Unravelling the mysteries of Indian-Jewish food
Book review by Dr Anne Sarzin
When Sydney writer Elana Benjamin pictures her childhood, the first image that enters her mind is her Nana Hannah’s Bondi apartment crowded with her father’s nine brothers and sisters, their husbands, wives and children, the sounds of laughter and loud conversation interspersed with Arabic and Hindustani. ‘My Benjamin aunts, uncles and cousins congregated at Nana’s modest two-bedder every Saturday evening for a home-cooked Benjamin feast,’ she writes in the introduction to her colourful book, Indian-Jewish Food: Recipes and Stories from the Backstreets of Bondi, which opens a window onto an exotic culinary world of spices, herbs, flavours, colours and fragrance.
The family were part of Bombay’s Baghdadi Jewish community, who fled Iraq at the beginning of the 18th century, seeking the religious freedom and trading benefits of British-ruled India. It was a small community, even at its peak there were only 5,000 Baghdadi Jews in India. After Indian independence in 1947 and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the community began to disperse, with many Indian-Jewish migrants settling in Australia. In the late 1940s and into the ‘50s and ‘60s, they formed their own enclave in Bondi’s backstreets around Curlewis Street, Gilgandra Road, Warners Avenue and O’Brien Street.
In conversation recently with Indira Naidoo at a packed event hosted by Waverley Library in Bondi Junction, Elana revealed her determination to preserve the recipes of her mother and grandmothers. Generally, their abbreviated written recipes comprised a meagre list of ingredients, without measurements, methods, temperatures or basic instructions. Collaborating closely with her mother, Sheila, who proved a rich and knowledgeable source of information, Elana began the challenging task of documenting a culinary heritage that mirrored the family’s history, their arduous journeys and re-settlement in foreign places, their rich traditions marking religious festivals and family milestones, and the abundant everyday meals prepared lovingly by generations of her foremothers.
Elana Benjamin
‘The new arrivals in Bondi used food as a means of retaining their cultural identity in their humble Bondi kitchens,’ Elana writes in the book’s Introduction, ‘the women cooked the familiar Indian-Jewish food of home. And they bought their ingredients that were essential to their cooking from a local Jewish-owned spice shop, Eze Moses.’ Eze Moses was a Sydney institution, and his shop offered an eight-year-old Elana some of her most vivid memories when she accompanied her mother there to buy an array of pungent spices, such as turmeric, cumin, coriander and cardamom, all so characteristic of her mother’s dishes that fused Indian and Iraqi traditions.
Although Elana refers in her book to two other Jewish communities in India, the Bene Israel and the Cochin Jews, who had their own culinary traditions, her book focuses solely on the cuisine of India’s Baghdadi Jews. She quotes Claudia Roden, who stated that Iraqi Jews who moved to India ‘kept up the old cooking traditions, but their dishes acquired new flavours and local touches, and they developed special dishes of their own.’ The local Indian cooks, many of them working in Jewish homes, added their own spices and ingredients to traditional Iraqi dishes.
The recipes in this book include sides, vegetarian, fish and chicken and meat dishes, as well as time-honoured sweets. Additionally, there is a useful bibliography and an index. ‘I hope this book inspires readers to head to their kitchen, to try out some new recipes, and to share their creation with family and friends,’ Elana states. ‘So that my beautiful Indian-Jewish food becomes theirs and, in doing so, brings joy to their home and to their life.’
Elana, a graduate of Moriah College in Sydney, is a freelance writer and self-taught cook. She is co-founder of Sephardi Mizrahi Voices Australia, an organisation that seeks to raise awareness of the traditions, culture and history of Jews from Southeast Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and Iran. For further information on her book, see www.elanabenjamin.com
Indian-Jewish Food: Recipes and Stories from the Backstreets of Bondi
Elana Benjamin
Photography by Shibani Mishra
Sydney Jewish Museum
