Jewish Food: More Than Just Matzo Ball Soup | Unpacked

Talking about Jewish food is both mouth-wateringly delicious and just a little complicated.
While Ashkenazi Jews (Jews from Eastern Europe) are used to foods like gefilte fish and matzah ball soup, these dishes would be foreign to a Jew from The Middle East, North Africa or Ethiopia who would prefer to chow down pkaila, shakshuka, t’bit or doro wat.

What connects Jewish foods, apart from being delicious, is that they developed from economic necessity and were often a way for poor communities to create something tasty from very little.

While some of these dishes have been forgotten over time, others are enjoying a culinary renaissance and gaining new generations of fans.

So pull up a seat and join us on this delicious culinary journey as we take the lid of the culinary melting pot of Jewish food.

Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:54 Turkey – P’tcha (Calf foot jelly)
01:55 Italy – Caponata, Fennel Gratin, and Prosciutto d’Oca (Duck prosciutto)
03:26 India – Jewish Puri (sweet Yom Kippur break fast food)
04:10 Ethiopia – Doro Wat (Shabbat slow-cooked chicken stew) and Dabo
05:37 Iraq – T’bit (Shabbat slow-cooked chicken stew) and Khikakeh (crispy rice)
06:14 Reasons Jews adapted local recipes
06:56 Outro

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Sources and Recipes: https://jewishunpacked.com/jewish-food-more-than-just-matzo-ball-soup/

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– Jewish food is so much more than just latkes, gefilte fish, and matzo ball soup. Here’s the thing, Jews hail from all over, North Africa, all over the Middle East, Europe, South America, you name it. So Jewish food isn’t just what your bubbe made. It’s vibrant and versatile, colorful and cool,

Underrated, and for too many people, virtually unexplored. Throughout history, poor Jewish communities had to get creative when it came to food. They also adapted local delicacies to adhere to kosher dietary laws. They made dishes specific to Jewish holidays. Some of these often forgotten traditions live on today –

If you know where to look. Today, we’re going down the rabbit hole of obscure Jewish food, some you might be into, some… maybe not so much. But everything’s worth trying at least once, right? So hold onto your plates and let’s get started. First, let’s talk about p’tcha.

The name comes from the Turkish words for leg soup. In the 14th century, Turkish peasants made a hot soup dish with lambs’ feet, one of the cheapest parts of the animal. Slowly, the dish spread throughout Central and Eastern Europe, where poor Ashkenazi Jewish communities picked it up.

Now, when you’re poor, you’ve got to be resourceful. So, these Ashkenazi communities adapted the leg soup and made it their own. They opted for calves’ feet, an often discarded part of the animal, and preferred the cool jellied dish to the hot soup. In their minds, these Ashkenazi Jewish peasants

Turned the cheapest part of the animal into a delicacy. In the early 20th century, Jewish German immigrants brought the dish to the United States and it was well-received by a generation of American Jews. It was a mainstay at weddings. On Sabbath mornings, families enjoyed p’tcha with chopped eggs.

However, p’tcha didn’t have the staying power of Ashkenazi classics like gefilte fish and matzo ball soup. Today, it’s hard to find in the States, only appearing on a handful of deli menus, like the New York City institution, 2nd Avenue Deli. Let’s head over to Italy, where Jewish communities, spanning back over 2,000 years,

Contributed to the nation’s world famous culinary style. Now, Jews have lived in the region of present-day Italy dating back to the Roman Empire. And from the 15th century to the mid-19th century, Italy was one of the only places in Europe Jews weren’t kicked out of, but they were confined to ghettos.

Again, like we talked about with p’tcha, poverty breeds resourcefulness. Italian Jews used what they had, including discarded vegetables and small, boney fish, to create delicacies. Italian Jews introduced things like fried anchovies and fish soups to non-Jewish Italians. Generally, non-Jewish Italians didn’t like eggplant, fennel, capers, and onions, to name a few.

So, they gave their Jewish neighbors their unwanted “scraps” who went on and created gold. They pioneered Italian dishes, such as caponata, a Sicilian cooked vegetable salad, and fennel gratin, which is baked and breaded fennel, that are staples of Italian food to this day. Due to the laws of kashrut, Italian Jews

Weren’t able to enjoy the many fine cured pork meats many Italians loved, such as prosciutto, so Italian Jewish communities raised geese, their “kosher pig”, if you will, to produce the kosher equivalent of porky products, like salami and sausage, as well as a kosher alternative to pork prosciutto. In Italian, this goose leg prosciutto

Is called “prosciutto d’oca”. Though the numbers are dwindling, some 28,000 Jews still live in Italy, where you can find this Jewish take on prosciutto in certain areas, particularly in Friuli, in the far northeast corner of the country. How about something sweet? For that, let’s leave Italy and travel across the world to India.

I’ve got to tell you about Jewish puri, a sweet pastry that India’s Mumbai Jewish community makes once a year to break the fast after Yom Kippur. This puri is a layered, deep-fried, crescent-shaped pastry filled with cardamom, pistachios, a variety of other nuts, and sweetened semolina.

India’s Jews make their sweet puri on Yom Kippur with seven layers, as seven is a significant number in Judaism, referencing the creation story of Genesis. The majority of India’s Jews, over 70,000 in fact, have made aliyah and now make up about 1% of Israel’s total population. About 3,500 remain in the Mumbai area,

But puri unites them all every October when Yom Kippur hits. Jews all over the world are big on stews, especially on the Sabbath. With stew, you can prep everything on Friday, then let it cook overnight, so you have your midday meal on Saturday good to go.

That way you can avoid actually cooking on the Sabbath, a big no-no in Jewish law. Ashkenazi Jews immediately think of cholent, the traditional heavy stew made with beans, barley, potatoes, and meat, as well as it’s Sephardic cousin, chamin. The word cholent comes from the medieval French words,

Chault, meaning hot, and lent, meaning slow, in reference to the long, slow cooking, and chamin comes from the Hebrew word for hot. But Jews from all over the world are fans of long, slow cooking on Shabbat. Take, for instance, doro wat, a chicken stew studded with hard boiled eggs that Ethiopian Jews

Traditionally eat on the Sabbath. Now, doro wat is a classic Ethiopian dish, so what makes it Jewish? Well, first of all, they adapted the recipe to avoid using ingredients that would break certain kashrut laws. And like their Ashkenazi cholent-making counterparts, Ethiopian Jews would prepare doro wat before sundown on Fridays.

Typically, they’d bury the pots underground once the stew was finished to keep it warm. Also, to signal a departure from the rest of the week, on the Sabbath, Ethiopian Jews trade in their injera, a spongy, fermented teff flour bread, typical in Ethiopian dining, for something called dabo,

A tender, yeast-risen wheat loaf that gets baked in a round pan, to eat with their doro wat. In Israel, there are over 120,000 Ethiopian Jews, the vast majority of the Ethiopian Jewish community. Meanwhile, Iraqi Jews are known for something called t’bit, their take on Sabbath stew.

Like doro wat, t’bit is much lighter than Ashkenazi cholent. T’bit is prepared with chicken and rice that’s seasoned with turmeric, cardamom, cloves, and cinnamon. It’s all simmered overnight on Friday and eggs are placed on top of the rice and browned in time for Sabbath brunch. The best part?

The cooking process leaves a crispy bottom layer of rice called khikakeh, similar to Iranian tahdig, and everyone, especially kids, would fight over the khikakeh. Today, there are nearly half a million Iraqi-Jews living in Israel and their cuisine is celebrated far and wide. It’s important to note that when we’re talking about

Jewish food, we’re often talking about borrowing. Jews from all over the world didn’t always invent something from scratch. Oftentimes, Jewish food is the result of adapting local recipes. That could’ve been because of poverty, persecution, kashrut laws, holiday, or a variety of reasons. All of that also makes it hard

To define Jewish food at times. But playing that role of adapter and borrower throughout history has given Jews of today a rich, complicated, and delicious food culture to chew on… literally. It’s what makes Jewish food, however you define it, so interesting, so vibrant, so relevant, and memorable.

Why not try as many of these foods as you can? We’ve got you covered and included links to recipes for all these dishes below. Which ones are you going to try? Thanks for watching. If you like what we’re doing here, consider subscribing, and if there’s something you want us to tackle

In an upcoming video, let us know in the comments.