Outing Ottoman Jewish Cuisine

The New York Times Dining & Wine Section has a story on a new chef, Ms. Silvena Rowe, that also stars the Ottoman Empire:-

...she set out to “trace where the Ottomans had been, the food they brought with them and the food they took away with them.” At its apogee, during the 16th and 17th centuries, the Ottoman Empire controlled most of southern Europe, northern Africa and western Asia. Mrs. Rowe immersed herself in research on the culinary legacy of that realm, spending time in the Arab world and Turkey. She had fallen in love with Istanbul 10 years ago but had never traveled to Syria. Damascus swept her off her feet.

“I’ve never ever been to a city where you walk and feel its beating heart,” she said. “Basically you wake up a day younger every day. It’s a magnificent feeling.”

There she consulted with chefs from the restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel, who gave her recipes for kebabs with walnuts and pine nuts, and sautéed monkfish with rose petal salt. She traveled to the ancient Syrian village of Malula, where Aramaic is still spoken, and picked up a recipe in a cafe for butter beans with feta and za’atar. She visited the Greek Orthodox Saint Thecla monastery and orphanage, where she watched a nun prepare grape leaves stuffed with salt cod, tarragon and rice in a kitchen carved out of a cave.

She spent time in Turkey...

You noticed this: "you wake up a day younger every day"?

Only that in Damascus too many people don't wake up at all after a good night's torture.

And it seems she never made it to the Jewish centers of the Ottoman Empire nor to Jerusalem. There was good cuisine there, too.

She could have used this book for research.

Or reviewed this:

Sephardic Jewish Food and Cooking

Sepharad is the Hebrew word for the Iberian peninsula that includes Spain and Portugal. Jewish cooking would need to adapt to these circumstances.Jews lived in Spain long before the Visigoth (Germanic) tribes invaded in 412, however after the Moorish invasion of Spain in 700, there was a large influx of Jews immigrating to Spain. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, Spanish Judaism flourished under Muslim rule, producing poets, scholars, and courtiers - what is known as "the golden age of Jewry." By the mid-thirteenth century, however, the Christians controlled all of the Peninsula except for a small area from Granada to the Mediterranean. In March, 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella decreed the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Many Jews converted or left while others went to Portugal, where Judaism could still be practiced freely. But Portugal expelled its Jews in 1497, and the tiny kingdom of Navarre followed suit in 1498. Judaism could be practiced openly nowhere in the Peninsula. Driven from home, the Sephardim established their own congregations in such places as Morocco, Italy, Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, the Land of Israel, and elsewhere.

With plenty of herbs and sometimes generous use of spices, Sephardic Jewish cooking is aromatic. They use a lot of lemon, garlic, tomatoes, olive oil, cumin with turmeric and more. Sephardic Jews are known for their love of cooking vegetables, from salads to vegetables stuffed with fragrant meat and rice, and pies or Burekas which often have feta cheese, spinach, or potato fillings. Sephardic Jews from Morocco and other North African countries enjoy cumin, ginger, and saffron & chilies. Jewish cooks from the eastern end of the Mediterranean have adapted their food and cooking as well and make heavy use of cinnamon in their cooking, so much that they use it as a savory accent for meat dishes The kebabs, pilafs and dolmades (stuffed vegetables) of Turkish Jewish cooking are still some of the most recognizable Sephardic dishes. Fruits, vegetables, spices, and grains were plentiful in the Mediterranean climate, and thus plant foods figured heavily into Sephardic Jewish cooking.

After all, as this makes clear:

...Ottoman cuisine was unified and refined in imperial Istanbul, but its ultimate origins are less clear.

It is a matter of mere speculation whether the origins of this imperial culinary legacy are to be traced back to Greek antiquity, the Byzantine heritage, or the ingenuity of the glorious Turkish and Arab nations, not forgetting Phoenician and Jewish traditions; nowadays you may find support for any of these claims in various countries in the Balkans and the Near East.

One too many cooks makes a mess.


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