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, Helene Jawhara Piner 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.

About the Author

Helene Jawhara Piner 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 Velasquez in Madrid, and the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History (Philadelphia). Dr. Jawhara Piner'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 Pais, and the Jewish Book Council and is a winner of the 2021 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards. Piner spearheads the culinary live show "Sephardic Culinary History with Chef Helene Jawhara Piner," promoted the ASF & The Center for Jewish History. Her new historical cookbook is forthcoming in Winter 2023.

Reviews

"Jews, Food, and Spain is a fascinating study in which the author, Helene Jawhara Piner, 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 Kitab Tabikh 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 Piner 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

"Helene Jawhara Piner'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, Helene Jawhara Piner 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, Helene Jawhara Piner 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." Piner 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? Piner 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 Piner'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 Kitab al-tabih in which Piner 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), Helene 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

Awards
Winner of Gourmand Awards Best Jewish Food Culture Book 2023. Short-listed for National Jewish Book Award 2022 (United States).



Book Information
ISBN 9781644699188
Author Helene Jawhara Piner
Format Hardback
Page Count 302
Imprint Academic Studies Press
Publisher Academic Studies Press