An Exaltation of Soups (48 page)

2. Drain the beans and rinse. Add them and the beets to the strained broth, bring to a boil over high heat, then reduce the heat to low, cover, and simmer until the beets are white and the beans tender, about 1 hour.

3. In a skillet, heat the vegetable oil over low heat, then add the onion, celery, carrots, and green pepper and sweat, covered, until the onions are yellow, 5 to 10 minutes. Scrape into the soup pot, simmer for a few minutes, then add the tomatoes, potatoes, herbs, and spices, and simmer until the potatoes are tender, about 20 minutes.

4. Add the cabbage and simmer until it’s the consistency you like—crunchy or soft.

5. In the meantime, chop the pork fat (or bacon), garlic, and dill in the food processor, processing in the yogurt at the end.

6. When the cabbage is the way you like it, remove the chile pepper and bay leaf from the soup and stir in the reserved pork, the tomato paste, and the garlic-dill-fat mixture. Return the pot to a simmer over medium-high heat, then cover the pot, turn the heat off, and let the flavors mingle for at least 30 minutes.

Ladle the soup into bowls and top each portion with a dollop of sour cream, sprinkled with a little fresh dill and parsley.

O
NCE UPON A
time, the Jewish people made a covenant with God that included specific dietary laws. Likely Abraham had no inkling of their unforeseen consequences, but they turned out to be profound.

There were three big items right from the start, and these were:

1. Meat and dairy products can never be eaten at the same time (“You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk”—Deuteronomy 14:21).
   

2. Meat must be drained of all blood before being eaten (“You [Noah] shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood”—Genesis 9:4).
   

3. People are not permitted, by God’s law, to work on the Sabbath, from sunset Friday until Saturday evening “when 3 stars are seen” (“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy … in it, you shall not do any work”—Genesis 20:8–10, the fourth of the Ten Commandments that God gave Moses on Mount Sinai, coming out of Egypt).
   

Right from the start, then, Jewish people could not, realistically, go to a non-Jew’s tent and have a casual dinner without breaking God’s law, creating inevitable distance from any neighbors. Accordingly, over the millennia and with all the refinements imposed by Talmudic interpretations, these restrictions dramatically
shaped the history of the Jewish people. In fact, I don’t think there’s any earthly way to understand the development of Jewish cuisines, festival traditions, rhythms of life, and ways of interacting with other cultures and societies without a thumbnail sketch of that history.

When Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, destroyed Jerusalem’s First Temple in 586
B.C.E.
and deported the population to present-day Iraq, it was a sign of things to come. Although Persian King Cyrus later allowed the Jews to return and rebuild, in
A.D.
70 the Roman general Titus destroyed the Second Temple and ruled that no Jews could live in Jerusalem henceforth. The Diaspora was on.

The first migration wave fanned out from Jerusalem throughout the Mediterranean and into Central Asia along established trade routes, to Syria, Iraq, Iran, and India; to Egypt and along the North African coast to Morocco; to Greece, Italy, France; and ultimately to what is now Spain and Portugal.

These peoples eventually became known as the
Sephardi
, meaning “from Spain,” all jostling for a living, shoulder to shoulder, in strange climes with peoples of many different faiths—animist, pantheistic, Christian, Zoroastrian, you name it. But when the Arab tribes rose in the seventh century to spread Islam across the world, the
Sephardi
rather suddenly found themselves in a uniformly Islamic world. And, for the most part, they were actually pretty comfortable in it for some eight hundred years, as Islamic rulers in all these different places practiced religious toleration.

It wasn’t until 1492, with the fall of Granada and the ferocious beginning of Grand Inquisitor Torquemada’s Spanish Inquisition that a reverse migration occurred that would take most of the
Sephardi—
those who refused to convert to Christianity or pretend to—back to the Ottoman Empire.

Accordingly, the Sephardic cuisine developed as diversely as their countries of settlement. Claudia Roden, in her superb
The Book of Jewish Food
, describes it as “sensual, aromatic, and colorful”—and
she shows how it successfully integrated a Spanish style with Turkish, North African, Arabic, and Persian styles, all within the restrictions of Jewish dietary laws. Across the Sephardic Jewish world, annual festivals were celebrated with all sorts of foods and seasonings, including soups with beef and pomegranate, pumpkin and chickpeas, favas and peas, rice and cilantro, eggs and lemon, walnuts, cinnamon, cloves, saffron, and hot chiles.

At the same time, and over time, as the Roman Empire disintegrated and northern Europe began to develop, Jews in southern Europe extended their trade routes northward, and sparse Jewish communities in France, Italy, and Germany began to grow up. The Yiddish language was born by the thirteenth century as a dialect of German, and so were the identities of today’s Ashkenazi Jews, who by the way had dramatically different lifestyles and cuisines from their southern cousins. Again I cite Claudia Roden: “There was a strong ascetic streak in German Jews, and their lives were inclined to spirituality rather than sensual expression…. They ate like the Germans—substantial foods, warming soups thick with oats, barley, groats, and dumplings….” For Sabbath and for festivals, they pulled out all the stops and killed a chicken.

These communities, living entirely within the Christian world, began to move east along northern routes in the thirteenth century to escape persecution at the time of the Crusades, and they began to flood east by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when those persecutions became unbearable. Instead of returning to the Mideast, these Jews moved east across Europe and ended up in cities and tiny villages throughout eastern and central Europe, the Balkans, the Baltics, Ukraine, and Russia.

In terms of soup traditions, there is a great and uniform sameness to the Ashkenazi soup menu. For weddings, chicken soup
(goldene yoich—
just the broth, but “golden” because of the fat globules on top). For sickness and convalescence, chicken soup. For the Sabbath, chicken soup. For the New Year at Rosh Hashanah,
chicken soup with round pasta. For Yom Kippur, chicken soup, but with dumplings
(kreplach)
, where the dough covers the filling as we all hope kindness will cover our sins on this Day of Atonement. The seventh day of Sukkot? Chicken soup with
kreplach
, same reason. Chanukah, chicken soup. Passover, chicken soup—this time with matzo balls
(knaidlach)
because not a speck of leaven should be in the house, much less in the soup.

Rosh Hashanah, the first holiday of the Jewish New Year, celebrates the actual creation of the world (generally pinpointed by medieval scholars as October 13). It is a movable feast, based on the lunar calendar and falling in September or October, and it begins with a feast—a traditionally “sweet” feast that launches a ten-day period of reflection and prayer, ending with the celebration of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. It is believed that during this start to the New Year all mankind passes before God, who looks into their deeds and hearts … and then passes judgment on them on Yom Kippur. Rosh Hashanah’s opening feast thus—optimistically—rolls out foods that symbolize hope and sweetness (raisins in challah; honey, apples, figs, sweet potatoes, squashes, and carrots), fertility and abundance (pomegranates, eggs, and rice), or that signify the eradication of one’s sins and enemies (leeks, called
karti
, or “cut off” in Hebrew, can help you cut off
all
those bad things).

Soup shows up at most traditional Rosh Hashanah feasts throughout the Jewish world. Chicken soup with
kreplach
is popular everywhere because of the pious hope factor (see above). Leek soup is traditional in Sephardic traditions because of its apparent potential for getting rid of enemies—and also sweet pumpkin and chickpea soup. Moroccan Jews substitute yellow split peas for the chickpeas and add saffron, ginger, cinnamon, and cloves to make
l’hamaak dil gar’a.
Many Iranians eat a hearty chicken soup with rice after carrying out
“simana milta,”
which itemizes each of the symbolic foods before consuming them. Iraqis dine on lemony
hammoud
soup with
kibbe
meatballs and cucumber.

W
ORLDWIDE
CHICKEN SOUP WITH DUMPLINGS
G
OLDENE YOICH MIT KREPLACH

Serves 6 to 8

W
HAT’S NOT TO
like about this soup? It’s wonderfully rich and aromatic with its double chicken consommé, flavored with root vegetables and set off with dumplings. Guaranteed to lift spirits and hearts on any occasion, it will certainly start the New Year right. It’s a good idea to make the soup the day before you’ll be serving it so the flavors can blend and so you can easily remove all the congealed chicken fat from the top.

1. Prep the ingredients as directed in the recipe list.

2. Make the dumplings (see sidebar).

1. Put all the ingredients except the salt and pepper and the kreplach in a large soup pot with the chicken stock, cover, and bring to a boil over medium heat. Reduce the heat to low and simmer, lightly covered, for 2 hours, until everything is tender and soft. Skim off the foam from time to time if needed.