Sephardi

"A feast for the senses as well as the memory."
—Alex Galbinski, Jewish News: Food & Travel

"The recipes in Sephardi reflect the lush and multifaceted culinary traditions of the Iberian Peninsula, influenced by Celtic, Iberian, Roman-Mediterranean, Germanic and North African flavors and techniques. Many of the recipes are the first recorded versions of dishes that are still made today — peot (challah), adefina (Sabbath stew), puchero (chicken soup) and even matzo — albeit with some modernized techniques."
—Julie Giuffrida, Los Angeles Times

"An engaging cookbook that tells a fascinating and moving story."

—Claudia Roden, author of The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York

“Sephardi is truly the only cookbook of its kind. Hélène is cooking enticing and delicious cuisine of Sephardic Jewry while telling the story of migration and rich history that is part of my family’s ancestry. Mazel Bueno to Sephardi!”

— Michael Solomonov, Chef and Owner, Zahav; James Beard Award Winner

"A vibrant scholar and a very talented cook, Hélène Jawhara Piñer has written a brilliant book that is as appealing as it is enlightening. From showing us that Swiss chard was mentioned in the Talmud to revealing that Jewish dishes were featured in prominent Muslim cookbooks, she makes every page one worth reading—and every recipe one you’ll want to make. Her research expands our idea of edible Sephardic culture, charting its geography and anthropology to places as far-flung as Brazil and Mexico, in the process serving up important context for an impressively rich culinary heritage. Sephardi reminds us that there’s always lots to learn about even the most time-honored traditions, and it’s a work that encourages us all to dig deeper into our own individual histories, no matter where in the world they originate."

—Adeena Sussman, author of Sababa: Fresh Sunny Flavors From My Israeli Kitchen

"The gorgeously illustrated book, accompanied by uncomplicated instructions, offers dishes with spices and herbs, some similar to those in Middle Eastern cooking. Several of the author’s personal recipes are drawn from historical sources adapted from her academic research."

—San Francisco Book Review

“Sephardi: Cooking the History strikes an elusive balance between being a ‘can’t put it down’ history book and ‘must immediately get into my kitchen’ cookbook.”

— Leah Koenig, author of The Jewish Cookbook

"Can you tell if someone’s Jew­ish from how they pre­pare their food? Can you tell a Sephar­di from an Ashke­nazi by what they are eat­ing? Had major Jew­ish thinkers, like Mai­monides, have any­thing to say about food, apart from dis­cussing kashrut? Hélène Jawhara Piñer has spent years research­ing such ques­tions and now offers read­ers a tasty Sephar­di buf­fet — some fifty recipes of the Jews of Spain and their dias­po­ra, from the thir­teenth cen­tu­ry onwards — as a frame­work for her answers."

—Jewish Book Council

“Hélène Jawhara Piñer's Sephardi: Cooking the History is a critical new work of Jewish culinary history. The book sheds a much-needed light on the foods of Jews from the Iberian peninsula while elucidating the community's rich culinary legacy. The role that ingredients, dishes, and cooking practices played in signaling one's religious identity under the inquisition speaks to the centrality that food played—and continues to play—in Jewish life. Jawhara Piñer's cookbook is deeply researched, and in addition to providing thorough historical context to foods commonly associated with the Sephardic diaspora, the book also provides many unique and rare recipes that bring Sephardic Jewish history to life in the kitchen.”

—Jeffrey Yoskowitz, author of The Gefilte Manifesto

“Reading these recipes I could almost smell my grandmother’s kitchen, and the dishes she cooked which descended directly from the Sephardic community in Smyrna (modern day Izmir, Turkey) and before that medieval Spain. Hélène Jawhara Piñer’s historical research has uncovered details that have been mostly forgotten, and I am certain that this book will have readers running to the stove to taste this largely unknown, opulent cuisine.”

—Ken Albala, Professor of History, University of the Pacific

“Sephardic Jewish culture was important not only in the Iberian peninsula, but in a vast international diaspora, especially in the modern age.

Historical investigation of primary sources uses texts, images, artifacts and other documents to analyze the past. The history of food has a fundamental repertoire for getting to know the food of yore: cookbooks.

The work of the historian Hélène Jawhara Piñer retrieves the most important medieval and modern recipes of Sephardic food to reconstruct these dishes and understand them as part of a persecuted culture that maintained its identity based on the precepts of kashrut, the Jewish commandments, but, in the face of anti-Semitism and of the Inquisition, he also often had to hide his Jewish condition in order to survive.

A kitchen that reveals and hides, expresses and delimits identities, serves as a border landmark of belonging to a community. In this universe, Jawhara Piñer not only observes, but tastes, when rereading the recipes not only with a look, but through the contemporary experimentation of the old recipes.

The result is an extraordinary book, which unravels the Sephardic past with the lenses of a cook historian, who not only reads the story, but cooks it over a slow fire, like the one needed for Shabbat dishes remained warm.”

—Henrique Soares Carneiro, Professor of Modern History, University of São Paulo

​“Hélène Jawhara Piñer’s cookbook, Sephardi: Cooking the History, is unique. … Published by Cherry Orchard Books, an imprint of Academic Studies Press, this is a volume worthy of its distinctiveness. The recipes in this unusual volume are derived from eclectic historical sources ranging from medieval cookbooks and literature to poetry and Inquisition trials. … Lavishly-illustrated… the recipes are straight-forward and easy to follow. … These are mouth-watering dishes that have passed the test of time and are still prepared in Sephardi households.”

— Sheldon Kirshner, Times of Israel (blog)