Image: Navaro · CC BY-SA 3.0
The Book of Jewish Food
- Year
- 1996
- Era
- 20th century
- Origin
- UK · Europe
- Language
- English
- Category
- Jewish/Diaspora
The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York, issued by Penguin in 1996, is Claudia Roden's landmark survey of Ashkenazi and Sephardi cooking gathered across the Jewish diaspora. Combining recipes with social history, migration narratives, and family testimony, the work reframed Jewish cuisine as a plural, geographically expansive tradition and has since been recognised as a foundational reference in modern diaspora food scholarship.
Cooking from this book
Sephardi haroset
Signature dishFew dishes capture the spirit of Claudia Roden's monumental survey quite like haroset, the sweet Passover paste evoking the mortar of Egyptian bondage. Roden traces its many incarnations across the Jewish diaspora, from the date and walnut versions of the Middle East to the apple and wine mixtures of Ashkenazi tables. It became emblematic of her project: a single ritual food refracted through countless communities, charting migration, memory and belonging across continents and centuries.
An editorial note on a dish associated with this book, written for The Coquinist. It is not a reproduction of the book's recipe.
