Sweetening the new year: How Jewish food becomes family tradition - opinion

What makes Jewish food Jewish? For Barbara Sofer, the answer lies less in the ingredients than in the place food occupies in family and communal life.

She recalls the late rabbi and food historian Gil Marks, who said Jewish food is not simply “food Jews eat.” It is food that “almost becomes sanctified by its use in Jewish life.” Marks’s words returned to Sofer as she sorted through recipe lists stained by years of preparing for Rosh Hashanah.

Her family’s main courses have remained largely constant, while the holiday table has also adopted many simanim, symbolic foods associated with Sephardi and Mizrahi traditions. Their Hebrew and Aramaic names become wordplays for hopes for the coming year. Beets, or selek, accompany the hope that enemies will be removed. Leeks, or karti, express a wish that those who hate the family will be cut off.

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Not food Jews eat.

Dessert proved less settled. In Colchester, Connecticut, where Sofer grew up, her aunt made teiglach, knots of dough boiled in honey. Sofer tried making them after she married, but her versions resembled fossils, and the dish disappeared from the family menu.

Honey cake seemed like an obvious replacement. It had a long history in Jewish sources and was ubiquitous in Israel, but Sofer did not like it. A more elaborate recipe with apples, nuts and glaze eventually passed to her children and grandchildren, who decided it demanded more effort than it was worth.

That brought her back to babka, another cake from her Connecticut childhood. In the small town of Colchester, the Lithuanian-owned Colchester Bakery stood beside the synagogue and operated under rabbinical supervision. Although its owners were not Jewish, their baked goods became part of Jewish communal life and the standard choice for kiddush. For Sofer, family tradition proved capable of preserving old memories while making room for change.

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almost becomes sanctified by its use in Jewish life.