Food and Foodways

Regional ingredients. Olive oil, eggplant, garlic, chickpeas, Swiss chard, and spices like cumin, cinnamon, and saffron run through Sephardic and Mizrahi cooking. These were the foods of the whole region, shared by Jews and their neighbors.

Kashrut. The Jewish dietary laws, kashrut, forbid pork and do not allow meat and milk to be mixed. Olive oil took the place of pork fat. It is also pareve, neither meat nor dairy, so it can be used with any meal. Historian Hélène Jawhara Piñer notes that a thirteenth century Arabic cookbook from southern Spain already included recipes labeled as Jewish, and that Inquisition records later treated eating eggplant as a sign of hidden Jewish practice.

Shabbat. Because cooking stops on Shabbat, communities developed dishes that cook slowly overnight or taste good at room temperature, from Moroccan dafina to Iraqi tbit and jachnun from Aden. JIMENA's Shabbat explainer tells their story.

Welcome and sweetness. Hospitality is at the heart of these foodways. In Ladino speaking Sephardic homes, women traditionally offered guests a spoonful of fruit preserves and a glass of water, served from a silver bowl. Syrian families set out maza, small savory bites. At Mimouna, Moroccan families open their homes with mufleta, honey, and mint tea, and Yemenite cooks spice coffee with hawaij.

Recipes as oral history

In most homes, recipes lived in memory. Claudia Roden, whose family left Egypt after 1956, began collecting recipes from exiled families who gathered at her parents' Friday night table in London. Until then, she found, these recipes were passed down orally through daughters and rarely written.

When Rachel Shemarya, born on the island of Rhodes in 1898, wrote down her potato boreka recipe in Ladino, she measured with “half a kiddush cup,” trusting the reader to know the rest. Her recipe is now preserved by the University of Washington.

Groups like the Jewish Food Society record elders cooking, so that skills learned by hand are not lost.

Morocco

Friday tables fill with colorful salads made ahead for Shabbat, like matbucha, slow cooked tomatoes and peppers, also called salade cuite, “cooked salad.” Spiced stews are served over couscous, sometimes with fiery harissa. One family from Fez has marked Fridays with the same chickpea dish for five generations.

Tunisia and Libya

Meals center on vegetables or fish with couscous, spiced with caraway, cumin, paprika, and hot pepper. Tunisian Jewish cooking blends Spanish, Italian, French, and Turkish influences, and Libyan Jewish cuisine reflects close ties with Italy. Two weeks before Passover, many families mark the new month with bsisa, a sweet mixture of grains, dates, and spices, stirred with olive oil as the household shares wishes for the year.

Egypt

Claudia Roden, born in Cairo in 1936, grew up in a family with roots in Aleppo and Istanbul. Her family's seder featured a haroset of dates and raisins said to look like the silt of the Nile, and artichokes with fava beans. Recipes were family secrets, rarely printed, until exile made writing them down urgent.

Iraq and Kurdistan

Kubbeh, dumplings of semolina or bulgur wrapped around meat, are fried or simmered in sour soups of beets, greens, or lemon. Miriam Persi, from a Kurdish Jewish family from Duhok, makes her grandmother's green hamusta, which takes four days. Iraqi Jewish families traditionally ate fried eggplant and hard boiled eggs for Shabbat breakfast, today often with amba, a tangy mango pickle.

Syria

Syrian Jewish cooking is known for stuffed vegetables, kibbeh, and sweet and sour flavors from tamarind. Claudia Roden has praised this cooking as the “pearl of the Arab kitchen.” Twelve loaves of bread on the Shabbat table recall the showbread of the ancient Temple. Poopa Dweck wrote her cookbook because she feared these recipes would be lost.

Iran

Rice is an art. The prize is tahdig, the crispy, saffron scented crust at the bottom of the pot. Herb and fruit stews called khoresh are served over rice; in Jewish homes the walnut and pomegranate fesenjan is often sweetened with dates. Jeweled rice graces weddings, and the herb omelet kuku sabzi appears at Nowruz.

Yemen and Aden

Breads are the stars. Rolled jachnun, from Aden, and buttery kubaneh bake overnight for Shabbat morning, served with grated tomato and the hot sauce zhug. Flaky malawach became an Israeli favorite after Yemenite Jews arrived in 1949 and 1950. The spice blend hawaij comes in one version for soup and one for coffee.

Ottoman Sephardic lands

In Turkey, Greece, Rhodes, and the Balkans, Jews made borekas, turnovers filled with cheese, potato, or spinach, along with bulemas. Savory pastries were often eaten for breakfast with brown hard boiled eggs. In Seattle, borekas have long been baked for bazaars held by the city's Sephardic congregations.

In Israel. Jews from the Middle East and North Africa brought their kitchens with them, and many of their dishes became everyday Israeli foods. The Iraqi Shabbat breakfast of eggplant and eggs became the pita sandwich sabich. Balkan and Turkish immigrants made bourekas a staple, Yemenite families popularized malawach, and Jerusalem restaurants served kubbeh to new audiences. These dishes belong to a wider regional kitchen: the Ottoman börek, the kibbeh found across the Middle East, and the griddle breads of the Arab world are close relatives.

Around the world. Syrian Jews in Brooklyn and New Jersey, Persian Jews on Long Island, Sephardic Jews in Seattle, and North African Jews in France and Canada keep these recipes alive.

Cookbooks as heritage records. Claudia Roden's A Book of Middle Eastern Food (1968) and The Book of Jewish Food (1996), Poopa Dweck's Aromas of Aleppo, and Gil Marks's Encyclopedia of Jewish Food turned family knowledge into lasting records. So do handwritten notebooks copied by mothers and aunts.

Common misconceptions

• “Jewish food means bagels and matzah ball soup.” Those are Ashkenazi favorites. Jewish food also means couscous, kubbeh, tahdig, and jachnun.
• “Sephardic and Mizrahi food is one cuisine.” Moroccan, Iraqi, Persian, Yemenite, and Ottoman Jewish cooking differ greatly, much as their languages do.
• “Kosher is a style of cooking.” Kashrut is a set of laws, not a cuisine. Each community followed the same laws with its own local flavors.
• “These dishes were invented in Israel,” or “Jews borrowed them.” Most grew from a regional kitchen Jews shared with their neighbors for centuries, then traveled with families to new homes.

In the public school classroom

• Treat recipes as primary sources. Read Rachel Shemarya's boreka recipe and ask: what did she assume the reader already knew?
• Map ingredients like rice, eggplant, saffron, and chickpeas, and compare how Jewish, Muslim, and Christian neighbors used them.
• Planning a tasting? Follow your school's food allergy policy and the CDC guidelines listed below: check with families first, avoid known allergens (sesame, nuts, wheat, and eggs are common in these foods), and offer a nonfood option.
• Focus on culture and history; skip blessings or ritual.

In Jewish schools and communities

• Pair a lesson on Shabbat with its overnight dishes, using JIMENA's Shabbat explainer and Mizrahi Shabbat supplement.
• Invite grandparents to cook with students and tell where each recipe came from.
• Create a class or community cookbook with each family's story beside its recipe.
• Explore the Sephardi & Mizrahi Education Toolkit for year round ideas.

At home and with family

• Cook with an elder and write down what they do, including the steps they never measure.
• Label family recipes with their original names and where they came from.
• Record the stories behind your family's dishes and share them with JIMENA's oral history project.
• Try a dish from a community that is not your own.

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