarah Aroeste interviewed by Sarah Benin Benor, I Sing it Fluently: Ladino Activism with Sarah Aroeste, HUC Heritage Words podcast, May 29, 2025, YouTube.com.

Engage with this Source

Flory Jagoda (Sarajevo, 1923–Virginia, 2021), became the driving force behind the Ladino song revival in the United States. She composed this song about her grandson making burekas (pronounced borekas in other dialects of Ladino), a Sephardic savory pastry filled with cheese, potato, and other fillings. The song highlights the maintenance of food traditions across generations, as well as nickname traditions—the boy depicted has an American name, Ian, and Jagoda adds the endearing Ladino suffix -iko/-iku. Sarah Aroeste continues the intergenerational theme by including her own children on the song recording, from an album that connects Sephardic food and music. In the interview excerpt, she discusses similar foods in her family and the recipe cards she inherited from her ancestors.

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Creator Bio

Sarah Bunin Benor

Sarah Bunin Benor, Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies and Linguistics at Hebrew Union College, received her PhD in linguistics from Stanford University in 2004. She has published and lectured widely about sociolinguistics, Jewish names, and Jewish languages, especially Jewish English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ladino. Her award-winning books include Becoming Frum: How Newcomers Learn the Language and Culture of Orthodox Judaism (Rutgers University Press, 2012) and Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps (Rutgers University Press, 2020). Dr. Benor co-edits the Journal of Jewish Languages and directs the HUC Jewish Language Project, which features the Jewish Language Website, the Jewish English Lexicon, and the Heritage Words Podcast, which Dr. Benor hosts and produces.

Creator Bio

Sarah Aroeste

b. 1976

Sarah Aroeste is an American singer, songwriter, and author whose work focuses on the preservation and contemporary interpretation of Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) language and Sephardic musical traditions. Born to a Sephardic family in Washington, DC, and raised in Princeton, NJ, she was trained in classical opera before turning to the Sephardic repertoire. Aroeste has released numerous albums for adults and children that combine traditional Ladino songs with new compositions and modern musical idioms, like rock and jazz. In addition to her musical work, she has written children’s books designed to promote Ladino language acquisition and Sephardic cultural transmission.

Creator Bio

Flory Jagoda

1923–2021

Flory Jagoda (née Flora Papo) was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia. When she was still an infant, her parents divorced and her mother moved back to Vlasenica, a small village outside Sarajevo, where Flory’s Sephardic maternal grandparents lived. Flory grew up in this large and musically talented family. When her mother remarried, Flory, now eleven, moved with her mother and stepfather to Zagreb, Croatia. In 1941, the three of them fled the Nazi invasion, going to Split and eventually reaching Bari, Italy. There she met an American soldier, Harry Jagoda and, in 1945, married him. After the war, it was discovered that the entire Jewish population of Vlasenica had been murdered in 1942 by Nazi-aligned Croatian fascists. The Jagodas moved to the United States, living for a while in Washington, D.C., where they had four children. After her mother’s death, Flory was inspired to reclaim the Sephardic music of her lost family. She taught her children traditional Ladino songs and composed new ones, such as “Ocho Kandelikas.” She began to teach and perform, playing the guitar and singing, around the world, and became widely acclaimed for her preservation of Sephardic culture and Ladino music. In 2002, she was given the National Heritage Award by the National Endowment for the Arts.