Women, Cookbooks, and the Making of American Sephardic Culture

Abstract

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• Women, Cookbooks, and the Making of American Sephardic Culture
• Max Modiano Daniel (bio)

In April 1976, the Los Angeles Times sent journalist Jean Bennett to cover the Moroccan Jewish celebration of mimouna at the Em Habanim synagogue in North Hollywood. Celebrated at the conclusion of Passover by Moroccan Jews throughout the world, mimouna has been an occasion for Jews, often alongside their gentile neighbors, to share food and visit each other's homes. It often draws comparisons to the post-fast iftar meal eaten by Muslims during Ramadan as a moment of communal gathering and nighttime celebration. Among the dishes prepared and served by the congregation's women were thriba (walnut cookies), mufletta (a fluffy pancake-like bread), frijuela (thin pastries with glaze), and dattes farcies (stuffed dates). The Arabic, Spanish, and French names of these foods reflect the linguistic, cultural, and political history of Jews in modern Morocco under Muslim, Spanish, and French rule.

Perhaps in line with the openness and conviviality characterized by the holiday—or, rather, motivated by an impulse to exoticize this event—Bennett's short article begins by playing off the reader's preconceived notions of Jewishness. She introduces the greeting "T'rebho," a wish for prosperity, and adds: "The word is Arabic. But the 325 people wishing each other a prosperous year were devout Jews." The need to say this assumes an expectation on the part of her readership that Arabic speakers are not Jews, despite the likely fact that the guests were conversing in French, as was typical of most Moroccan Jews in the second half of the twentieth century. The article goes on to state that, although the festivity "has roots in the religion of the Sephardim, one of the highlights of the evening was belly dancing," expecting the reader to be surprised by this confluence of activities. Toward the conclusion, we are also informed that the dishes served "are extremely difficult to make, [and] are very sweet and also expensive," and that it was "extremely difficult for them to get the recipes down on paper!" Yet a Mrs. Gabriel Dery of Van Nuys is quoted as being "eager for the Ashkenazic Jews here to enlarge and enrich their tradition by adopting some of her customs."¹ [End Page 633] The ways Moroccan Jews are presented as Arabic speakers, belly dancers, and experts at forbidding and luxurious recipes may indeed inspire others to heed Mrs. Dery's call, but it does so by drawing on stereotypes and exaggeration.

A dual vision of mimouna as both a woman-led family and communal gathering and as a so-called exotic, performative, and educational experience is emblematic of the larger discourse around Sephardic foodways in the United States. In this article, I argue that the foodways of Sephardic American women and the cookbooks they authored shaped a culture that reflects the joint alterity and familiarity of Sephardic Jews in a majority-Ashkenazi Jewish world. Especially at the intersection between female and minority experiences of marginalization, food has become a powerful tool for cultural survival and transmission in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Furthermore, this dual discourse serves to narrate, preserve, and recuperate what these sources understand as a vanishing tradition while also marketing Sephardic culture as appealingly exotic. These efforts are informed by the existential anxieties that marked mid-twentieth-century Sephardic Jewry in the United States, who feared the losses that would come with acculturation into mainstream Jewry and secular American society. To this end, many worked to make Sephardic foodways—and Sephardic culture—both familiar and attractive to a diverse audience composed of Sephardic Jews and others. By taking cookbooks and the discourse around foodways seriously within a historical framework, we can see how Jewish immigrants from around the Mediterranean and Middle East and their American-born descendants constructed a modern Sephardic identity in which food and women play central roles.²

I proceed by examining the role of history, nostalgia, and memory in understandings of Sephardic food and culture, as well as the tension inherent in its shift to America. The second section then illustrates the discourses on Sephardic food that paint the cuisine—and its Jews—as simultaneously...