Cache of Crypto-Jewish Recipes Dating to Inquisition Found in Miami Kitchen

Genie Milgrom fled Cuba for the United States with her parents when she was a young child. Her ancestors came from Spain hundreds of years ago via Portugal, Colombia, and Costa Rica. Milgrom was raised Roman Catholic, but converted to Judaism in her 30s. A few years ago, she found a stash of recipes in her attic, which turned out to be family recipes from several generations of women, and revealed how food can carry the stories of our heritage.

As a girl, Milgrom didn’t think to question the idiosyncratic customs her mother and grandmothers practiced in the kitchen.

Recipes didn’t mix milk and meat, eggs were always cracked into a separate bowl and inspected for blood before use, and rice and leafy green vegetables were washed carefully and checked for insects. Curiously, some recipes called for potato or corn starch instead of wheat flour. And perhaps most unusually, Milgrom was instructed by her Spanish-born grandmother that when preparing a large batch of dough, one had to always pull off a small piece, wrap it in foil, and throw it the back of the oven to burn.

“She told me it was for good luck,” Milgrom, 64, told The Times of Israel during a recent interview at a Jerusalem hotel.

See, Milgrom's ancestors were Crypto-Jews, meaning that they pretended to convert to Catholicism to avoid death under the Spanish Inquisition. Over many generations and immigration to new countries, Catholic beliefs took over, but Jewish dietary laws survived in the family recipes. One was even designed to make a sweet dessert resemble pork chops to throw off religious policing! Milgrom has written both fiction and non-fiction books about discovering her heritage, and now she has a cookbook of those rediscovered family recipes, tested and adapted for modern kosher kitchens, called Recipes of My 15 Grandmothers. Read the short version of Milgrom's story and how the cookbook came about at the Times of Israel. The article includes a recipe for Rosh Hashanah dark fruit cake. Learn more about the history of Crypto-Jews or Converso Jews with links posted at Metafilter.

(Image courtesy of Genie Milgrom)


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