A PIECE OF LARD KEPT IN A COOL CORNER of the kitchen. A vegetarian dish prepared in tandem with a pork-rich analogue. A pot of Shabbat stew simmered ahead of time to allow for a hands-off meal later. Simple sights you might find in many a home kitchen — and also, sometimes, evidence of secret rebellion. It’s a collection of findings all cited during the Spanish Inquisition trials, which ran from the late fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, peaking in the sixteenth. Food has a long history of getting mixed up with politics, and it was the weapon of choice for Catholics during this time: they used it to denounce the Jews and Muslims who had been forced by the state to convert to Christianity but secretly maintained their religious practices.
When Queen Isabella I and King Ferdinand II issued the Alhambra Decree (the edict ordering the expulsion of practising Jews) on March 31, 1492, Jews were given a choice: be baptized or leave. Over the course of the next 300 some years, somewhere between 200,000 and 600,000 converted. (Approximately 160,000 chose exile, and — estimates vary wildly — between 3,000 and 300,000 refused both expulsion and conversion, and were executed.) Of the Jews who stayed and converted, some continued to practise their religion secretly, though how many is impossible to know given the necessary secrecy of it all.
At first, explains Ilan Stavans, a Mexican-Jewish food historian, coercively converted Jews and Muslims were called cristianos nuevos (new Christians). The term converso eventually emerged to describe Jews who hadn’t fully renounced their religion or who still acknowledged their background. “Converso became a term that, at first, was used in a derogatory way, and then those conversos appropriated it with a sense of pride,” Stavans says. (The term marrano, meaning pig, was more widespread, and an insult with extra heft given that Jews don’t eat pork; unlike converso, it hasn’t been reclaimed as thoroughly.) Later on, the term crypto-Jews (from the Greek word for hidden) was coined, perhaps a more accurate reflection of these people who were forced to hide their true selves. (In Hebrew, the term is anusim, which translates to “coerced ones.”)
Bordeaux-based historian, chef, and cookbook author Hélène Jawhara Piñer is of French and Spanish heritage and grew up Sephardic; she had always been interested in the relationship between food and religion and devoted her PhD to the subject. In 2016, when embarking on that research, she wanted to dig up the oldest Jewish cookbook but struck out, instead finding elements of Jewish culinary practices tucked into broader works. Jawhara Piñer did find six Jewish recipes within a thirteenth-century Arabic-language Andalusian cookbook and two others gleaned from a fourteenth-century Egyptian cookbook.
Many other sources for her PhD relating to Sephardic cuisine were less traditional and required some detective work to locate, not to mention being able to read Italian, Catalan, Arabic, Spanish, and Portuguese: “[This food] was not something that could have been shared openly, so you have to delve into sources like shopping lists, letters or poems, or other kinds of literature,” says Jawhara Piñer. “Because of the Inquisition trials, you have to gather all those different kinds of sources to be able to understand the culinary history of the Sephardic Jews.” She combed through food-related writings from the Cairo Geniza, a repository that contains over 400,000 Jewish manuscript fragments from all sorts of sources, dated between the sixth and nineteenth centuries. On a twelfth-century scrap of paper, the historian spotted a shopping list written by an Andalusian woman living in Egypt, addressed to her husband and asking him to buy chicken and lemon for Shabbat. However, when it came to gathering details about the food practices of medieval Jews, no sources were more helpful than the Inquisition documents that mentioned food: according to Jawhara Piñer, approximately 60 percent of the trials used food as evidence. “They unveil the real life of the crypto-Jews, from Spain, from Italy, everywhere where the court of the Inquisition settled in order to spy on converso practices,” she says.
Crypto-Jewish lives were defined by secrecy to avoid violence and expulsion from their Iberian communities, but these people maintained a covert connection to their culture through food. Shrouded in secrecy, food remained a cultural thread within the diaspora of Jews who left Spain and its threats of execution. Sephardim dispersed around the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic to Latin America, which was illegal as Spain spread its discriminatory concept of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) and wanted to prevent conversos establishing openly Jewish communities elsewhere. In these new homes, encounters with a whole new set of ingredients redefined converso food. Something it did retain was its air of secrecy, with generations of Jews trying to blend into Catholic majorities, leaving it all but forgotten, present mostly in traditions practitioners don’t know are Jewish. But a more recent wave of people curious about their lineage is uncovering those long-buried roots, often connecting with the formerly secret culture by way of its food.
Markers of Secrecy
Given the Inquisition’s famously repressive and violent tactics, Jews who wanted to maintain both their religion and their homes needed to exercise extreme caution. “They obviously had to hide their practices, including their food practices,” says Jawhara Piñer. “It was so easy for people to spy on the food practices of the Jews in order to denounce them.” Despite precautions, many conversos were found out and turned in — often due to a whisper network of women denouncing other women, Catholic servants in Jewish households sharing converso indications with the authorities. They would report being asked not to come in on Friday, or to use different spoons to stir pots of stew, only one of which contained pork, or describe a piece of lard (a Christian home staple) kept as a decoy for guests. Jews often became identifiable not because of a specific dish but rather by abstention: in Spain, avoiding pork became a tell.
However, a rich culinary culture continued to proliferate. Adafina — an overnight Shabbat stew of chickpeas, chard, and meat, thickened with eggplant — was already being prepared by Sephardic Jews in medieval Spain before the Inquisition, but it became a converso staple. According to Jawhara Piñer, trial documents were the first source that tied conversos to the stew. Foods also turned into an unspoken signifier between Jews, a kind of secret code that you deciphered when you saw who gathered for Saturday lunch or brought over stewed eggplant seasoned generously with garlic and olive oil, with unleavened bread on the side during Passover. Though eggplant — which grows easily in hot climates and arrived in Spain in the tenth century after a long trek on the Silk Road — was also eaten by Muslims, Christians stayed away from this food and associated it with Jews. Jawhara Piñer dug up instances of Christians using the culinary preference in mockery, namely comparing Jewish dark skin to the eggplant’s exterior.
Maintaining secrecy requires adaptability; for conversos this meant tweaking recipes to incorporate local ingredients. These shifts were a survival mechanism of sorts, ensuring that certain traditions would continue while also blending into the surrounding culinary landscape. Changing ingredients meant that what defined certain Jewish foods as Jewish was often more about how they were prepared than what they were made with: “The process is really important,” Jawhara Piñer says of dishes like adafina — of which there are countless versions, depending on where they’re made in the Sephardic diaspora. “In fact, most of the time, the process is more a way to identify the converso family than the food itself.”
That adaptability became only more relevant as conversos, expelled from Spain, boarded ships headed for Latin America, becoming the first wave of Jewish immigrants in the New World. Proof of their passage can still be tasted in dishes that survived undercover for centuries, like a Mexican version of the Iberian meatball soup, sopa de albóndigas, inflected with local herbs and spices in the broth. As with the coded communication back in Spain, these foods were legible to those in the know. “Those that participate in the secret … will feel that they are members of a group that nobody else can recognize,” says Stavans. “And that gives them a sense of authenticity and uniqueness.”
Having grown up amid a confluence of traditions in Mexico City, Stavans has long been interested in how Jewish food becomes Jewish. He’s travelled throughout Latin America gathering recipes born from mishmashed waves of immigration: Sephardic Jews in the late nineteenth century, the Ashkenazim and Sephardim fleeing the Second World War and, finally, Israeli and Mizrachi Jews in the 1960s. The converso immigrants of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have seniority; private documents describing their food culture help tell their story. “We have a lot of letters, diaries and autobiographies, and other types of writings including recipes of conversos in those cities,” Stavans says.
Stavans and Margaret E. Boyle, co-authors of Sabor Judío: The Jewish Mexican Cookbook, both come from Ashkenazi families. The two also share a similar — and specific — culinary lineage. “We discovered that, in our respective families, there was this very precious document,” explains Stavans. “A recipe book that has travelled through the generations. It was written by women and came from [Eastern] Europe and then shows the fusion with Mexican food.”
The two texts have entries in common, which then took on Mexican twists with subsequent generations. The introduction to Sabor Judío describes Stavans’s mother putting her own spin on the classics, spicing up the matzah ball broth with jalapeño or adding Mexican coffee to honey cake. However, the people who wrote down these foods lived in Mexico in ignorance of conversos. By the time they arrived, converso traditions had been absorbed into the Christian majority, leaving the newly arrived Jews to think they were the first People of the Book to settle there. The buried-but-present history is visible in a photo of Stavans’s own grandparents kissing in the famous Alameda Central park, where the Mexican extension of the Spanish Inquisition executed accused witches and Jews in the seventeenth century: “They are oblivious to the fact that, in the back, there is a plaque that says this is the Plaza del Quemadero, the very place people were burned at the stake,” he says.
Hidden in Plain Sight
Much like Stavans’s grandmother wrote down her recipes, conversos also passed along their culinary traditions, leaving out the fact that these practices were Jewish. Over time, as their descendants were raised in Christian homes, that omission manifested in families whose culinary habits had unexplained quirks: they would eat fish early on Saturdays while neighbours feasted on meat hours later, or undertake a spring cleaning of the kitchen that actually coincided with Passover.
For Stavans, what makes these dishes and practices inherently converso is how the discernible details aren’t necessarily overtly Jewish. “If you tell somebody [about] gefilte fish with salsa or mango, they will say, ‘Oh, I see the Jewish and the Mexican connection,’” he says. By contrast, if you describe a dish of fish cooked in tomato sauce, “people will not immediately think this is Jewish food. But, for those families, it was something that you cooked so that the neighbours would not suspect you, and that passed on from one generation to another.”
As Jawhara Piñer sees it, the change food underwent as it arrived in a new location is a marker of identity: Sephardic Jews “are so diverse, and this diversity makes our strength,” she says. “We have a very singular food identity that has been shaped thanks to the different foods we were able to find in our locations.” That trusty Shabbat stew is the perfect illustration of her point. What came to define converso food outside of Spain is how it adapted to its new home. Its superpower was blending in by taking up ingredients that were widely used locally, leaving the process of cooking the dish as the strongest tie to history and tradition. The ingredients of adafina, which is mentioned repeatedly in Inquisition trial documents, vary wildly depending on location and climate. Italian and Portuguese varieties mixed in freekeh and chestnuts. When adafina arrived in South America, tomatoes and sweet potatoes made their way into the pot, while Mexican versions incorporated corn. “I really love when one dish is mentioned in different kinds of sources,” adds Jawhara Piñer, “from different territories and different centuries, different periods, because it really shows that this is a Sephardic food, because when people move, food moves.”
Years of research inspired Jawhara Piñer to write cookbooks, including Sephardi: Cooking the History, based on historical sources and mostly staying true to original concoctions. One of her favourite recipes in the book is for a haroset that tracks the movement characteristic of conversos. It was created by a Portuguese family that was expelled and went to Italy before settling in Mexico, where it was cited in Inquisition trial documents. This version of the Passover staple combines chestnuts, vinegar, figs, soaked dates, apples, and thinly cut cinnamon sticks, all shaped like a meatball and rolled in almond.
Jawhara Piñer points out that, though they might not always be understood as such, hints of converso Jews are widespread in foods that have been absorbed into Christian culture. Turcos, for example, are savoury-sweet turnovers of Portuguese origin that were prepared for Sukkot; they were brought to Mexico by conversos, documented in the Mexican Inquisition, and are now popular with South Texans. This absorption of Jewish culinary history isn’t limited to foods that left the Iberian peninsula for the New World, either. Hojuelas — a fried dough dessert of Spanish Sephardic descent — is now prepared mainly for Easter in Andalusia. Foodstuffs also travelled in the other direction: chocolate, which came to Europe after colonization, was brought there by Sephardic Jews who left Mexico to return to Spain, and eventually settled in France. Jewish chocolate makers set up shop in the southwest Basque city of Bayonne. In Mexico, converso Jews sometimes substituted 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 never garnered much attention. Stavans points out that rising curiosity about converso traditions is partially attributable to many Latin American families discovering their Jewish heritage via contemporary ancestry databases. As they have, long-hidden traditions have become 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 metaphors 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 secret. Raised in a Catholic family, the Miami resident found out about her Jewish ancestry only as an adult. The truth came to her by way of food, specifically a collection of hundreds of recipes found in her mother’s belongings, many dating back to the Inquisition. (After this discovery, she realized that there had been clues: in a 2019 interview, she told NPR that her grandmother 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 breadbased snacks akin to French toast, shaped like the thick slices of meat they are named after. Milgrom ended up converting to Judaism, undoing her ancestors’ forced conversion to Catholicism some 500 years earlier, and writing books about her experience, including one titled Recipes of My 15 Grandmothers.
As more and more Latin Americans discover their Jewish histories, that interest has rippled outward. In Mexico 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 Jewish identity that is much more recognized and widespread.”
In contemporary Spain, though, the culinary impacts of the Inquisition are both obvious and invisible. As Jawhara 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 Jawhara 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.
