Jews, Food and Spain

Hardbound, 302 pages

A fascinating study that will appeal to both culinarians and readers interested in the intersecting histories of food, Sephardic Jewish culture, and the Mediterranean world of Iberia and northern Africa.

In the absence of any Jewish cookbook from the pre-1492 era, it requires arduous research and a creative but disciplined imagination to reconstruct Sephardic tastes from the past and their survival and transmission in communities around the Mediterranean in the early modern period, followed by the even more extensive diaspora in the New World. In this intricate and absorbing study, Hélène Jawhara Piñer presents readers with the dishes, ingredients, techniques, and aesthetic principles that make up a sophisticated and attractive cuisine, one that has had a mostly unremarked influence on modern Spanish and Portuguese recipes.

Hélène Jawhara Piñer holds a doctoral degree in Medieval History and the History of Food. She has lectured at Bar-Ilan University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Casa de Velásquez in Madrid, and the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History (Philadelphia). She was awarded the Broome and Allen Fellowship of the American Sephardi Federation (ASF) in 2018 and the David Gitlitz Emerging Scholar Prize of the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies in 2021. She is a research associate of the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Renaissance (France). Dr. Jawhara Piñer’s main research interest is the medieval culinary history of Spain through inter- and multiculturalism, with a special focus on Jewish culinary heritage until the early modern period. She is the author of the historical cookbook Sephardi: Cooking the History (Academic Studies Press): the book was praised by the Los Angeles Times, El País, and the Jewish Book Council; is a winner of the 2021 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards; and has been translated into Spanish. She spearheads the culinary live show “Sephardic Culinary History with Chef Hélène Jawhara Piñer,” promoted the ASF & The Center for Jewish History, and is a member of the Foodish Advisory Board of ANU Museum (Tel Aviv). Her new historical cookbook is forthcoming in Winter 2023.