Celebrating the Food of Sephardic Jews

Joyce Goldstein's knowledge of the culinary traditions of Mediterranean Jews runs deep, and she served many Sephardic dishes at her former San Francisco restaurant Square One. Let's meet Joyce Goldstein.

Q: Where did the word Sephardic come from?

Sefarad was the Hebrew name for Spain and Portugal—the Iberian Peninsula—and so Mediterranean Jewish food came to be known as Sephardic cooking. That's as opposed to Ashkenazic cooking, which is Central European and what most Americans think of as Jewish food—very heavy, brisket and latkes.

Q: What role did the Jews play in moving dishes and ingredients around the Mediterranean?

Under Muslim rule, Jews were forbidden to hold positions in government. They were never citizens and could not vote or have any power. Their lives were restricted to trade and money lending, so they ended up active in the import-export business and what we now call the rag trade. Jews were involved in bringing in foods from the New World and were often among the first to eat them. Pumpkin, peppers, tomatoes—these were foods they helped bring over. They were also among the first traders in chocolate.

Q: Did Mediterranean Jews have their own culinary repertoire, or did they simply modify existing Mediterranean dishes to meet kosher laws?

Most Sephardic cooking reflects the countries where the Jews were living. The difference is that the Jews had to follow kosher laws. Dairy and meat couldn't be served at the same meal, so take a Greek moussaka. The Greeks make it with eggplant, lamb and cheese custard. Well, Greek Jews had to create a topping made with stock and flour because they couldn't have dairy with meat.

Jews can't work on the Sabbath, so in many Sephardic recipes, dishes marinate overnight. Jews prepared them before sundown on Friday for Saturday lunch. I'm going to pick a Sicilian favorite: Butternut squash sautéed with mint and garlic. The pan is deglazed with a little vinegar, then this mixture is poured over the squash and it marinates overnight. The next day, it's remarkably pungent and wonderful.

Another typical Sephardic dish is fish in saor, where little sardines are sauteed with onions, pine nuts and raisins, then vinegar and oil are poured over the fish and they marinate overnight.

Q: Are these still thought of as Jewish dishes or have they entered the broader repertoire?

Most Sephardic Jewish dishes have always been part of the mainstream cooking. Sicilian Jewish food looks like Sicilian food. Roman Jewish food is distinctly Roman. The same in North Africa. The recipes are practically identical except for the ban on mixing dairy and meat. That's the dividing line. So at a meat meal, you wouldn't have a butter pastry. But if you were served an olive oil cake, for example, you wouldn't think it was particularly Jewish until you saw it in the context of the meal.

Q: Tell us about falafel—what you know about its origins and movement. It seems to be the national dish of Israel.

Legumes are one of the bases of the Sephardic diet. At Passover, Ashkenazic Jews do not eat legumes or rice, but Sephardic Jews do because it's such a large part of their diet. Falafel is largely an Egyptian dish where chickpeas are ground with spices and formed into pellets and deep fried, then tucked into pita with tomatoes and cucumbers and served with tahini dressing. It is now part of the cuisine of Israel, but Israel is a melting pot with Jews from all over. When you go to Israel, you'll get falafel, which everyone loves, but it's originally Egyptian.

What's on the Passover table around the Mediterranean? Here are Goldstein's best guesses.

Can you spare 10 minutes to watch an expert taste cheese? Meet New York cheese maven Max McCalman and join him on an international tasting. [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3]

Q: Would you share some tips on storing cheese?

I recommend that people don't store cheese for the most part, unless they happen to have their own temperature-controlled cheese cave. Temperature and humidity are the key components of good storage—a moderately cool temperature of around 50ºF and humidity at least 80 percent, although higher is fine. The third factor is an exchange of air. Cheeses are alive and they need to breathe so they can reach their full potential. It shouldn't be drafty, but there should be some ventilation. At home, you might use the refrigerator's vegetable drawer.

There's a universe of microflora in each cheese. So a fourth factor that gives cheeses maturing capacity is managing the microflora. When cheeses are stored around their cousins, they develop more successfully. Goat's milk cheeses will taste better if they're stored around other goat cheeses. Washed rinds are more successful around other washed rinds. Bloomy rinds like to be together, and blues definitely need to be with other blues because blue molds can spread. But it's best to let your cheesemonger take care of your cheeses for you, and buy just what you expect to eat.

Q: What about wrapping leftovers?

Cheeese should be wrapped well. If you receive it in good cheese paper that is waxed on one side and semi-permeable so it can breathe and expel moisture, that's good. But cling film is a necessary evil. Well-aged hard cheeses don't suffer too much in cling film, but even then I would still use a little paper around the cheese, then the cling film. If you do wrap cheese directly with cling film, it's best to change the wrap daily because it can impart undesirable flavors.

In antiquity, leaves were used. That's how cheeses were transported around the Mediterranean. To this day, some cheeses are still wrapped in leaves, like French Banon, and often they pick up a little something from the leaves. But that was just a good, handy, tidy way of transporting them.

Q: What are the prospects for America becoming a cheese-eating culture?

It's good to see that per capita cheese consumption in the U.S. has almost doubled in the past 15 years as Americans gain respect for cheese. We've known we like wine for a long time, and Americans have become wine savvy. American cheesemaking is not quite where the winemaking is, but it's catching up rapidly.

People are less afraid of cheese now. But I still hear "it will make me fat, or give me high cholesterol, or I can't have it because of lactose." Well, I'm out to set the record straight. Cheese is near-perfect food, and many cheeses will make you feel like you're going to live forever.

"Ninety percent of the cheeses we know today were invented in the last 100 years."

An Insider's Taste of Turkey

Turkey is a favorite destination for today's culinary travelers, who encounter a cuisine that is richly varied and seasonal. To learn more about the highlights of the Turkish kitchen, we turned to Istanbul food authority Engin Akin. Let's meet her now.

Q: What are some of the similarities between Greek and Turkish cooking?

Of course there's always a sweet argument between Turks and Greeks about whether something is from their cuisine or ours. People want to own things that they like, that they cook with their hearts and share with loved ones. But when you look deep, you find there are lots of shared dishes, and that's how Myrsini and I started writing the book.

One popular example is moussaka. Moussaka is cooked very differently in Greece than in Turkey.

When Turks Make Moussaka

Most of our ingredients are a result of geography, like pekmez, a product of the vine. Anatolia has been a land of vines for thousands of years, one of the first countries where wine was produced. But what to do with wine when the religion doesn't permit it? What the common people did with these beautiful, tasty grapes was to turn them into pekmez, a syrup made of grapes. In Turkey, we make dessert out of it or use it as a sweetener. Greeks use it with fish; I use it with meat because in Turkey we never use sweets with fish.

Q: What are some other distinguishing features of Turkish cooking?

After the Turks embraced Islam, wine was prohibited to them. Before that, they had been great wine drinkers. So Turks began devising methods for getting tang out of foods they could get. We needed that tang for gastronomic balance.

So instead of wine, we had sherbets and fruit juices boiled down with sugar. When lemons were a luxury, we used sour cherries. Greengage plums give a good sour taste, so we put them between our dolmas. And that's how yogurt acquired popularity. I don't think we eat yogurt because it's healthy but because it gives the right tang.

When pepper came from the New World, we were fond of it, but we didn't otherwise like spices. People might wonder why, since we had access to spices through our ports. Spices were used for potions in the palace kitchens, and I have a feeling that once the sultans had it in their potions, they didn't want it in their food.

But we do have our aromas, like butter. Many dishes are dressed with a little butter, heated enough to give a beautiful aroma. At the last moment, you add some ground red pepper and pour it over the yogurt, and it looks beautiful. I don't think there's any recipe like this in Greece because they could cook with wine and drink wine, so the acidity is already provided. I think our cuisines also differ in that we use fruit with meat, especially in the eastern part of Turkey where the Persian influence is greater. I haven't seen this in Greek cuisine.

Q: What are some of the dishes a traveler to Turkey shouldn't miss?

You should have at least one kind of eggplant dish, maybe in tomato sauce like imam bayildi, or fried eggplant with yogurt. One has to taste a börek, which you make out of yufka with many kinds of fillings. My favorite, and you should try it, is the water börek. It's really difficult to make, and Istanbul would be the right place to taste one. Good restaurants make it well. On the streets they tend to get a little sloppy with it. Each yufka is boiled and it acquires a crust by slowly frying it in huge trays specially made for that.

The city of Gaziantep has some of Turkey's best food, says Akin. Here's what to try.

Spain's Bold New Wave

All eyes are on Spain these days, thanks to the passionate, avant-garde cooking of Ferran Adrià and his disciples. But what do Spaniards think about the culinary revolution in their backyard? Is it endangering traditional cooking? We asked Clara Maria de Amezua, an authority on Spanish regional cooking, to share her views. Let's meet her now.

Q: What do you think of the new-wave Spanish cooking?

I think the new Spanish cuisine has fascinated all of us. We have all these great, talented young people who have inherited a tradition from a splendid group of chefs, especially in the Basque country and Catalonia.

I don't know why, but those two regions have led the gastronomic movement. Maybe because they're close to France, where food has always been a great asset. The Basque country has prime products, from the fabulous fish in the Bay of Biscay to beautiful legumes.

And the Basques have always loved food. They have a special tradition there that doesn't exist elsewhere—cofradias, or groups of men that cook and dine together. One Spanish writer says that this tradition was founded because when Basque fishermen came home after a long time on the seas, they found the women ruling the house, and they didn't have anything to do. So they created these places to go and meet friends, since they were not of use at home.

Many of this young generation of chefs have trained with Ferran Adrià in Catalonia. Adrià has been a sort of magician of Spanish cuisine who has kept his investigations on a high level. The young people coming after him are in love with their work. They're not so interested in the material side. They want, above all else, to do things well.

What do other Spaniards think about Adrià's inventive ideas? De Amezua clues us in.

Q: How would you describe what these new chefs are doing?

They start from tradition and then they innovate. They are very imaginative and audacious, but the concepts are rooted in their mothers' cooking, the regional cooking.

They cook a lighter cuisine, which is happening all around the world. They pay attention to health, but I would say they're mostly concerned about the quality of their products. They want to see them being grown. I once heard Alice Waters say, "I never buy what I have not seen in the field," and I remember her when I see these chefs because they have their own vegetable gardens.

Q: Is the new wave threatening the traditional Spanish kitchen?

Spain is a very old country, and Spaniards don't evolve so easily. It's very difficult to take a Spaniard out of the world of traditional food. When you ask many people what they want for lunch, they want their judías con chorizo (beans with sausage) or their fried eggs with potatoes and tomatoes. Even people who can have whatever they want in the world will say these are their favorite dishes. In a way, I think our young chefs have had more echo outside of Spain. Their talent has passed our borders, and their reputation has grown more quickly than the understanding in some sectors of Spanish society.

Gerry Dawes - A Guided Sherry Tasting

Spain produces one of the most fascinating and least understood beverages in the world: Sherry. Made in a spectrum of styles, from dry to sweet and from pale gold to walnut brown, sherry can accompany a meal from soup to dessert. Here to guide us through some of the finer points of tasting and serving sherry is a longtime enthusiast and connoisseur. Meet Gerry Dawes, an authority on the foods and wines of Spain.

Q: Before we start the tasting, can you give a quick overview of how sherry is made?

I recommend that you look at books like Julian Jeffs' (Sherry by Julian Jeffs, Faber & Faber, 1961) because the fractional blending, or solera, system is quite complex. To oversimplify it, if you imagine a pyramid of barrels, you draw off the wine you're going to sell from the bottom row, then refill those part-empty barrels from the second row, and refill the second row from the top row. So some of the sherry in each bottle is as old as the solera itself.

If you see a bottle that says "Solera 1950," that was the year the solera was established. New wine keeps getting added, but each barrel contains fractional amounts of wine from the earliest foundations of the winery.

That's what gives sherry its continuity and character. It is constantly building on its ancestor wines. The young wine takes on the character of the older wine, so you're able to produce a uniform, steady product year after year.

Most of Spain's best sherries are now available in the U.S. The important thing to realize is that sherries now are better than they've ever been in their history. The sherry business went through a bad period, but the industry opted for quality, and what we're seeing now are some of the greatest sherries every made.

Q: And the price is right.

For what you get out of a bottle, they're very inexpensive. You can get eight to nine pours out of a bottle, so it costs far less per serving than a red wine consumed in one sitting by two people.

Dawes is going to introduce us to some of his favorite sherries. Listen closely to the words he uses when describing them. Some of the aromas and flavors he discerns in sherry are uncommon in Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and other familiar varietal wines.

Note that he begins his tasting with the most delicate wine and ends with the richest. In order from left to right, they are: manzanilla, fino, amontillado, Jerez cortado, oloroso and Pedro Ximénez. Let's watch:

Q: What about serving temperatures for these wines?

The manzanilla and fino should be served chilled. The others should be at cellar temperature, the temperature of a good white Burgundy—not chilled but cool. Never serve the fino or manzanilla warm, and never leave them open behind the bar. Always make sure they're kept under refrigeration.

As for pairing sherry with food, Dawes has some great ideas.

From Barrel to Glass If you ever visit the sherry bodegas in Jerez de la Frontera or Sanlucar de Barrameda, you will see winemakers drawing sherry samples from barrels in a most dramatic fashion. Dawes demonstrates.