 Getting the most out of every ingredient. That's the mark of a maker. The KitchenAid Blender Collection. Welcome to the British Library Food Season event, generously sponsored by KitchenAid. My name is Polly Russell and I'm a curator at the British Library and the curator and founder of the food season. And this year I have had the delight of working with Angela Clutton as the guest director. As usual with the food season, we wanted to have a series of events which were eclectic, relevant, and involving some of the most interesting voices in food and history and culture, as well as an opportunity to showcase British Library collections. And tonight's event with Simon Sharma and Claudia Rodin, chaired by Lucy Silver, just could not be more perfect. Not only are the speakers fantastic, but also the event coincides and accompanies the British Library's current exhibition, Hebrew manuscripts, Journeys of the Written Word. This includes rarely seen treasures of music, science, and philosophy from some of the most famous Jewish scholars dating back to the 10th century. And I haven't visited yet because I haven't been on site, but I've been told that there's a love potion involving basil, which is food of some sort. So I'm delighted and can't wait to see that. The exhibition is open until April and so if anyone can get to the British Library, I think it will be wonderful for you to go and visit. For this evening's event, which is about to start, please do submit questions, which are available at the bottom of your screen. And also, should you want to buy any of Simon or Claudia's wonderful books, they are available also on the tab on your screen. Now I'm going to hand over to our chair, Lucy Silver. Chair Lucy trained and worked as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She has been the co-chair of Jewish Book Week since 2011 and directed the festival from 2014 to 2018. She is the perfect chair for this evening. Over to you, Lucy. Thank you very much, Polly. Good evening, everybody. You can see us, we can't see you, but maybe that's not a bad thing. All right, here we go. Claudia, this is about you. No one will ever produce a richer or more satisfying feast of the Jewish experience than Claudia Rodin. So said Simon Sharpe in praise of Claudia's book of Jewish Food. Claudia Rodin is a woman of many talents who became renowned at an early age as Egypt's backstroke champion. She excelled in both maths and science and could have pursued her career in either but came to London in the 1950s to study at St. Martin's with the intention of becoming an artist. In the end, however, cookery and cookery writing prevailed. Her cookery books, also social and cultural histories encompass the very best of international cuisine, from the Lebanon to Vilna, the world is her oyster. Perhaps we should say her tagine of lamb with preserved lemons. Her distinctively beautiful voice is known to us all through radio and TV. Claudia was given a lifetime achievement award last year by the Guardian Observer. Going straight to the point, Simon is not only our Renaissance man of culture, but he is also a serious foodie as his Twitter account attests. Lockdown has been unable to suppress Simon Sharma's creativity, irrepressible. Many of you will have seen the first two programmes of his superb new series on the romantics and marveled at the inventiveness of his presentation. Also current is Simon's great gallery tours on Radio 4, where he walks and talks us through some of the world's greatest museums and artists. He also gave us his dream dinner on Radio 4 last week, still available on BBC sounds. And he served as hors d'oeuvres, little slivers of whitefish and smoked salmon on rye that have a distinctly Jewish feel to them. I know Claudia and Simon well, and I'm delighted to be here this evening to interview them about Jewish food. So, my first question is for you, Claudia. Your book of Jewish food was published in 1996. Jewish food is not exactly what springs to mind. 1986. Oh, sorry, 1986. I'm so sorry. 1968. 1968 was a book of Middle Eastern food. No, sorry. Yeah, yeah. So, to continue, Jewish food is not exactly what springs to mind when people think about ought cuisine. So, Claudia, why did Jewish food excite you enough to write this masterwork about Jewish food? I was actually asked to write it by my publishers. And at the time, it was Elizabeth David, Jane Grickson and Jill Norman, who were having dinner together. And they said, well, they noticed that in my Middle Eastern book, I had several recipes that I said were Jewish dishes for Passover or for a Sabbath dish. And they suddenly said, well, we really should have. We only know one type of Jewish cuisine. We never knew there were any others. And so they asked Jill Norman, asked me to write it when she was at Penguins. And I said, oh no, there's no such thing. And also, where will I find it? It seemed a totally impossible thing. But then I did take it on and I couldn't stop because I went on and on and on and finding more and more things. And people kept telling me there's no such thing. Even my own relatives, I have a few relatives I would keep seeing. They said, well, Claudia, what are you wasting your life on? There is no such thing. We add the same things as everybody else in our countries. And yes, but since the book came out, everywhere I go to give a talk in synagogue, there's always someone telling me, you forgot. You forgot the Jews of Afghanistan. And there I find them. And you forgot the food of the Jews of Holland. Yes, now I've got them. And so not only were all those Jewish foods, there were such a thing, but there's a lot that have been left out. And you're still collecting recipes, aren't you, Claudia, for your new book, which I think is going to be called The Med and Out Next Year. Yes. Yeah. Simon, here's one for you. We know quite a lot about what people ate in general in biblical times, but it was a lowly matzah, the first food that can be called truly Jewish. Well, even that probably not, actually, Lucy. I mean, matzah, for a start, it should be said, the book of Exodus was written 400 years, at least after the ostensible exodus, if indeed the exodus happened. So we're in the kind of 9th, 10th century BC when the book of Exodus was written. So the unleavened bread, which is undoubtedly part of the Torah and part of that great epic, is likely to have been made of, certainly it didn't come in squares. It comes out of Maneshevitz or Rikuzin. Perfectly square, I don't know. It's likely to be made of primitive kind, the first domesticated grains, einkorn, to begin with, and einkorn gave way to emmer wheat as well. Those were the wheats that were really the grains that were mostly eaten in Egypt. And we have a certain amount of knowledge about this very, we nowadays think of the Middle Easters overwhelmingly kind of rice-driven in terms of its grains, but we have the first proper documents, what a self-consciously hebraic, or if you like Jewish society, of the papyri documents of the Jewish mercenary soldier and family colony of Elefantini on the upper Nile near Aswan. Their kind of daily life is quite richly described and it's very, very heavy on breads of different kinds. Now, einkorn and emmer wheat would have been these flat, rather grayish discs, which would have been the first matzah, really. So a kind of harder, tougher, some more biscuity-like version of the basic shape of pita bread. So in the sense in which this was a kind of a ritual, festival-directed kind of food, you could say that was one of the first distinctive... Distinctive... Thanks very much. Simon, I want to... There'll be people out there in the audience who don't know very much about the rules of cash-root or kosher cooking. So could you just give us a very brief explanation? I mean, as brief as you can. And then I want to ask you, has kosher cooking... It's dangerous to say as brief as you can to me. As you well know, Lucy, you'll be... Do your best. ...on that later. Do your best. You've got lots of questions. In your opinion, has kosher cooking stunted the creativity of Jewish food? Those are two different questions. You want me to... I can talk about cash-root. There's a nice... Cash-root, really, for a start, like a lot of the Bible, you know, that old joke about the... ...rescueship captain who arrives on the desert island to rescue Mr. Goldberg. And he says, well, it's wonderful to pick you up, Mr. Goldberg, but tell me, why do you have two synagogues? And he says, one I go to and the other one I wouldn't be seen dead in. The same thing is true of the Bible. There are two completely different accounts of the creation and genesis. And similarly, there are two different accounts of cash-root. One in Leviticus and one in Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy was almost certainly written at least a century after Leviticus. And Leviticus is more forgiving, you have to say. The basic rules of cash-root is you've got to separate meat and milk. You shall not see the lamb in its mother's milk. There are complicated, which really would be, dull criteria about the animals. You have to chew the cards and have a clove and hoof. But then there were all sorts of definition of what is an abomination. The great anthropologist, Mary Douglas, wrote a great book about purity rights and cleanliness rights. And for the first time it made sense that really what those biblical rules were all about, what were regarded as anomalous. And for Deuteronomy, flying insects are anomalous because they're creepy crawly things and they're also kind of bird-like. And therefore, Deuteronomy, I think it's chapter 14, says, very definitely you shall not eat it. But Leviticus says, no, absolutely not. Grasshoppers, locusts, cate-dids, all those kinds of things are perfectly kosher. And one culture that Claudia knows very well, Claudia, supreme ethnologist of Jewish life. Gemini culture, habitually, ate locusts. You ate locusts before, in effect, they ate you, or got rid of all the stuff that were, and still do. And interestingly, the rabbis in the Talmudic period, being unable to reconcile these two totally different approaches to whether you can eat insects or not, particularly flying insects. I said, it's okay to eat it, despite what Deuteronomy says, if it's a tradition in your community, because there was no way they were gonna stop Gemini. There's a Gemini cookbook I have on my shelves. Claudia probably has it as well. And locusts, crunchy locusts is a very important part of it. All right. Maybe we should... Have you tried it, Lucy? That's great, Simon. Maybe we should leave the second part of that question. And so, Claudia. Claudia, we've just celebrated Jewish New Year, which we call Rosh Hashanah. Tell us about the sort of food your family used to eat on Rosh Hashanah in Cairo. And who would be invited to the festivities? In Cairo. In Cairo. Yes. Well, I was part of a very big extended family. And we used... Well, some of us, we had different groups and we weren't always the ones in my parents who were the hosts, but we also often were. Well, I'm just... Yes. There were several things that we wanted to eat, was let me see, things that were green to represent new life, lots of different vegetables, things that were white that represented purity. We also had things that were orange and we had a kind of squash that was like a spaghetti squash. It means it had fibers that came apart with which you made a jam because it represented gold. In the Ashkenazi tradition, it is cemis that people eat. But we also had... She says, Claudia, for people who don't know. Yes. Eastern European Jewish. But of course, most important of all, we had... We did have apple and we did have honey, but sometimes we just dipped in sugar to represent the sweetness of life because it was most of the things we ate were symbolic. I should have started with the very symbolic things. In particular, we had to eat the head of something. And here in England, we've started eating a whole fish with the head on. But in Egypt, we ate the head of a lamb. But if it wasn't the head of a lamb, it was the brains. We would eat brains. I mean, they were wonderful brains. It was tongue. Or it was something to do with the head because the symbolism in Egypt was that we would be at the head, and the Jews should be at the head. But now we have become to say that we have to be at the head of doing good deeds. Nice. So that is more acceptable. Thanks very much, Claudia. This is a bit of an impersonate question, but was your family kosher? No. But nobody was that I knew in Egypt. We were a very lax community. My generation and my parents' generation. But my grandparents' generation were very religious. I mean, there was an uncle who was a Kabbalist. But yes, they were very religious. Sometimes when we visited the older relatives, I didn't go and kiss them because they didn't kiss a girl, even though I was quite young. But so at a certain point, well, maybe I won't go into it, but my grandfather explained why he wasn't kosher anymore. And a lot of Jews had a similar explanation. Shall I say? Yes, yes, if you can. No, quickly. Yes, that my grandfather, when they came from Syria, because they came from Syria, they all lived in a quarter with a slaughterer and with the synagogues, the Jewish school, everything. And then they moved away to grand districts. And from there, they couldn't, it was very far to keep going to the Jewish district they had been into to buy. They went to buy at the market all kinds of things. And then my grandfather saw the slaughterer going to buy from the Muslim butcher. And so he went and told the slaughterer or rather the butcher, the Jewish butcher, obviously. How can I come all the way to you when you buy to him? And his explanation was that all the Jews were away, all of them asking for the same cuts. He couldn't cut, you know, slaughter all these animals just for the cuts. For the fine cuts required by Jews. Okay, and Simon, I'm sorry, I'm asking you for this sort of exegesis generally speaking. Simon, Claudia's book of Jewish food divides Jewish cuisine into two overarching categories, Ashkenazi and Sephardi. Again, in two sentences, can you tell the people in the audience you might not know the difference, something about the origins of Ashkenazi and Sephardi? Well, Ashkenazi, you know, just means really, it's a description really of Northern European Jewish cultures generally. So Germany, France, the Rhine Valley, extended to Poland, the Pale of Sattlement. Sephardi and Mizrahi, there are, I think most people know now that there are Sephardi community originally was Spain, Portugal, the Italian community, particularly the Roman community was completely distinctive with their own language, in fact, Judeo-Italian. But the whole of the Margrethe, you know, was full of Jewish cultures, but they were very far-flung indeed, way beyond Turkey and Persia, both had enormously important cultures with their own foodways and extended all the way to Afghanistan. Indeed, the great lost Jewish cuisine has to be from China, from Kaifeng, you know, where Jews had a very powerful presence under the Northern Song dynasty in the 11th, 12th and 13th century all the way through. And if only, you know, there's that famous joke about, you know, what a Jew is eating Christmas if they're not going to use to Turkey, answer Chinese food, really. It's what they do in New York anyway. So if only we had those documents of, we know that they kept halachik law and most of the festivals. So it'd be wonderful to know what Jewish Chinese cooking was. The only one missing, I think. Well, maybe, is it there in your book, Claudia? I don't think we have any good sources for it. So you ask, yes. I have a Chinese scholar from China. Yes, who actually contacted me to say I heard that you are interested. But she had looked into it because her work was on Jews. And she was particularly interested in Jews. But she said there was nothing left now. The only thing that somebody who went to the region, they went there and they bought something that, I forget now the name of a pastry that was supposedly Jewish, but it came with Lithuanian Jews. Well, that doesn't count at all. It's just, you know, in Manchuria, there was a lot of Manchurian Jewish culture had a great aunt who lived in Harbin. But for example, I could be, this is a rather nice story that when, we thought when I was making a story of the Jews, we wanted a film of particular community which had been boiled down to one person in Kochi, a woman called Sarah Cohen. So this is not the great Iraqi-Calcutta-Mumbai connection which produced Sanctuus and Proliphic and gastronomically very creative cultures. This is the culture of South India, of Kochi and Kerala. And they had their own particular food ways. And you can go to Kochi. Some of you listening or watching may have done this. And you still see it makes one cringe a little bit, Jewtown, it's actually called that. And the beautiful Paradisi synagogue, which is, oh, which was begun during the period of Portuguese and Dutch incursion and has decorative elements from them all. And they went to see Sarah Cohen, who I think, I know she was very, this is 10 years ago and she was already pushing 90, but she was very determined and a tough, tough old bird. And then we were interrupted by this young Muslim man actually in a not very Muslim part of India who had brought her Friday dinner in the Kochi style. And he in fact was doing a doctorate on Kerala Jewish cooking. And Sarah was his principal source actually, so S-O-U-R-C-E. So these food ways went absolutely everywhere. I just want to say one thing about, you know, obviously Ashkenazi cooking is originally much more familiar. Heavy in starch, in potatoes, in pickled foods, in salted foods. Oh, by the way, actually, one, to go back to my favorite subject, one travelers midrashic account in the Middle Ages described locusts being pickled actually as well in Egypt. So locusts were everywhere. Sephardi food is the glory of the sort of things that Claudia writes about so beautifully over and over again. But what it won't say is there's one aspect to the ritual of Jewish life, which is a crossover moment, I think. Claudia may disagree between Ashkenazi and Sephardi cooking. You're not supposed to start cooking on the Sabbath on Shabbat. So both in the classic Sephardic cuisines of Spain and Portugal before the expulsion in 1492 and in the Ashkenazi world of Poland, you were very stew driven. You took your pot of a meat and a meaty stew with lots of vegetables, sometimes with semolina and whether it was Adafina in the Lusitanian and Iberian world or whether it was Cholent in the Ukrainian and Polish world, you then put it in the baker's oven and it stayed there. So you weren't actually doing the cooking and you retrieved it during the Sabbath having not cooked in because it was slow cooking. It was still hot and delicious. And my mother was one of the, it was a tradition in the Ashkenazi community all over Ashkenazi Jewish world but into London as well in the early part of the 20th century for children to go and pick up the Cholent part which my mother certainly did. It was one of the few things that my mother herself was actually brilliant at doing. Her Cholent was prize winning and I'm not crazy about Ashkenazi cooking myself but I do love a perfectly made Cholent. Claudia even, I think in your book you describe that even in your parents' time they still took the pot, didn't they? To the oven. No, because we, when I was born we were living in a little island that's residential and it's now one of the grand areas of living and there weren't a communal oven. I beg your pardon, the grandparents' day. It is in the Jewish quarter. There was the public baths and the public baths, they always had a fire to warm the water, to heat the water and at night it was the dying coals that people would go and put their pots in but it was the people in the Jewish quarter. By the way, when I was saying that people were always telling me we missed out and you know when I was speaking at the Sephardi synagogue by the way I called the whole part of my book Sephardi although now we call them Israhi but at one time in Israel they called everybody who wasn't Ashkenazi Sephardi but because they moved the Sephardim or the people I called Sephardim they moved from east to west and backwards and forwards but not north to where the Ashkenazi were so they had contacts and cultural sort of hybridization between themselves so there was something common about their food which wasn't between the Ashkenazi and the Sephardi but with, sorry, what did you ask? That's absolutely fine and very interesting Claudia. You've both been rather rude in your own way at various times about Ashkenazi cooking and Claudia, you described it in your book I mean this is a summing up kind of all carrots and dumplings and grainers but boiling hot, have you changed your mind over the last 25 years about how you were cooking? Yeah, no, no, but all the way I did love many, many dishes and I still eat them when I can but I have to say that the Ashkenazi themselves don't think much of their food If you see in Israel, I was there at a conference that was called many, many years ago long before my Jewish book which was called Kus Kus or Gefil to Fish and it was, they had asked people from various communities to come and cook in Jerusalem. We were in this hotel, Glad Hotel where we had to be watched by what you call them sort of making sure that you were doing everything kosher but yes, at the end of it there was a big, big party where the, because we had to cook as well as talk and people had to have a taste but at the end there was a big dinner in a restaurant called, I forget, now I forget names, but on one side was all the Sephardi food on the other was the Ashkenazi food and all the Ashkenazi came to eat at the Sephardi and none of the Sephardi went to cook, eat at the Ashkenazi table but there is now, there has been lots of changes and at the beginning in Israel, at the beginning of the state they didn't want a Sephardi food, Sephardi food was despised and it wasn't considered Jewish, it was considered ethnic Jewish food was considered Jewish but it was despised as well because it represented a food of oppression and a food of, it had to be forgotten and left behind and the food that they considered Israeli was hummus and falafel and all those things which they found already there but actually one person told me there is only one food you can say is truly at that time Israeli and it was Turkish Nitzel Turkish Nitzel? Well it's sort of, I want to just sort of complicate things a little bit and I must remember that you know the term of the century around 1900 for example whether the food was horrible then Jerusalem had an enormous Jewish majority there were about 70,000 Jews to about 15,000 Palestinians they were a small, very, very small minority in Palestine, Israel overall but they were a serious majority and I don't want to give the impression that Ashkenazi food throughout is something I think despised is quite a strong word really you know there is one more Ashkenazi bakery near the Lion Gate in the Old City that's been going since the Ashub, since the 1920s and you will not find a more sumptuous array of pastries if I was doing it, you're right to say that I held my nose a bit at Ashkenazi cooking my own family, unlike Claudia, was a mixture of both and originally from Izmir, other shamans were went to Batashania and Romania where a lot of intermarriage with the Ashkenazim happened but Romania was one place, Batashania in particular where there were Ashkenazi and Safadi households who mixed regularly including the ingredients of their kitchens and you know there are some things I attempted I mean it is, gefilte fish gets a terrible wrap and usually deserved and there's nothing more ghastly than these gray, soggy, lumpen, cement like things with their little kind of carrot yarmulke, their little carrots sitting on top but if gefilte fish is only, it is right, it's very close to Canel de Brachet, isn't it? It's actually a dumpling of finely ground fish if your fish is good, if you add egg whites, whipped egg whites to it you're careful about the spice and you don't over-poach it these things can be actually... I hope you're listening very carefully in the audience Claudia, if you want you to add something I have to say that I'm talking about a certain period and everything has changed in Israel including Ashkenazi food has become very, very fashionable I think already 15 years ago or 20 years ago but it became fashionable through the American gourmet magazine New York Times and all the... it was the American deli food and the American idea of Jewish food that made Ashkenazi food become the soul food of the elites because they were powerful elites of Israel The answer to my childhood in Glasgow in comparable cooks and I still haven't tasted anything that compares Simon, look back to your party Ashkenazi roots you spent the latter half of your childhood in Goldersgreen What was in your lunchbox? Yeah, this is really embarrassing Lucy I thought, well, Lucy's... Lucy grew up as Lucy Cohen, I think that's right, isn't it? Yeah, indeed, yes But no relation to the staggeringly great smoked salmon purveyor in Goldersgreen Road called Cohen Smoked Salmon it was still there when you... I don't think it was when you arrived, Claudia but anyway it was really, really very good at least in my childhood memory but my mother, you know, because I did not do school lunches really I had packed lunches as you say Lucy and it was always, always smoked salmon with sometimes a smear of cream cheese on it on rye bread every single day and I was sort of, you know... I think it was the point I hadn't realised that it was kind of luxury food and would infuriate, you know, my mates in the 19... my non-Jewish mates in the 1950s bloody Jews with their smoked salmon so I think it was probably at the moment when I opened my sandwich box and said, oh no, this is a terrible thing to say not smoked salmon again my best friend, a fellow called Sid Harris took his open blade pencil sharpener and snatched it away and started not to eat my smoked salmon sandwich but to tear it it was a kind of sandwich pogrom that actually happened so I attempted to retrieve the... and got my hands freshly sliced I still... Ms. Nake and me putting up to the camera it's very faint now but I still bear the scar, 12 stitches actually of this personal attack on my smoked salmon sandwich You could have swapped and given poor Sid a taste of your daily fare, couldn't you? Yeah, terrible, that actually never occurred to me you know, because I didn't realise the hips are annoyingly luxurious food I want to remind everybody to submit questions and there will be time for questions so do send them in and we'll look forward to them later on Claudia, on a more serious note perhaps You add something or the sense of not being prejudiced and all that but of course when we think of Jewish food and the shtetl, it's one kind of food but then there was all the kinds of foods that came out of Hungary and Austria and they joined the Ashkenazi food culture with, you know, some of the grandest foods of the world so... Good, I don't think with any Ashkenazi... Yes, I still think that the Ashkenazi is a very good point, Lucy to say, for example, there's a there's a dumpling crescent which is essentially Hungary and Bohemia so Hungary and Czechoslovakia and you think, oh, but of course the dumplings can be again you know, like a filter fish can if you know how to cook it properly very light and very refined and there are stevery dumplings and, you know, gorgeous kind of cherry and fruit dumplings and that's a particular subset of the Ashkenazi world Right, so moving on a little bit to a different area Claudia, under the Spanish Inquisition Jews had to give evidence that they'd become good Catholics they truly converted Did food have a role here? Yes, well, because a lot of women were brought before the court of the Inquisition and they were reported by a jealous or somebody who had a grudge against them it could be their maid or it could be the neighbour but the one thing that they were brought in for which is in the courts of the Inquisition in the archives it was always about food apart from things like candles, they might be using candles but it was always food and there were some, of course the main thing was that they didn't eat if they didn't eat enough ham or bacon or pork and so everybody was putting pork of some kind in their dishes and it became such an important thing or rather for the whole population, not just the Jews people who were old Christians, not just the new Christians and the Muslims who had converted as well they all put pork in so as not to be taken as a possible Jew and it has influenced the food of Spain this is why wherever you go you rarely find a soup or a salad or any vegetable dish without something either a little piece of pork somewhere or just the pork fat on it is there but the food that they had at that time I heard about several of the dishes that were mentioned as Jewish dishes and one of them was what you call it an aubergine and cheese gratin do you know that? Berenjena con queso I think so but the thing is I found it in Turkey it is the favorite dish of the Jews of Turkey and it is so extraordinary that that was a dish that actually brought a lot of trouble to women in Turkey if they cooked it, but here they brought it to Turkey but in Spain they would have been that's great Claudia and actually bringing in Turkey I've just got a question for you Simon about the Ottoman Empire could you tell us how food... in questions Lucy sorry kind of ask an historian questions really okay come in at the end what do you want to know about the Ottoman Empire? okay what I wanted to know is something about the relationship between the Jews and the sultan Selim II oh yeah okay so that's yeah one of the Jews who became very important to originally was Portuguese from the Mendes family who became a kind of treasurer and a kind of sort of deputy vizier to Selim II was also, we know this, was also the great caterer Selim II was notoriously copulent and particularly after prayers on Friday light to gorge on this very complicated and delicious kind of abundance of food that was both savory and sweet and Mendes was who was known as the great Jew had an enormous caravan which used to go all the way through the different courtyards of Topkapi to deliver this so yeah I think I began that's that's that's kind of you so I apologize for saying I'm getting all the questions so in fact there's a chapter about there's the couple of pages about this in volume two of my Jewish history not the great catering but I you know it was interesting though to switch it slightly that within this very kind of mixed up food world of my Sharma grandparents my mother Steinberg grandparents weren't mixed up at all because that was really purely Lithuanian Ashkenazi food but in the more kind of mixed up Balkan tradition there were there were foods that came absolutely I mean one that's very I think I'm right in saying Claudia O'Corretti called my grandmother Sarah called it Fritaka and it was basically kind of ground up chicken patties actually but chicken is important and you you've grounded up you I think some sort of dill was used which I don't like very much but it was ground up with onion in the way in which kind of beef patty would and it be fried but it was I remember served with rice by my by my grandmother and it was it was something that she certainly said anyway originally came that her husband who's I say my grandfather died before he was born particularly liked and was a kind of ismiri thing and certain and my mother inherited that and she made that sort of very well too and it was always called a Fritaka and sometimes you come with kind of braised tomatoes and I think it was worth to tell us something I feel I wish I could bring the portrait that I've got downstairs of my great grandfather because he was the chief rabbi of Aleppo and he is he was he was made that he was he was given the post by the Sultan Abdelhamid and he has he is there in a what is he called his his robes and his kaftan and his his turban and all the medals given to him from Abdelhamid and so we did feel as not only from Aleppo but from the Istanbul part of the family that we were Ottoman and in a big way and from all the different parts we inherited all these dishes and I could say yes this is where we are from and this is where we are from we had a very brief period in Vienna I think actually some of my great uncles lived in Vienna and there was a saying that where shamans lived empires fell the Ottoman Empire fell followed by the Habsburg Empire as we know followed by the British Empire and hey here I am in New York the bad spell is not right I was going to ask you when did Jewish cooking first come to Britain but you put me off there's the famous fish and chips thing really which is only half for our chips and the potatoes were not absolutely not part of unless Gloria corrects me as far as I know not part of safari cooking fried fish of course absolutely was and fried fish certainly was sold on the streets of 18th century London and the first time which is rather wonderful I think actually that Jewish cooking was sort of recognised in the publication of the book which I'm sure the British library has got lots of first editions cooking for private houses I think it's called 1845 and the very last chapter you can read it online actually everybody it's called Jewish and foreign cooking before you get to foreign cooking there is Jewish cooking and there's a celebration of not any of fried fish of food by being fried but eaten cold the following day for example fish like pink fish like salmon actually apparently was fried by Jewish communities and then eaten cold for breakfast or for lunch the following day the other dish there are two other kinds of Jewish cooking which are celebrated in Eliza Acton's book one are the use of pounded almonds of almond flour to substitute the wheat flour obviously that arose out of Passover practice when you weren't allowed to have leaven types of pastries and salt beef what Eliza Acton called smoked beef but actually is kind of pickled or salt beef which she says without meaning to be offensive said it's so good that it resembles the flavour of a perfectly cured ham which was the best way probably to celebrate it this is quite nice because this leads us to talking a little bit about and this is for you Claudia how and why was the Delhi first introduced in New York in the early 20th century who did it cater for actually I'm just trying to think well really in the 19th century and it was let me see where did I say I can't answer the phone sorry mind you Claudia you said the purpose of the Jewish Delhi well it was no no it just makes a funny noise I'm just going to say this for you Claudia it was when the pogroms in Russia and there was this mass of 2,300,000 Russian Jews arrived in America and they arrived from Stettles and they lived in tenements and many of them were males were men on their own and they couldn't afford to go out to places they wanted to eat their own food and neighbours started cooking for them and giving them food and gradually it started lots of places where they cooked the kind of foods that they had at home at home and gradually they became there were more and more people and families where the women went to work also couldn't cook at home so the Delhi became a very important part of American Jewish life and somehow that kind of food that was created at the time when they were between the Stettles and the tenement that became the idea of Jewish food that the menu of the Delhi until today from the salt beef there were different kinds of delis there were the meat ones and then there were the fish ones which were called dairy and that had fish and creams and various deli things so they specialised in different things one thing that happened in New York that was born in New York is the pastrami because people say it's something that is Romanian but it's not the Jews in Romania didn't make it that way it was something completely unique of New York Now we're going to throw this open to the audience in a minute so I've got a last question for both of you so Claudian Simon perhaps starting with Claudia can you tell us about this new way of Middle Eastern cooking which is led by Yota Motelenghi and his Palestinian partner Sami Tamimi and Sarit Pakker and Itamar Shulovich of Honey & Co do you think Claudio you might have influenced the Middle Eastern cuisine in any way? Yes because they say so they say that it was their bedside reading every night to get inspiration but because it was my Middle Eastern book was translated into Hebrew very early on it's 50 years ago and as Yotam says he was born the year that my first book came out and in Israel it was the first book that actually had Middle Eastern recipes and well I do find that all the chefs there had an award at the Jewish Film Festival or Jerusalem Film Festival for the influence I had and then I went to for the award and several chefs invited me to special dinners that they made and said you know that the book was where they had their original source material but somehow that's unsurprising Simon would you like to add anything about the kind of cooking that Ottolenghi for instance and Sammy to Mimi present in Jerusalem or I think you're... Yes I think the book is a wonderful book because again in the spirit of Claudio's work there's a lot of folk history in it and it does indeed go back to the days when I was a little bit nostalgic about because it seems to be a gloss golden age where Jews and Arabs in cities like Jerusalem Jews and Palestinians in cities like Jaffa and Jerusalem sort of shared a lot of food culture and there's a lot of that in the book on Jerusalem it's a wonderful evocation of if there is any who don't know it the Makhaneh Yehuda food market is absolutely an incredible place one of the greats in Barcelona it's one of the great extraordinary kind of food markets of the world but there are weird phenomena for example I read a small story here in New York that one in four Americans buys hummus every week from their supermarket this is absolutely extraordinary originally hummus was in the idea that it might be it was meant again for rather in the spirit of Claudio's history of how Delhi started in New York it was originally made by a man called Norman Soha in the 1980s and the mid and late 1980s for Israelis, so a large Israeli expatriate community in New York who wanted to be reminded of the hummus back home and the fact that the business grew and grew and grew and eventually was bought by PepsiCo by the makers of PepsiCola who delivered I think it was 12 million free samples to supermarkets all over the country although I have to say my first introduction to hummus in the 1970s was via the Arab restaurants in Jaffa and I don't think that the Tel Aviv would produce quite the same kind of standard quality of hummus I don't know that I've really found it elsewhere Simon you might like to I'm very purist about hummus, I like to make my own and cook my own cookies Of course you do Simon, and of course you would like to give us your recipe and of course you would like to give us your recipe for chicken soup but you don't have to put them up on your website unfortunately because there's a lot of people out there with a lot of questions for you so before I turn to them just quickly Claudia I just want to say yes I think what is happening with your tam and all these others but primarily your tam they have created a Middle Eastern novel cuisine that is absolutely wonderful but it keeps changing because it is like the global cultures today are creative and they have to keep creating and some like your tam have incredible magic about what they do and do it extremely well and I find this is particularly upsetting to Middle Eastern restaurants that are Turkish and Lebanese and all that who always do the same traditional thing their menu is set in stone and they find that these people, young chefs or older chefs from Israel feel free to do not, they can use anything from any Jewish community whether it's Yemenite or Persian and feel free to do what they want with it and so what they are doing has made a huge impact on international global gastronomy or cuisine wonderful, you may have an opportunity to sort of expand on this sort of things that we've touched upon but now I'd like to open it to the floor and here's the first question from Cheryl and she doesn't actually specify who this question is too so either of you could pick it up as someone who was brought up on Jewish food and still appreciates it in what ways do you think that Jewish food would change? It's a little bit like you were just mentioning and Fat, Claudia, in relation to... Yeah, I mean in America it can change completely because people there feel you have to be creative and they do for instance latkes with courgette and it has nothing to do with the latkes that we know but in France people when I gave a recipe using a different fish for gefelter fish there was uproar that I had to change it in my French edition because the French are traditionalists but here it just changes with what is available Here's a question for Simon from Philip Coles Simon, you mentioned locusts did John the Baptist eat insects or carob beans? Absolutely unqualified to answer the question not having been there at the time I have no idea I don't mean to blow the question but certainly we know that locusts were we don't even know if they were consumed in biblical times we know they were consuming plague of locusts but we certainly do know that in very ancient Jewish communities in Yemen and indeed in Ethiopia it was absolutely standard and as I say, Yemeni cookbooks survived from quite a long time ago so when the first Jewish rediscovery of Yemenite Jews occurs in the middle of the late part of the 19th century they certainly discover that locusts are basically be your happy hour snack Thank you very much Here's a question from Aaron Valance I would love to know whether there are any dishes specific to the Jewish community in Britain that you don't see anywhere else I guess that's for either of you Claudia? Yes, it is the fried gefilte fish you don't see it anywhere else and because like the fried fish in Bata it came with the Portuguese Jews who came to England in the 18th century and the way of frying in Bata is something that the Portuguese has brought even to Japan but the Jews brought it here but they started also frying gefilte fish because everywhere else gefilte fish is just stewed white this is the only place that you can find that Did you want to add anything? I don't know about you Claudia but I would counsel people trying it outside the Jewish community not actually to have a full-on Bata really but actually just to dredge the ground fish with onions and spices whatever you want to do it like that, that's actually what my mother did and it could be tiny little cocktail fish balls or large patties and they're both very good and they stay good mysteriously for days afterwards but actually yes now that's the way most of the Jews do it but when Eliza Acton gave recipes she called fish in the Jewish manner it was a Bata was that ground fish there or whole fish? Yes that would be some chips fish so we have written that so here is a question from Win Brown, she says can you tell me anything about the kinds of food eaten by African Jews or was it basically the same as other Jewish traditions I'm thinking particularly of Ethiopian Jews Well I know that I mean as far as I know about it actually and again I'm working again on the rediscovery of Ethiopian Jews first of all by a great Karriite ethnologist in the 1890s and he describes food in the Jewish community which is richly slaughtered but is indistinguishable from the kind of food eaten by the rest of the Ethiopians one particular case in point being in Jarrah this extraordinary kind of rather I don't know how we all feel about in Jarrah not my favourite kind of thing but it is why you mop part meat stews very spongy, Claudia how does it get to be so spongy and cloth-like and certainly Ethiopian Jews Gondar, Gondar is a great Ethiopian was the centre of most of the Ethiopian Jewish community and they were the first people who went talk about using in Jarrah rather than plate stews which seem to be sort of indistinguishable from I think yes I know but there are of course now communities, there are communities now the Abodaya community in Uganda which is quite important and very distinctive Jewish community and I think all the rest of you have been frozen or maybe it's me who's frozen but the Abodaya community also I think developed as I understand it Jewish variations on what standard East Africa food is I mean there is quite a thriving there was a Jewish community in the Sudan but they were of Iraqi and Syrian origin and so their food was something they adapted it to things that they found there but I don't know of something purely African myself apart from the Ethiopian ones Lucy did you want to say something? My niece has a café in Tel Aviv actually and with the chefs are Eritrean and so the food is Eritrean and then once a week they also put on Eritrean music so if anybody wants any details I can supply them later Polly This is a question from Rebecca What would you say distinguishes Jewish food from the other food native to a place Is it mainly that it is shaped by cultural laws? For me or yes I find that very often Jews come from a country and think that they eat exactly the same thing and then you find out from the people in the country one Jewish have realized how different their food was but for instant the reason why it's different yes it has to do partly with the kosher laws they use oil instead of butter or else goose fat instead of pork fat so there's a different in taste but there are for instance the Sephardi Passover cakes are made with almonds there is that kind but there is something else and that the Jews moved they were migrating for all the various reasons of work of trade of persecution but they brought something from one country to another and it created a mix of two cultures sometimes of three cultures and in various countries in some countries like in Turkey the food remained very different although the Jews who came from Spain because the majority or great number went straight from Spain to Turkey and they kept until recently their food of Spain in an unbelievable way which I researched quite a lot but they didn't stop them from eating shish kebab and pilafs from adopting foods from Turkey as well but I remember at a conference a Turkish gastronom said can Claudia tell us why I'm 50 years old that was a few years ago and I have never eaten the Jewish food of Turkey and the Jews have been here well he had to go and eat in their homes but now I must say that it has got into restaurants that there are Jews and caterers who learn from Jews and they sell to restaurants the specialities of Jews I just had something really that Claudia was saying yesterday when we were having a preliminary conversation there are certain foods which were unknown in the ancient world or not known to the Romans or Greeks even though we think of them as quintessentially and Claudia's book and Claudia mentioned this yesterday because the Jews were living in Sicily they got artichokes from the Arab culinary world and brought them into Italy Jewish artichokes had that distinctive migratory route the same thing with melanzane but very often it's a matter of what the Jews carry there are tiny little variations for example something I rather like Biales which you may in Britain know they're quite well known in New York which are not the same as bagels or bagels they're flat, they're round but they're flat and they're solid, no hole in the middle there's a little depression in the middle they're caramelised softened onion shreds they're very very good if they're done properly and that was distinctive not just to Poland but to Bialystok in particular, hence the name and certainly wasn't, there was nothing else like it in the Polish bread basket as far as I know That is wonderful, thank you both for such rich answers just a quick note here, hi Lucy we would love the details of your niece's café It's on Benjahuda but I doubt that it's over at the moment sadly it used to be the journalist's café on Benjahuda and I will find the details anybody can contact me at lucyatjewishbookweek.com We're going to be inundated Here's a question from Adam Lieber Why do you think Ashkenazi food never got the uptake and glamourisation in the UK that we see in New York and the USA and do you think Hasidism appreciate the quality seen across the pond or from the developments within the food from the younger chefs I think why do you stick this question about Ashkenazi food about having the uptake and glamourisation in the UK versus across the pond has it ever glamourised in America despite the spectacular globalisation of the bagel which is another comparable to hummus but I haven't done the kind of food ways research on that has it ever glamourised it was always the same stuff turned out at weddings and bar mitzvahs and it made it into Hollywood scenes in various Hollywood movies the Jewish co-in brothers or whatever it is of people that inevitably family feuding catastrophic bar mitzvahs really where gefilter fish and smoked salmon and various kinds of slightly suicidal chicken were presented but it was never really glamourised but it was popularised so it's that's simply because the Jewish community the film industry, the entertainment industry or the catering industry was very it was sentimentalised I think is the proper word place like Barney Greengrass which is still a wonderful place for every conceivable kind of smoked fish not just whitefish but sturgeon and not just smoked salmon but whitefish and sable and sturgeon on Amsterdam Avenue is a place where people go to remember their grandparents from Brooklyn and the Lower East Side there were of course places like that in London there was the Great Salt Beef Cafes of Blooms and the Great Bagel Emporium there is still one there but it keeps on being resurrected in a slightly different version I think yeah because Ashkenazi Jewish culture in America was such a big thing you know the comedians the comedians were at the weddings and they were at the hotels in the hills with whatever and they were talking about food all the time it was their jokes and their things and it's got into Hollywood talk and American talk it's sort of so it is because the community there was so powerful it was the Golden Community of the World. Yeah there's a story of the visitor to a very excessively lavish bar mitzvah who is you know who goes into the main dining room and is astonished to see a full sculptural bar mitzvah boy down in Potato Kugel and someone says is that you know is that a sculpture by Zadkein and the host there no no Zadkein only works in Chop Lever you know right Polly I don't know whether we've got time for any more questions but kind of this links in and I think it's just arrived on my phone and it's from Omar Petillo what did Ashkenazis eat before we knew about potatoes for latkes they used they didn't do latkes they did other things but yes they didn't have it's a khanika thing because of the you know the miracle of the oil the miracle of the oil by the way it's not in the book of Maccabees it was an invention by the Mishnah and the Talmudists much later on but he was supposed to eat something in oil a very good example of the radically divergent food ways is in the safari world you eat oil fried donuts with with jam filling and as you rightly imply you know as the question of rightly implies potatoes were kind of unknown until the late 18th century so like a fairly recent invention in fact it's a kind of lukumadis they are little fritters and so do the Moroccans as well I don't know how much time we have we've got Polly I wanted to actually have the final question if I may which is for both of you what food could you not what would be your least dispensable food what food could you not live without Simon what food do I like the least what food do you like the most what food do I like the most in Jewish food oh dear you go first Simon's floored I feel having you know like 3000 recipes that I've tried over the years I can't say one difficult as a food writer because I've got too many not a recipe but a food like I think Nigella said roast chicken for instance is it not particularly Jewish no I mean roast chicken you know I couldn't live without roast chicken is it as good as kosher is kosher chicken is it especially good as kosher chicken yes it depends on things whether it's good or not I do like chocolate I do make chocolate I live without it maybe I could do laptop liver yeah Polly do you think that time's up I think very sadly time I think really sadly time is up I can't thank you enough Lucy you've done the most beautiful job and given the difficulty of this technology it nevertheless feels like we've been in the most wonderful intimate informal but informative conversation with the three of you it has been wonderful and I think that the telephone in fact enhanced it because it was just like being at your house Claudia it has just been wonderful I'm definitely putting on an event next year which is going to be called kus kus or gefilter fish for sure food season and I've just got this kind of tantalising question about what was it that the Chinese eight Chinese Jewish communities and I think everyone it's just been absolutely tantalising and delicious listening to you but to all thank you if wonderful audience so thank you for your beautiful questions so sorry we couldn't answer them all if you have enjoyed this evening's event please come back and join us for other food season events which are taking place between now and the end of October today we have an amazing double bill two events one called beyond the bank which is looking at some really inspiring initiatives which are taking sort of food solutions out to communities beyond food banks really inspiring work and another event on food futures with D Woods Tim Lang and Dan Saladino which will be very interesting on the future of food we would absolutely love to see you again thank you again to our sponsors and most of all thank you so much to Lucy Claudia and Simon for just an evening I don't think any of us will ever forget thank you so much thank you pleasure thank you Lucy thank you