Customer Reviews

Sephardic Cooking: 600 Recipes Created in Exotic Sephardic Kitchens from Morocco to India

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Copeland Marks' collected most of these recipes from Sephardic members of senior citizens groups in Israel. The dishes are central to women's participation in the religious life of their communities. Women's worship, as Susan Sered has pointed out, is partially carried out in the home sphere. The recipes are remarkable. Two of my favorites are the Persian fesenjean & the Yemenite samak. Neither are for rank beginners, but both are divine.

I borrowed this from the library and fell in love with it.I have been looking for homemade old world recipes from the middle east and this book has it. I love how it is broken up into countries. Some of the recipes have a lot of steps but it is worth the effort. The tastes that this book has to offer is far from "American cuisine" and that's okay with me. Not all the recipes follow the laws of kashrus but it has plenty that do. I still think its an asset to any cookbook collection.

I keep kosher. Not every recipe in this book is, as for example chicken with yogurt, so if you don't understand the laws of kashrut and are depending on this book to teach you, then you're in for trouble. However, if you know how to manage a Jewish kitchen, then magnificent tastes await you here. There are dishes from 16 different countries. My favorites are Georgia and Iran. PS I just ordered a hardcover copy as my paperback one is quite worn.

This is the best sephardic cookbook, I like it because of the many different recipes for each country within the sephardic world. I use it a lot and recommend it to people I know.
The recipes are not hard and most ingredients are easy to get.

I love this book! I own more than 20 cookbooks and this is the only one I've made more than three or four recipes from. The recipes and ingredients are simple but delicious, and they give you an authentic taste of the various cuisines they're drawn from. I've eaten at various ethnic restaurants in NY and already been knowledgeable about the food from this book alone - for example, what spices provide a flavor that my friend has commented on, that certain ingredients are typical of the cuisine, etc.

Which brings me to another great feature of this book: It's divided by region and country and has short written pieces and pictures of Jewish life in each one. This is not only educational, but also helps the reader connect to the sense of history behind the recipes. If you have family from somewhere covered in the book (I'll list the sections later FYI), you can have a source of family recipes. My daughter is still a baby, but I look forward to teaching her to make these simple and delicious recipes as she grows.

And yes, the simplicity is as much a part of these recipes as their deliciousness. These are true family recipes, developed to be made by multiple generations of women working together. You don't have to get out the mandolin slicer or the pasta maker unless you want to. For example, there are dumpling dough recipes that are made by soaking bread in water, wringing it out and reshaping it by hand. The ingredients can generally be found in any American supermarket. I even managed to find everything I needed or perfectly good substitutes while living in Prague for a year.

This book has legendary status among Jewish cooks. I got it years ago after reading an online discussion of how great it is. I recently bought it again (hence, this review) as a surprise for a friend who just got married. She told me that she'd seen this book in the kitchen of her aunt, the "go-to cook of the family," and didn't know how I knew she wanted it since we'd never discussed it. That's what happens when a book is legendary! The only thing I don't know is why it's still out of print.

The chapters are:
1. Eastern Mediterranean
(a) Turkey, p.3 (b) Greece, p. 35
2. Middle East
(a) Kurdistan, p. 65 (b) Baghdad (Iraq), p. 91 (c) Persia (Iran), p. 103
3. Caucasus and Central Asia
(a) Georgia, p. 197 (b) Uzbekistan (Bukhara and Samarkand), p. 249 (c) Afghanistan, p. 299
4. India
(a) Calcutta (The Baghdadi Jews), p. 325 (b) Bombay (Bene Israel), p. 353
(c) Cochin (The Black Jews), p. 369
5. Red Sea
(a) Yemen, p. 387 (b) Ethiopia, p. 401 (c) Egypt, p. 415
6. The Maghreb - North Africa
(a) Morocco, p. 433 (b) Tangier, p. 464 (c) Tunisia, p. 471 (d) Libya, p. 507

Pages numbers are from my edition (1994 paperback, cover pictured here at the time of this writing). I included them to show how extensive the book is - it doesn't have three or four recipes from each region, but tens of pages of them.

the book was nice we personally knew the author, he was a very nice man and he should rest in peace
had some authentic recipes but, Jews from these regions of the world are very strict when it comes to the rules of kashrut(kosher) mr. marks had more than a few recipes in this book that if he did his research he would have never put them in The one basic rule for jewish cuisine is NEVER to MIX meat and dairy in one dish or even in a meal there are even rules about how long you must wait before you eat a meat meal after eating dairy and visa versa