Class 4: Jewish Food Traditions: Global Flavors and Local Adaptations

Food and Cultural Influence

In American popular culture, and in its restaurants and supermarkets, Jewish food is often represented in one of two ways: kosher food (food involving the dietary restrictions of kashrut, keeping kosher) or Ashkenazi food, like bagels. In fact, Jewish communities around the world have produced and consumed diverse foods, often partly reflecting the norms of the places where they were living. These range from foods like Iraqi kubbeh (meat dumplings) to Yemeni jachnoon (slow-cooked pastries). Like languages, Jewish foods have traveled with Jews as they have moved around the world. In the same way that a Germanic language in Hungary and a Romance language in Turkey could be Jewish, Lithuanian and Tunisian foods can be considered Jewish in American Jewish communities.

Cooking and Eating Locally

A major factor in local differentiations in Jewish foods is the availability of ingredients: the Jews preparing these foods have used the ingredients and cooking tools available to them locally. They have sometimes made local dishes exactly how their Muslim, Christian, or other neighbors made them, but they have also exhibited many distinctive culinary features of their own. Jews have adapted local foods for the dietary laws of kashrut and have maintained special foods, especially for the Sabbath and holidays, sometimes influenced by biblical and rabbinic texts

The Geography of Jewish Food

The only foods found consistently across the wide expanse of Jewish geography are the slow-cooked Sabbath stew and two Passover foods, matzah (unleavened bread) and charoset/haliq (fruit and nut paste; see Saadia Gaon’s tenth-century recipe and several others here). Even those foods have diverse names, ingredients, and preparation techniques, depending where their preparers originated. 

Jews prepare the slow-cooked Sabbath-lunch stew before the Jewish Sabbath starts at sundown on Friday and leave it simmering all night, so as not to break the prohibition against cooking on the Sabbath. Sabbath (Heb., Shabbat) stew has different flavors and textures in different parts of the world, based on local ingredients and culinary norms. In Ashkenazi communities, it tends to have beef, potato, and barley, while in Iraq it has chicken and rice. The stew has also had a variety of names, reflecting discussions in rabbinic literature about food prepared on or for the Sabbath.

In general, Jewish cuisine has looked and tasted like local non-Jewish cuisine, with distinctive features stemming from four sources:

• restrictions and holiday observances stemming from the Torah and rabbinic literature: for example, it is forbidden to mix meat and dairy products (Exodus 23:19); it is traditional to eat certain symbolic foods at Rosh Hashanah (b. Keritot 6a).
• pre-migration cultures: for example, Ashkenazi Jews in America may eat kasha varnishkas and knishes, foods from Eastern European Jewish cultures; Jews of Moroccan heritage in France often eat couscous for Friday night dinner.
• Israeli culture (twentieth century onward): popular Israeli foods like falafel and Bamba are important foods in American Jewish cuisine
• independent innovations: for example, American Jews often eat bagels, lox, and cream cheese on Sunday mornings and Chinese food on Christmas.

Within a given geographic community, including the United States today, the foods individuals choose to prepare and consume, in restaurants, synagogues, or home, connect Jews to their local and historical communities and to their living and deceased ancestors.