Remembering the Fish and Making a Tsimmes: Jewish Food, Jewish Identity, and Jewish Memory

One must try everything to recover memory. It has so many hiding places.

Lawrence Durrell, Clea (1960)

Every cuisine tells a story. Jewish food tells the story of an uprooted, migrating people and their vanished worlds. It lives in people’s minds and has been kept alive because of what it evokes and represents.

Claudia Roden, The Book of Jewish Food (1996)

These wise words by two writers who resided in Egypt, one in Alexandria and one in Cairo, can help us to decipher the secret alphabets in which the deep connections between Jewish food and Jewish identity are inscribed on the tablets of Jewish memory. Claudia Roden’s reference to “migrating people and their vanished worlds” in the introduction to her Book of Jewish Food—which won the 1997 National Jewish Book Award in the (now discontinued) category of “Sephardic and Ashkenazic Culture and Customs”—precedes her poignant declaration that “my own world disappeared forty years ago, but it has remained powerful in my imagination.” Roden (née Douek) was born, like her parents (who were both of Syrian background), in Cairo, which she left in 1951 in order to study art in Paris. They joined her there five years later during the mass emigration of Egyptian Jews following the Suez Crisis, and from Paris they eventually moved to London, where “the smells of sizzling garlic and crushed coriander” in Roden’s mother’s kitchen would, as she later recalled, reinforce the feeling “that we had never left Cairo.”¹

It is indeed fitting that an Egyptian-born Jew who moved to France should write about food evoking vanished worlds, since, aside from the obvious Proustian echoes, as she herself noted, the book of Exodus “recalls the wistful longings of the Jews for the foods they had left behind in Egypt.”² In fact, however, the most striking instance of the Israelites’ alimentary nostalgia for Egypt occurs somewhat later in the Bible, when they declared: “We remember the fish we used to eat free in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic” (Num 11.5). One might note further that one of the foods Roden later nostalgically recalled having been sold by “a street vendor in Cairo” was “small red mullet with garlic.”³ In his 1927 commentary on Numbers, the Anglican divine L. Elliott Binns (1885–1963) wisely commented that “memory in looking back not seldom delights in what was pleasant, forgetting that which was harsh and burdensome.”⁴ One is tempted to say the same of Roden’s exercises in culinary nostalgia, which are occasionally accompanied by evocative recollections, as of the “palm trees, pretty villas and gardens with bougainvillea” in her native neighborhood of Zamalek from the introduction to The Book of Jewish Food. In a similar vein, Diane Lipton in her autobiographical essay “Longing for Egypt: Dissecting the Heart Enticed,” confessed that she “cannot contemplate Jews and Egypt without thinking of Claudia Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food.” Together with the memoirs of Egyptian Jewish life (and post-1956 trauma) by André Aciman and Lucette Lagnado, Roden’s book made the British Bible scholar “want to reread Exodus with the possibility in mind that the Bible too longed for Egypt.”⁵

Aside from its evocation of longing for a lost paradise, Roden’s project of compiling recipes from the past has a political dimension—or at least possessed such a dimension when it was begun in the 1960s when she was living in Paris and working on her Book of Middle Eastern Food (1968). Although the Jewish character of the Levantine world whose food she sought to recreate was not reflected in that book’s title, in its introduction she described her family as “Sephardic Jews” who were “exiled from our Middle Eastern homelands,” and for whom “Friday night dinners . . . have been opportunities to rejoice in our food and to summon the ghosts of the past.”⁶ Prior to 1956, as Roden then saw it, Egypt was their “homeland,” but not the neighboring country where a...