Jews, Food, and Spain

2023 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards

Best Jewish Food Culture Book;

2022 National Jewish Book Award Finalist

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, Helene Jawhara Pier 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.