curiosity about converso traditions is par- tially attributable to many Latin American families discovering their Jewish heritage via contemporary ancestry databases. As they have, long-hidden traditions have be- come a source of pride: “It’s an amazing life under the surface that is about tricks — it’s about silences, and it’s about using meta- phors for certain things because you can’t name them directly,” says Stavans. “That, I think, is what crypto-Jewish food is about. It’s the emotional attachment that comes with a secret.” Havana-born Genie Milgrom is familiar with the experience of uncovering that se- cret. Raised in a Catholic family, the Miami resident found out about her Jewish ances- try only as an adult. The truth came to her by way of food, specifically a collection of hundreds of recipes found in her moth- er’s belongings, many dating back to the Inquisition. (After this discovery, she real- ized that there had been clues: in a 2019 interview, she told NPR that her grand- mother had taught her customs she later learned were Jewish, like checking eggs for blood.) One of the found recipes was for chuletas —the Spanish word for pork chops—which are actually sweet bread- based snacks akin to French toast, shaped like the thick slices of meat they are nam- ed after. Milgrom ended up converting to Judaism, undoing her ancestors’ forced conversion to Catholicism some 500 years earlier, and writing books about her expe- rience, including one titled Recipes of My
ADAFINA Left to cook gently overnight, ingredients in this Shabbat stew vary from chickpeas and chard to tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and corn.
15 Grandmothers . As more and more Latin Americans discover their Jew- ish histories, that interest has rippled outward. In Mexi- co City, says Stavans, “ Kosherísmo is really a widespread term.… It can mean that something is kosher or it can mean that something is deliciously Jewish, though it really isn’t kosher. Today, being Jewish is complicated, but Jews are no longer in the shadows, so I think it’s part of the new Jew- ish identity that is much more recognized and widespread.” In contemporary Spain, though, the culinary impacts of the Inquisition are both obvious and invisible. As Jawha- ra Piñer points out, Spanish officials were very successful in placing Christianity at the centre of society, positioning their power in opposition to Jewish and Muslim culture via food. They essentially pork-washed history. “People think that the people from Spain have always been eating pork, which is totally crazy because it’s totally wrong,” says Jawha- ra Piñer. “There has only been a Spanish cuisine since the fifteenth century, erasing all the populations that were living in Spain before.” As it turns out, the winners not only write history— they also often write the recipe books.
tion, was brought there by Sephardic Jews who left Mexico to return to Spain, and eventually settled in France. Jew- ish chocolate makers set up shop in the southwest Basque city of Bayonne. In Mexico, converso Jews sometimes sub- stituted the wine in the Shabbat blessing of the Kiddush with a chocolate-based drink, a practice they adopted from local Indigenous people. In Bayonne’s historic Jewish quarter, residents, over time, became versed in chocolate manufacturing. Eventually, they created the gelt prized by sugar-hungry kids on Hanukkah.
REDISCOVERED LEGACIES
When Jawhara Piñer started digging into converso culinary history, it was a relatively unstudied field: the food had nev- er garnered much attention. Stavans points out that rising
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