When speaking about Jewish food and eating habits, it’s hard to isolate a single strain. That’s because Jews have been spread out among so many different countries and cultures ever since their exile in the year 70CE that you’d have to talk about each Jewish ethnic sect separately to make any sense of Jewish eating habits and Jewish food. Each Jewish ethnicity took recipes and dishes from its host country, whether it be Africa, Europe, Yemen, or the Orient. So what we’ll do is a top three Ashkenazi (European) foods, top three African foods, and top three Yemenite foods, and top three Oriental Jewish foods.

The most stereotypical Jewish food is that popularized by the Ashkenazi ethnic sect, coming out of Europe and especially Germany and Eastern Europe. Jewish eating habits from there are influenced by constant poverty that struck the Pale and forced the Jews to eat cheaply. The dishes that became a mark of the poor man back then are now cultural phenomena, mostly because Ashkenazi Jews are the most heavily Westernized of Jews, and the most in contact with American culture. Therefore, when an American thinks “Jew” he thinks Ashkenazi Jew.

1) Cholent. This is a Yiddish word that I just found out from Google Translate means “spares.” I thought it meant stew, but it doesn’t. This makes a lot of sense, because spares are essentially what cholent is. The actual food is pretty much any scrap you can put in a slow-cooker, vegetable, meat, grain (usually barley because it’s cheap), and water, chuck it in there and simmer it on low for 24 hours. It’s incredibly easy to make, requires no effort, and is a good dish if you have a bunch of refrigerator scrap left over you don’t want to throw out. You also go to your butcher and take his scrap (bones, fat, some meat chunks cut off that nobody wanted because they’re not very good), and your cholent comes out really cheap. Since it’s cooked for so long, though, everything turns out delicious in the end. For authentic Ashkenazi cholent, you’ll need some intestine stuffed with pureed vegetables. This can get dangerous if you don’t clean it properly.
2) Gefilte Fish. Once again the cheap stuff. Carp is such a bony fish that it’s nearly impossible to eat. This is why it’s so cheap, and this is also why gefilte fish is made out of carp. In order to get rid of the bone problem, Jews of Ashkenaz just put the entire thing in a grinder and made fish puree, re-stuffed the skin, and called it a day.
3) Gribinis. Cheap again? Of course. Go to your butcher and ask him to give you the leftover skin for free. He’ll probably do it. Then you put a bunch of oil in a pan and fry the stuff up with some onions. Very, very bad for you, but very, very good.

We can see now how cheap Ashkenazi Jews are, especially now that they’ve made everyone culturally aware of these foods and now everyone thinks they’re delicacies or something. I’m an Ashkenazi Jew, so it makes me laugh. Let’s move on to the Sephardim.
1) Hamin. This is a straight up Hebrew word meaning, “Hot stuff.” Doesn’t necessarily mean spicy, but it’s basically cholent with different ingredients. Instead of garbage, the Sephardim use rice in place of barley, and hard boiled eggs instead of meat scraps. Sephardim also actually use spices, which Ashkenazi dishes don’t usually have much of besides salt and pepper.
2) Shakshouka. I’ve had this made really horribly (Israeli Army) and really amazingly (my wife). Basically tomato sauce, paprika, baharat (google it), cilantro, parsley, onions, and eggs fried over easy in the juices. If made right, it’s really great stuff. If made badly, it tastes like tomato-flavored rubber tires from your local mechanic.
3) Sahlav. This is a rose-water based thick pudding-like drink that tastes like a combination of perfume and Pier1Imports smell. I personally think it’s gross.

Am I biased towards Ashkenazim? Probably. On to Africa.
1) Injera. I had this at an Ethiopian absorption center in northern Israel. It’s a savory pancake, and it’s pretty good. I hear it’s made from tif flour, a grain found in Africa.
2) Waat. A spicy sauce made of meat, vegetables, and beans. It’s what you put in injera.
3) Taj. Home brewed honey wine with lemon juice.

On to Yemen? Let’s do it.
1) Lamb’s head. This is exactly what it sounds like. Yemenites eat it on Rosh Hashana instead of a fish head. They basically roast the whole thing and eat it off the skull. I intend on getting one this year to try it out.
2) Jahnun. Yemenite Jewish pastry, fillo dough wrapped in a spiral and coated with vegetable oil and fried. It’ll make you sick, that I guarantee.
3) Arak. There’s an argument over whether this is primarily Sephardic or Yemenite. But either way, it’s an anise flavored highly alcoholic beverage, my favorite drink, though I mix it with coke.

Shalom Goldfarb is the editor of Judaica Worldwide, a portal of educational material on Judaism, Judaica, and Jewish holidays. There’s also some Jewish humor on the blogroll, so check it out!

Over the years, traditional Jewish foods have found their way into contemporary American eating habits. Perhaps you’ve run to a deli or a grocery and ordered a quick lunch of corned beef on rye with a kosher dill on the side, or maybe you stopped for a quick bite of a bagel rushing to work in the morning, or maybe a sweet blintz is more to your liking. Even a run through most store bakeries show you stacks of challah bread.

Most Americans don’t give what they eat a second thought, and dismiss traditional Jewish food as just another form of fast food. Eaten on the run, there is little thought behind the food and it’s traditional place in Jewish culture and cuisine. This only clarifies how well assimilated food traditions are in America.

Perhaps the quintessential traditional Jewish food is the bagel. The traditional aspect of the bagel is found in dubious historical fact. The bagel is said to have originated in Vienna. Created by a Jewish baker to honor the Polish King, Jan Sobieski III, for heading the Polish cavalry in a charge that saved Vienna from invasion by the Turks in 1683, the shape of the bagel is supposed to mimic the stirrup (called a beugal) of King Jan’s saddle. The facts are, there was a Polish King Jan III, he did lead a cavalry charge to defend Vienna from invading Turks, and there were Jewish bakers in Vienna at the time. However, there is reference to a food named “beygls” as early as 1610, found in paperwork from Krakow, Poland. In addition, “bugel” was a Yiddish word which was used to describe a round loaf of bread. That aside, the bagel has been eaten by most eastern European Jews since the 1600’s. It came to America with the Ashkenazi in the late 1800’s, and is considered by that community to be traditional Jewish food.

Though not sold in all delis across America, the moniker “Jewish Penicillin” is given to down home chicken soup. It is hard to consider such a universally eaten soup as Jewish, yet, many Jewish families made it through many centuries of hard times all over the globe on chicken soup. The traditional Jewish food is a clear, or pale yellow broth, eaten with bits of chicken floating in it, most often with broad egg noodles. At one point in time, in most middle class American Jewish homes, chicken soup was a once a week staple. Most people will agree that they eat chicken soup when they have a cold, and there is actual laboratory evidence that homemade chicken soup can actually make the length of a cold shorter by days.

If people took the time to stop and think about their food choices, they would agree they eat some type of food on a weekly basis that they would consider traditional Jewish food. They might not know the history behind the tradition, but they would see the food as a Jewish staple.

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