For Stavans, what makes these dishes and practices inherently converso is how the discernible details aren’t necessarily overtly Jewish. “If you tell somebody [about] gefilte fish with salsa or mango, they will say, ‘Oh, I see the Jewish and the Mexican connection,’” he says. By contrast, if you describe a dish of fish cooked in tomato sauce, “people will not immediately think this is Jewish food. But, for those families, it was something that you cooked so that the neighbours would not suspect you, and that passed on from one generation to another.” As Jawhara Piñer sees it, the change food underwent as it arrived in a new location is a marker of identity: Sep- hardic Jews “are so diverse, and this diversity makes our strength,” she says. “We have a very singular food iden- tity that has been shaped thanks to the different foods we were able to find in our locations.” That trusty Shab- bat stew is the perfect illustration of her point. What came to define converso food outside of Spain is how it adapted to its new home. Its superpower was blending in by taking up ingredients that were widely used local- ly, leaving the process of cooking the dish as the stron- gest tie to history and tradition. The ingredients of ada- fina, which is mentioned repeatedly in Inquisition trial documents, vary wildly depending on location and cli- mate. Italian and Portuguese varieties mixed in freekeh and chestnuts. When adafina arrived in South America, tomatoes and sweet potatoes made their way into the pot, while Mexican versions incorporated corn. “I really love when one dish is mentioned in different kinds of sourc- es,” adds Jawhara Piñer, “from different territories and different centuries, different periods, because it really shows that this is a Sephardic food, because when peo- ple move, food moves.” Years of research inspired Jawhara Piñer to write cookbooks, including Sephardi: Cooking the History , based on historical sources and mostly staying true to original concoctions. One of her favourite recipes in the book is for a haroset that tracks the movement characteris- tic of conversos . It was created by a Portuguese family that was expelled and went to Italy before settling in Mexico, where it was cited in Inquisition trial documents. This ver- sion of the Passover staple combines chestnuts, vinegar, figs, soaked dates, apples, and thinly cut cinnamon sticks, all shaped like a meatball and rolled in almond. Jawhara Piñer points out that, though they might not always be understood as such, hints of converso Jews are widespread in foods that have been absorbed into Chris- tian culture. Turcos, for example, are savoury-sweet turn- overs of Portuguese origin that were prepared for Sukkot; they were brought to Mexico by conversos , documented in the Mexican Inquisition, and are now popular with South Texans. This absorption of Jewish culinary history isn’t lim- ited to foods that left the Iberian peninsula for the New World, either. Hojuelas — a fried dough dessert of Span- ish Sephardic descent—is now prepared mainly for Eas- ter in Andalusia. Foodstuffs also travelled in the other di- rection: chocolate, which came to Europe after coloniza-
group that nobody else can recognize,” says Stavans. “And that gives them a sense of authenticity and uniqueness.” Having grown up amid a confluence of traditions in Mexico City, Stavans has long been interested in how Jew- ish food becomes Jewish. He’s travelled throughout Latin America gathering recipes born from mishmashed waves of immigration: Sephardic Jews in the late nineteenth cen- tury, the Ashkenazim and Sephardim fleeing the Second World War and, finally, Israeli and Mizrachi Jews in the 1960 s. The converso immigrants of the sixteenth and sev- enteenth centuries have seniority; private documents de- scribing their food culture help tell their story. “We have a lot of letters, diaries and autobiographies, and other types of writings including recipes of conversos in those cities,” Stavans says. Stavans and Margaret E. Boyle, co-authors of S aborJudío: The Jewish Mexican Cookbook , both come from Ashkenazi families. The two also share a similar — and specific — culi- nary lineage. “We discovered that, in our respective fam- ilies, there was this very precious document,” explains Stavans. “A recipe book that has travelled through the gen- erations. It was written by women and came from [East- ern] Europe and then shows the fusion with Mexican food.” The two texts have entries in common, which then took on Mexican twists with subsequent generations. The in- troduction to Sabor Judío describes Stavans’s mother put- ting her own spin on the classics, spicing up the matzah ball broth with jalapeño or adding Mexican coffee to hon- ey cake. However, the people who wrote down these foods lived in Mexico in ignorance of conversos . By the time they arrived, converso traditions had been absorbed into the Christian majority, leaving the newly arrived Jews to think they were the first People of the Book to settle there. The buried-but-present history is visible in a photo of Stavans’ sown grandparents kissing in the famous Alameda Central park, where the Mexican extension of the Spanish Inquisi- tion executed accused witches and Jews in the seventeenth century: “They are oblivious to the fact that, in the back, there is a plaque that says this is the Plaza del Quemadero, the very place people were burned at the stake,” he says.
HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT
Much like Stavans’s grandmother wrote down her recipes, conversos also passed along their culinary traditions, leav- ing out the fact that these practices were Jewish. Over time, as their descendants were raised in Christian homes, that omission manifested in families whose culinary habits had unexplained quirks: they would eat fish early on Saturdays while neighbours feasted on meat hours later, or under- take a spring cleaning of the kitchen that actually coincid- ed with Passover.
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