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.”

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.”

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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 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.

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.

“That is something that students have mentioned to me that they are grateful for,” Neuert says. “It has made them more aware of the need to talk to elders, to get family recipes. … There are many sources for Jewish, Eastern European recipes that are pretty standardized. What is unique is what your bubbe put in her brisket.”

Recipes change because people make them change. Preferences change. Health trends change. Work changes, Neuert muses. “It also changes based on the people who you live amongst. I hope that I get [students] to look at all of those different things … It’s all about not taking your food for granted. It comes with a heavy, heavy history and it’s like a key and a lock—it tells a story.”

Teams of student bakers pull plump bagels from the oven. They admire their bakes and hold cell phones up to snap photos. Minutes later the bagels are sliced, smeared with cream cheese, and topped with lox, capers, and thinly sliced red onion. As students munch, Neuert delivers the course’s last lecture, on Israeli foods—one she knows is fraught with ownership issues.

“The foods we think of as Israeli are really traditional Palestinian foods and foods from other Arab lands that Jewish settlers found there,” Neuert explains. She reminds the class that the foods they will cook for the final are foods that originate from and are found throughout Arab cultures.

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The night of the final, a giant glass bowl of pita dough rests covered on a table in the Marsh Food Lab. The room smells vaguely of yeast. A second bowl of raw falafel mixture is parked beside a deep saucepan of oil. Neuert looks at her watch. The last session of “controlled chaos” is about to start, she says.

The menu includes baby spinach salad with dates and almonds, Israeli salad, pita bread, falafel, a lemon-mint drink limonana—and tahini chocolate chip cookies.

The students divide into groups to prepare their dishes. Knives clack against cutting boards as mint and lime wheels are stacked into bright green piles. Citrus and sugar are muddled in pitchers with wooden spoons.

Half an hour later the teams have all diced, chopped, rolled, fried, pickled, and baked their contributions. They carry the platters into an adjacent room and place them on a long table. Then they step back to snap photos of their handiwork before digging into the spread.

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JEWISH FISH CURRY FROM KERALA

What makes this dish distinctly Jewish? The frying of the fish prior to adding it to the sauce, and the addition of the sweet and sour tamarind is also quite traditional in Jewish cookery. This recipe is adapted from Esther David’s cookbook Bene Appétit: The Cuisine of Indian Jews.

INGREDIENTS

• 1-2 lb filleted white fish

• ¼ cup rice flour

• 1 tsp turmeric

• Tamarind paste

• Ginger

• 3 peeled garlic cloves

• 1 jalapeno / spicy pepper

• Cilantro

• 1/3 cup dried coconut (unsweetened)

• 1/3 cup coconut milk

• 1-2 tomatoes

• 1 tsp garam masala

• 1 tsp turmeric

• 1 tsp cumin

• 1 tsp coriander powder

• 1 tsp salt

• 1 tsp pepper

• 6 curry leaves

• 1 tbsp coconut oil

• 1 tbsp peanut oil

• 1 onion

DIRECTIONS

1. Mix rice flour with a dash of salt and pepper. Spread across a large plate. Dip white fish so that flour adheres to both sides. Set aside.

2. Break off about a 2’’ square piece of tamarind paste and pour about 1/2 cup boiling water over. Let sit. Once tamarind has softened, you can sieve to remove seeds.

3. Make a green masala paste by blending peeled ginger, garlic cloves, jalapeno, cilantro, dried coconut, and coconut milk until a paste-like consistency. Set aside.

4. Chop onion and tomatoes into small pieces. Set aside.

5. Create spice mixture by mixing garam masala, turmeric, cumin, coriander powder, salt, and pepper. Mix together and set aside.

6. Melt coconut oil in pan until hot. Add fish. Fry 4-6 minutes until golden. Flip and repeat on other side. Remove fish to plate.

7. In the same pan, add peanut oil and chopped onions, and brown over medium heat.

8. Add tomatoes and cook about 6 minutes until they break down.

9. Add spice mixture and curry leaves. Allow to fry in oil. Stir in tamarind and let cook for 1-2 minutes.

10. Stir in garam masala paste, coconut milk, and ½ cup water. If too dry, add more water.

11. Allow sauce to simmer over low heat for 15 minutes. Taste for salt.

12. Slide fish into sauce. Cover. Warm fish through.

13. Service with rice, raita, and/or chutney.