needn’t perform time-consuming ritual handwashing before eating them, she explains. Bagels were and remain the perfect to-go food. Eli Davis, a nutrition sciences major leading the bagel-making portion of the class, fills four steaming pots of water with barley syrup and baking soda. The students gingerly peel raw bagels from metal trays, trying not to disturb the signature ring shape. After the bagels are boiled, coated in “everything” seasoning, and placed in the oven, Davis demonstrates how to roll and shape the dough for a second batch.
Learning with Every Bite Everything heaped onto plates and ladled into bowls is a reminder that we are shaped by the past. At least, that is the idea behind Natalie Neuert’s course, The Jewish Diaspora in Twenty Recipes, a fusion of a cooking class and Jewish studies seminar. As both a lecturer in music and director of the University of Vermont Lane Series, she thinks about the ways culture is transmitted, often through music, across generations and geography. But culture is passed down at the table, too. Neuert grew up consuming the food and stories that Yiddishspeaking family members shared. “The big three things that carry a diaspora culture from place to place are music, language, and food,” Neuert explains. “When Jews went to another place, they were confronted with a different growing season, sometimes different ingredients, and the local population and what they cooked and ate. So that became hugely influential in their cuisines.”
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Neuert’s class tackled dishes like a fish curry from southwestern India. The Malabar coast was home to Jews who fled Spanish territories after the Alhambra Decree of 1492, which forced Jews to convert to Christianity, leave the country, or be executed, Neuert explains. “I tried to come up with recipes that tell a story like that.”
One evening in May, the class sits in a circle of desks discussing the final. They have a paper due in a week, but no one has questions about it. Instead, they parse the menu and muse about potential guests to invite. And then it’s onto the night’s agenda: bagels. As the students tie their aprons, Neuert reminds them why bagels are a traditional Jewish food. One story holds that observant Jewish merchants needed something that wouldn’t spoil while traveling, and because bagels are boiled, they are arguably not technically bread under kosher law. This means one
Senior Joia Putnoi perches on a wooden stool by the doorway. This is the first time she has connected her Jewish roots to her studies, she says, and she is not alone. Several of her classmates describe the course as the first time they’ve examined their Judaism through an academic lens. For Putnoi, her family has both Ashkenazi and Sephardic lineage. She conducted an audio interview of her “Granfran” for a class project and opted for a specific location: “Where else than in the back of a cab leaving [New York’s] Chinatown?” she asks with a smile. Putnoi’s grandmother is a secondgeneration American who grew up in Long Island. Her mother emigrated from Izmir, Turkey, in the 1920s, and her father came to America from Vienna, Austria, after surviving Dachau concentration camp in World War II. During the interview, Granfran describes her motivations for writing her memoir as a cookbook. “I do believe in our tradition that the table is an extension of the sanctuary,” she says. “It’s really about wanting to keep that part of our culture alive.” Class assignments have prompted students to explore family histories through food. BAILEY BELTRAMO
