Jews, Food, and Spain - by Hélène Jawhara Piñer (Paperback)

About the Book

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.

Book Synopsis

2023 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards Best Jewish Food Culture Book; 2022 National Jewish Book Award FinalistA 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.

Review Quotes

"Jews, Food, and Spain is a fascinating study in which the author, Hélène Jawhara Piñer, asserts that food is an important key to unraveling the complexities of the Jewish cultural heritage, especially in early Medieval Spain. Using the 13th century Arabic language cookbook Kītab Tabīkh as guide, she explores what can be discerned from its contents regarding Jewish culture and its evolution in the multicultural setting of Al-Andalus. Cuisine, as Jawhara Piñer explains, is so much more than just recipes... [The book] would be a valuable addition to an academic Jewish history and culture collection as well one focused on food studies."

-- C. and Anne-Marie Belinfante, AJL News & Reviews

"Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are. This should be the motto of any book that examines the medieval food culture of Iberia. In her new book entitled Jews, Food, and Spain, Hélène Jawhara Piñer seeks to demonstrate both the process through which the Jewish cuisine of the Iberian Middle Ages acted as a cultural identifier, and how this culinary culture has been maintained in modern Sephardic communities. ... This book is a welcome addition to the growing discussion of the culinary multiculturalism that existed in the Iberian Middle Ages. ... there is no doubt that this book is an important examination of the influence of Jewish culinary culture on medieval Iberia and on the diasporic culinary journey of Iberian Jews."

-- Martha Daas, Speculum

"Hélène Jawhara Piñer's new book, Jews, Food, and Spain, is a wonder. Her research is deep and comprehensive, her presentation detailed and wise, and her 'gift' to the reader generous. Her work answers every question about the Sephardic culinary heritage you have ever had, and many questions you didn't even know how to ask. This is a book anyone interested in food, its history, and its meanings, will want to read."

- Dr. David Kraemer, Jewish Theological Seminary Librarian and Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics. Author of Jewish Eating and Identity Through the Ages

"In Jews, Food, and Spain, Hélène Jawhara Piñer invites us into the medieval kitchens of Muslim Spain, where she uncovers compelling evidence of several unknown, distinctively Jewish culinary practices that over the centuries have been integrated into Spanish cuisine. Her meticulous research into the foodways of Spain's Sephardim will be eye-opening to all those with an interest in the food, history, and culture of the region."

- Darra Goldstein, Food historian and founding editor of the journal Gastronomica

"In this fascinating study, which will appeal to readers (and cooks!) interested in the intersecting histories of food, Sephardic Jewish culture, and the Mediterranean world of Iberia and northern Africa, Hélène Jawhara Piñer studies Kitab al-tabikh, a cookbook of uncertain authorship written in Arabic around the year 1200 which also includes dietary advice about which foods to eat to address individuals' variable health needs. Remarkably, this volume includes several recipes which its author describes as explicitly Jewish, such as "Jewish Partridge" and "A Jewish Dish of Eggplants Stuffed with Meat." Piñer uses this volume and these recipes as her point of departure to investigate far-reaching questions: What is Jewish cuisine, what is Sephardic culture, and how can we use the history of food to trace Jewish experiences in the Iberian Peninsula and later, following Jewish and Muslim expulsions from Spain? Piñer makes a case for the role of ingredients, methods, cultural associations, and even utensils or cooking pots that probably once made a recipe discernibly Jewish."

- Heather J. Sharkey, Professor and Chair, Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

"'To eat is to remember'. These words which conclude Piñer's fascinating book are its basic postulation. Jews, Food, and Spain unfolds the story of the of Sephardic Jews through the unique perspective of its cuisine. It starts with a brilliant reconstruction of the medieval Arabic cookbook Kitāb al-ṭabīẖ in which Piñer uncovers the Jewish layers through a painstaking linguistic and textual analysis and goes on in the footsteps of the almost invisible traces left by Jewish cuisine in Spain after the expulsion as well as in the Sephardic diasporas around the Mediterranean and in the new world. Through the history of food and foodways, Sephardic identity is discovered and reaffirmed. This is a captivating book with enormous erudition which brings new insight into the history of Sephardim, Spain and the Mediterranean."

- Miriam Frenkel, Menahem Ben-Sasson Chair in Judaism & Islam Through the Ages, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

"Through a refined 'counter-hair' reading of historical sources (Islamic texts in the Middle Ages, then Christian texts), Hélène reconstructs the identity (not only culinary, since what we eat is what we are) of a people of which others speak, to describe and mark its diversity. It is an exciting detective story that reveals not only the characteristics of Jewish cuisine in those distant centuries, but also the strength with which those characteristics have been transmitted over time, until today."

- Massimo Montanari, Professor of Food History, Bologna University

About the Author

Hélène Jawhara Piñer holds a doctoral degree in Medieval History and the History of Food. She has lectured at Bar-Ilan University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Casa de Velásquez in Madrid, and the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History (Philadelphia). Dr. Jawhara Piñer's main research interest is the medieval culinary history of Spain through inter- and multiculturalism, with a special focus on Jewish culinary heritage. She is the author of the historical cookbook Sephardi: Cooking the History (Academic Studies Press) which was praised by the Los Angeles Times, El País, and the Jewish Book Council and is a winner of the 2021 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards. Piñer spearheads the culinary live show "Sephardic Culinary History with Chef Hélène Jawhara Piñer," promoted the ASF & The Center for Jewish History. Her new historical cookbook is forthcoming in Winter 2023.