When I flick through Elana Benjamin’s cookbook – Indian-Jewish Food, Recipes and Stories from the Backstreets of Bondi – I’m filled with nostalgia. I can smell the food emanating from the apartment she talks about – Nana Hannah’s home. I can hear the squealing laughter, and I can taste the delectable aloomakalas (fried potatoes that are as unhealthy as they are delicious).
You see, Elana’s nana Hannah was my big nana – my great grandmother.
What’s funny is that I have many of the same recipes that Elana has shared in her book, passed down by my nana Margaret. But despite most of them originating from the same source – Hannah – my recipes differ from Elana’s.
She explains why in her opening.
“Documenting these Indian-Jewish recipes has not been easy. The cuisine has mostly been kept alive by hand rather than the written word. This means the women in the community tend to cook by feel, intuition and tasting as they go.”
Elana shares that her mum would often tell her to include “some” cumin powder and “a bit of” garam masala.
As we chat over coffee I laugh because it’s exactly what my nana used to tell me. “Just sprinkle a bit of turmeric in,” she’d advise. But what is “a bit”?
When I got married, I told my nana that all I wanted as a gift were the dozens of Iraqi-Indian-Jewish recipes that I had grown up eating. I needed them written down so that I could cook them too.
Elana had the same thought when her mother turned 75.
But while my recipes are confined to a display folder, lovingly written on paper in my nana’s handwriting, Elana has published hers. It means everyone can get a taste of the scrumptious recipes from the Sephardi-Mizrahi community.
Elana shares in her book that she never grew up eating Iraqi cooking. Perhaps, she says over coffee, that was because she didn’t grow up like a typical migrant child – she took peanut butter and honey sandwiches to school rather than family recipes.
The one sandwich we both have vivid memories of is Elana’s dad’s chutney. Elana tells me that she never learnt how to make it because it would always just appear at her front door. “One jar with chilli and one jar without,” she laughed. She writes that extended family get-togethers of her youth always featured chutney sandwiches. They still do. Whenever our family is together, out comes the chutney.
“Food is a kind of unifier; people don’t really get into major conflicts about food, it’s not divisive.”
But, getting the recipe written was tricky. Her father told her she needed two plastic cups of water. “What is a plastic cup?” we laughed.
Yet, it is included in the book with the backstory to explain what it is and why it’s so important.
Elana has a passion for preserving Sephardi-Mizrahi heritage. She said it dates to her childhood, attending a Modern Orthodox school, where Elana never saw herself in her education. “There was a cognitive dissonance between home and school,” she said. “I went to school and there was nothing reflected back at me. If I don’t share this history, these recipes, they’re going to be gone.”
Elana uses the recipes as a stepping stone for conversation, and they’re a great starting point for people who haven’t come across these kinds of dishes. It’s also why she includes the story of Eze Moses and his spice shop. “Food is a kind of unifier; people don’t really get into major conflicts about food, it’s not divisive,” Elana mused. “It’s a way of raising awareness about the story of Sephardi-Mizrahi Jews.”
Particularly, Baghdadi Jews, as that’s where the Benjamin family originally came from. Even the addition of a spice that people may not often cook with broadens their minds to a different cuisine, and by extension a different culture – one which many people, even Jews, sometimes don’t know about.
Elana’s interest in documenting Sephardi-Mizrahi culture built gradually over time. At university, she wrote an essay about her mother. Her interest in her family’s history piqued from there.
“Over time, I became more aware. I use the word erase, it’s kind of loaded, but I became aware that the history of the Baghdadi Jews was being erased, and I felt like no one was talking about it,” Elana recalled. “I just felt so strongly about preserving the traditions.”
In 2012, Elana wrote My Mother’s Spice Cupboard: A Journey from Baghdad to Bombay to Bondi. It’s the story of her family’s migration from Iraq to India and finally to Australia, intertwined with the history of the Baghdadi Jews of Bombay. Last year, Shalom in Sydney called Elana and asked her to take part in an event where authors would come together with a small group of people and cook some recipes. Elana would be talking about Spice Cupboard, so she needed some recipes that were detailed in the book. But they had to be accessible for others and of course, they needed to include spices. She knew how to cook dahl, but she didn’t know how to make pilau and date barbas.
“My mum always cooked them. My dad would just appear on the doorstep with food. So why would I?” she said. “But that was the first time when I asked if she could teach me. And then she turned 75, and I had this moment of what if something happened to my mum, I wouldn’t know how to make the meals.”
Those moments, together with the realisation that there are so many people who don’t know the history of Sephardi-Mizrahi Jews, inspired Elana to cover as many recipes as possible.
Elana points out that while she has tried to stay true to the original recipes, many are adapted to today’s world. Because today, for example, many live in a two-income family. There’s very little time to dedicate to cooking after a long day of work.
“Nana had all day to cook. It’s completely different to coming home and just wanting to get something on the table,” Elana said. “That generation says, ‘It’s the way we’ve always done it,’ but our generation says, ‘There are different ways to do it.’”
“I just felt so strongly about preserving the traditions.”
Elana also realised that if she didn’t get these recipes down, they may very well end with her. “I want to share the recipes because I don’t want the sole responsibility for keeping them alive,” Elana laughed. “I don’t want them to get lost.
“I feel like it’s righting a wrong for all the people who have come before us, who were so busy working to make their home in Australia that they didn’t have time to pass things on to the next generation. [Those] who have such a rich, cultural, beautiful legacy that we need to preserve,” Elana said.
Big nana Hannah died in 2002. When she died, she had nine children, 19 grandchildren and 29 great-grandchildren. The Benjamin family has always been large, with generations either separated by just a couple of years or even overlapping. My generation of great-grandchildren now numbers 43, and there are nine great-great-grandchildren.
I thank my big nana Hannah every day for ensuring our family was close and instilling a rich appreciation of our Iraqi-Indian heritage. I know she would be proud of how her great-great-grandchildren are embracing their Sephardi-Mizrahi customs. And I know she would be incredibly proud that her family recipes have been lovingly noted down and shared with the world.
Because let’s face it, Sephardi-Mizrahi food is possibly the most delicious. And nothing makes my heart sing more than seeing my 11-month-old son – great-great-grandchild number 8 – eat her humeem (the recipe is on page 50).
November is Mizrahi Heritage Month, commemorating the cultural heritage of Mizrahi Jews.
Indian-Jewish Food, Recipes and Stories from the Backstreets of Bondi is published by the Sydney Jewish Museum, $39.99 rrp.
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