OP: Sephardic Cuisine

Expelled from Spain in 1492, Jewish refugees scattered in all directions, commingling their Spanish-Jewish heritage and cuisine with that of their new homes. The results can be surprising.

For example, one might not expect to find a deeply rooted tradition of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern flavors in a landlocked southern African country. However, that is precisely what we get in this 1986 community cookbook compiled by the Sephardi Ladies of Zimbabwe.

The use of Ladino—a Judeo-Spanish dialect derived from medieval Spanish—in the recipe titles emphasizes the dueling senses of stasis and cultural disruption at play with displaced peoples hanging on to threads connecting them to a homeland. 

Among the recipes you will find:

• Kashkara reynada, broad bean skins—stuffed with minced meat, panade, and egg—fried in batter coating the seam side only then braised in a tomato sauce with the shelled beans
• Arroz kon saffron, a rice dish which includes unspecified herbs in addition to saffron and piri-piri sauce
• Bourikitas—spinach or potato and cheese-filled bourekas (translated as cheese pastries)
• Saleb—a sweetened beverage, originating in the Levant, thickened with tubers, traditionally orchid bulbs; arrowroot is specified in this case

Recipes use a mix of measurements by weight in metric and by volume; oven temperatures are metric.

Spanish, Middle Eastern, African, and colonial influences appear at every turn. While headnotes and commentary are absent, much can be intuited with a little digging. The brief forward is written by Chairlady Stella Cohen who authored the somewhat more expansive and obtainable (though also out-of-print) book Stella’s Sephardic Table in 2012.