As a Jewish cookbook author who leads culinary workshops around the country, I get a fair number of repeat questions from audience members. “Can you help me track down my grandmother's lost gefilte fish recipe?” is a common one. “Can I leave out the nuts (or flour, milk, eggplant, etc.) in the dish you are making?” is another. But there is one question that comes up more than most: “How exactly do you define Jewish food?”
It is a great question, and also a really complicated one. I love it because it indicates to me that people are thinking both critically and broadly about what it means to “eat Jewish.” Jewish cuisine is often reduced to a short list of latkes, pastrami, matzo ball soup, and other Eastern European hits. It is also regarded as immutable—a fixed thing, passed down from generation to generation since time immemorial. (And woe to the cook who takes creative license with Bubbe's kugel recipe.) But in reality Jews have moved around a lot throughout history—by choice and by force—and so have lived and cooked just about everywhere. The Jewish merchants who once traded along the Silk Road and elsewhere, meanwhile, swapped not only spices and other goods but also ideas. As a result, Jewish cuisine is at once profoundly global, deeply regional, and eminently adaptable.
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