Food is our connection to our Mexican Jewish past

At the age of 80, Ofelia Slomianski, while she still had her memory — completed a written recipe book (in Yiddish and in Mexican) of hers and her mother’s recipes. Bobe Miriam (as her family called her) then passed her culinary collection to her daughter who added her own comments and stories.

It fell into the hands of grandson, Ilan Stavans: “And because she was losing her memory — she was suffering from Alzheimer's — it was very meaningful to me to be receiving such a document and I cherished it.”

Similarly, Margaret Boyle, who also had Mexican heritage, had received a similar recipe-filled notebook passed down the generations from her great-grandmother Malka Poplawski (aka Baba Malka). While Baba Malka was still cooking her family took turns observing and documenting her work in her Mexico City kitchen. It was “a link to the Old World” says Boyle.

Stavans and Boyle are both US based academics — he a Professor of the Humanities, Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College (Massachusetts) and she, director of Latin American, Caribbean and Latino studies at Bowdoin College (Maine).

The books may have been enjoyed only by their families had the pair not met when Boyle invited Stavans to her college in 2018 as a speaker for a series she was running in Jewish Thought. “Ilan was speaking about converso identity, and that was where we first connected in the scholarly way, and in spending the day together, we learned more about our shared Jewish Mexican ancestry.”

They discovered that both had inherited a family collection of recipes handed down over generations. Both of their matriarchs had immigrated to Mexico from Eastern Europe at the turn of the century and when the academics compared notes they discovered how historically important their families’ food histories were: “For me, food has definitely been a way to better understand my family history and to keep family members alive” said Boyle.

Fine wine - sweet kiddish wine becomes a cooling popsicle Photo: Ilan RabchiskeyIlan Rabchinskey

Stavans recalls growing up in Mexico surrounded by fellow immigrants from the Old Country: “Food was the connection to the past and the way they recreated the shtetl. Though very soon the food began to integrate different elements of Mexican cuisine as well. It was no longer pure Eastern European, you know, chicken soup or gefilte fish or other dishes, but started incorporating some of the fruit, the vegetables, the flavours, the spices of Mexico.”

This inspired them to create a cookbook together of the recipes of their respective families which turned into a larger project: “In talking to other Mexican Jews, we realised that there was much more. Other families had similar documents, and it started growing, with people sending us all kinds of dishes and old recipes renewed — people in the diaspora, meaning in LA, in Chicago, and New York, and Israel” Stavans explains.

The seed that was the two handwritten notebooks blossomed into this larger Mexican Jewish book — Sabor Judio — that was published last year.

In the culinary compendium recipes like punchy snapper ceviche con maror and icy cold paletas Manischewitz (sweet wine ice lollies) share space with mango jicama salad and pollo Luis de Santángel — a full-flavoured chicken dish named after a Renaissance Spanish converso.

They give a flavour of the exciting dishes that have evolved since the arrival of the Ashkenazi immigrants more than a century ago.

Find all the above recipes in The JC’s recipe section.

All recipes are extracted from Sabor Judío: The Jewish Mexican Cookbook by Ilan Stavans and Margaret Boyle.