The New Mediterranean Jewish Table: Old World Recipes for the Modern World is a new cookbook by Joyce Goldstein that explores the rich traditions of food going back centuries. Goldstein was the chef-owner of Square One in San Francisco in the 1980s and was a part of the California movement that fostered the farm-to-table food philosophy. Since 1996 she has been a prolific author, having written over 25 books on a variety of food topics. Now she has written a book that reveals the wide and vibrant world of Jewish traditions throughout the Mediterranean countries, filled with recipes that reflect the traditional recipes of each region, while observing Kosher laws. WGVU spoke by telephone with Joyce Goldstein.
WGVU: There’s a general idea of Jewish cuisine that is understood by the American Jewish population and the general public, but you’ve expanded that menu by including food traditions from other Jewish cultures in the Mediterranean.
Joyce Goldstein: Well, yes, I think most Americans think all Jewish food is brisket and latkes and bagels and lox. But there were millions of Jews living in the Mediterranean, and they fall into three categories, the Sephardic Jews, who lived in Spain and Portugal, and had to leave after the Inquisition, and most of them went to Greece and Turkey. Then there were the Maghrebi Jews from North Africa, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt and Libya. And then the Jews living in Muslim countries since Biblical times, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon. And all of them have distinctive cuisines, so they shouldn’t just be lumped under Sephardic cooking because the North African Jews and the Arabic Jews are not Sephardic by any means. And they cook a healthy Mediterranean diet, I mean again, there’s Ashkenazi Jewish food, which is meat and potatoes and root vegetables, hardly any fruit, hardly any greens, not a healthy diet. And the Mediterranean diet which is loaded with fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, spices, herbs, small portions of protein, a very healthy way to live. And we just need to get more people to cook that kind of Jewish food than the other.
WGVU: Is there any culinary thread that binds these various Jewish cultures together?
Goldstein: The follow the Kosher laws, in other words there will be no shell fish, no pork and no meat with dairy, so that puts some limits on what can be cooked. For example, if you were in Greece and you ordered a Lamb kebab, they might put a yogurt on it, like a tzatziki, but if you’re an observant Jew you could not do that because that would be mixing dairy with meat. So you might use a tahini sauce or some sort of flavored mayonnaise as your dipping sauce. Those would be some of the distinctions that are made.
WGVU: You also point out that cooks in the past didn’t have the luxuries of the modern kitchen. Talk about the importance of technique as opposed to efficiency.
Goldstein: I think in the old days they had nothing but time. That’s all they did was cook. Women didn’t go to work, so it didn’t have to be efficient. And they cooked on little burners, most homes didn’t have ovens, they brought things to the village baker. So it was a very different style of cooking. When I was translating a lot of these recipes from the past they were organized poorly. Many of them would have things in the beginning that should’ve been at the end, and things further down in the recipe that you could’ve done the day before. So I sort of looked at it as reorganizing it for the modern home and being a little more time conscious. The other thing is that we cook alone whereas they often cooked communally sitting around a table doing things together. So again I didn’t include a lot of the super time taking recipes that required teams of people to do them. And finally I adjusted a lot of the recipes for the modern palette because Americans tend to like things that are a little bit more intense in flavor than a lot of these older recipes, we eat out, Mexican one night, Thai the next. We want things that are a little bit stronger in taste. So I added more lemon, I increased maybe the garlic, I increased the spices, but basically I did a reorganization job. These were home cooks. It isn’t like you need fancy equipment. You don’t need circulators, hydrators and blow torches and all that stuff. It was food that was cooked at home, so anybody can do it.
WGVU: You talk about translating the recipes, what are some of the oldest recipes. How far do they go back?
Goldstein: Well, let’s look at something like hummus and chickpeas. Did you know that when they examined the stomachs of the mummies in Egypt there were chickpeas in their tummies. So a lot of these recipes are ancient. It’s strange that now Israel is getting credit for hummus and falafel, but those are ancient recipes that have been cooked by Arabs and Arabic Jews forever, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. And a lot of the meat and fruits stews that you see in North Africa and southern Spain really came from Iran and those go back also hundreds of years. I mean it’s interesting that in the Middle Ages, well first we go way back… the Arabs brought citrus fruit to southern Europe and because the Jews needed citrus for one of their festive holidays, Sukkot, they became the caretakers of the citrus gardens and eventually became the people that dealt in citrus trade since the Middle Ages. It’s pretty amazing how far back this goes. So there’s so many recipes using citrus and lemon that are ancient, I mean, hundreds of years.
WGVU: What are some of the recipes that you might recommend for a novice cook to try out from the book?
Goldstein: Well, any number of them. There are some very simple fish recipes where you can make a sauce ahead of time and have it ready, I did one the other day…fish with green tahini, a tahini sauce that’s sort of enriched with parsley and cilantro a little extra lemon. And you put it on the fish and put it in the oven for ten minutes and bang you’ve got dinner. And any extra sauce can be spooned on potatoes, vegetables. There’s a simple roast chicken that’s rubbed with orange, lemon and ginger that anybody can do. The soups are really lovely and simple and some are purees like the asparagus soup or the artichoke soup, but many of them are just brothy soups that have vegetable added to them. Many of the salads are just cooked vegetables. The vegetable repertoire is actually huge and simple to do and very flavorful. Because we work with such a variety of produce these days that we didn’t have before, more and more things are being cultivated here in California, they get sent all over the country. And so you’re getting Meyer lemons, you’re getting a lot of our herbs, different multi-colored potatoes, with all the multi-colored carrots, we didn’t have those twenty-five years ago, but we have them now. You go to the supermarket there are fresh herbs in the produce section, which we never had before. So there’s no excuse for people not to cook.
WGVU: Finally, what are some of the surprising things that you discovered while researching the book?
Goldstein: The most surprising was in the seventeenth century, the middle seventeenth century, there was a whole Messiah movement all over Europe. And there was a Jewish rabbi named Sabbatai Zevi who declared himself the Messiah. He was excommunicated but he kept a following for a long time, and there were people who joined his cult, and it was a cult, and became Muslimized and they gave up keeping Kosher. I was working from a book that was written in nineteen sixty something by the guy who used to be the curator of the Jewish Museum in Salonica, Nicos Stavroulakis, and he was working with this woman who had been from this line of Jews, that were called Donmeh, or Ma’aminim, Donmeh meaning turncoat and Ma’aminin meaning loyal, and it was a wonderful collection of recipes but none of them were following the Kosher laws. There was chicken cooked in butter and things like that. So I took a lot of those recipes and made them fit the Kosher laws because the food was totally delicious. But I didn’t know anything about this movement, they were secret Jews.
Spring vegetable stew (carciofata di Trieste)
Yield: makes 6 servings
Ingredients
1 lemon, juiced
3 medium artichokes, or 6 small artichokes (about 8 ounces after trimming)
3 tbsps olive oil
2 tsps garlic, minced (or more to taste)
1 cup English peas, shelled
8 oz baby carrots, peeled
8 oz mushrooms, sliced
8 oz asparagus tips
8 oz little new potatoes
8 oz tiny pearl onions, peeled
2 cups vegetable broth, or as needed
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Pinch of sugar (optional)
¼ cup fresh flat-leaf parsley, chopped (plus more for garnish, if desired)
Fresh mint or basil, chopped for garnish (optional)
Instructions: Prepare the vegetables: Shell and blanch the English peas for 1 minute, then set aside. Parboil the peeled baby carrots for 5 to 7 minutes, then set aside. Slice and sauté the mushrooms in olive oil for 5 minutes, then set aside. Blanch the asparagus tips in boiling water for 2 minutes, then set aside. Parboil the potatoes for 7 to 10 minutes, depending on the size. Set aside. Parboil the peeled pearl onions for 4 to 5 minutes. Drain and set aside.
Fill a medium saucepan with lightly salted water and bring to a boil.
Prepare the artichokes: Meanwhile, add the juice of 1 lemon to a bowl of water. Working with 1 artichoke at a time, trim off the stem flush with the bottom, then remove all of the leaves until you reach the heart. Pare away the dark green areas from the base.
Cut the artichoke heart in half and scoop out and discard the choke from each half with a small pointed spoon or a paring knife. Slice each half into quarters and slip them into the lemon water. When all of the artichokes are trimmed, strain them out of the lemon water and add them to your saucepan of lightly salted boiling water. Parboil for 5 minutes and drain.
For the stew: Warm the oil in a large sauté pan over medium heat. Add the garlic and parsley and stir for a minute or two. Add the prepared artichokes, peas, carrots, mushrooms, asparagus, potatoes, pearl onions and just enough vegetable broth to moisten.
Bring the stew to a simmer and cook, uncovered, until all of the vegetables are tender, about 10 minutes. Taste and adjust the seasoning with salt and pepper, then add the sugar, if needed for flavor balance.
To serve: Transfer the stew to a serving dish and garnish with the mint. Serve hot.