Manischewitz paletas and brisket tacos liven up Rosh Hashanah

From nopales and horchata to matzoh balls and Manischewitz, there has been a long trading back and forth of influences between Mexican food and Jewish food, both Sephardic and Ashkenazi. How do a humanities professor from Massachusetts and a romance languages professor from Maine come together to write a cookbook about Mexican Jewish food? We decided to find out. Ilan Stavans and Margaret Boyle are the authors of Sabor Judío: The Jewish Mexican Cookbook.

Evan Kleiman: Could each of you tell us who Ofelia Slomianski and Malka Poplawski were and what role they played in the book? Margaret, maybe you start.

Margaret Boyle: Sure, I am happy to talk about Malka Poplawski. She was my great grandmother. She lived in Mexico City, and I would visit her as a child through my early adolescence. I grew up in Los Angeles. She was born in Poland but found her way to Mexico City in her early 20s, and she was an amazing cook. I learned about Judaism and I learned my Spanish through my relationship with her.

Ilan Stavans: My mother, Ofelia Slomianski, was the daughter of Polish immigrants to Mexico who had made it in the first couple of decades of the 20th century. They were Yiddish speakers. They knew no words of Spanish, nothing to do with the food, nothing to do with the culture when they arrived. They actually wanted to come to the United States but immigration quotas made it impossible so they settled in Mexico temporarily, with the hope of eventually moving north, and they never did. My mother, Ofelia, learned from her mother, Miriam Slomianski, how to do Polish Jewish food — gehackte leber (chopped liver) and gefilte fish and all kinds of other dishes. 

As my mother came into her own as a cook, she started to incorporate many more elements of Mexican cuisine. I became fascinated by that fusion, by the connection of the immigrant food and how it had traveled from the old continent to the mutations that the food went through as generations passed. The Mexican Jewish identity became much more formed and that formation was expressed in dishes of all kinds.

I understand that each of your families has a family cookbook that is a repository of richness in terms of history and documenting this kind of fusion. Tell us about these books.

Ilan Stavans: I will start with much pleasure. This book, the recipe book, Libro de Recetas, has traveled across generations. It has a mythical status. It's almost biblical in the family. It started by a great-grandmother but it was really my grandmother, Miriam, who put it together, incorporating the recipes that her own mother and her own grandmother had started. It was in Yiddish, it had some Polish, and when my mother inherited it, she infused all kinds of Spanish words. My grandmother had also used some Spanish. 

What I love about that recipe book is that it's a kind of mirror across time of how the family has fed itself and the many comments that the women, who are the keepers of the memory and the tastes in the family, have added to each other. My grandmother would cross out certain ingredients and put new ones, and my mother would debate in writing if those were the right ones and add others. By the time it reached me, I could see the dialog between the women in the family.

Ilan Stavans (left) and Margaret Boyle used their relatives' migration to Mexico to create a cookbook. Photo by Ilan Rabchinskey.

And Margaret?

Margaret Boyle: For my Baba Malka, which is what we call my great-grandmother, towards the end of her life, our family was really interested, I think, like a lot of families, in capturing the food that she made and that we all enjoyed. We got her to write down some of her recipes that she learned as a young woman. 

Then, later in her life, her daughters and nieces started copying down what she was doing in the kitchen. What you see in the margin of all these notes are conversations between different generations as we tried to figure out, I'm thinking, in particular, of her chocolate babka, which was so difficult for any of us to make quite the same as hers. 

We would have these conversations with her while she was alive and after she passed away, it was my aunt who kept this collection of handwritten recipes. We would continue to annotate and try to keep her alive in that way.

When did Jews first start arriving in the Americas? Who were they? Where did they come from?

Ilan Stavans: Jews in the Americas go back to the moment the Europeans first arrived, thinking it was a discovery. It was really an encounter. We are told that several of the members of the crew of Columbus's ships in his four voyages were crypto Jews, secret Jews who were escaping the Inquisition and looking for a safe haven where they could thrive again as Jews, given the persecution that was taking place in Spain. 

They arrived to the Caribbean. They also arrived to what is today Mexico and Central America. That is really the first wave of Jews although it's difficult to call it a wave because they didn't recognize themselves openly as Jews.

The next, truly first wave, or at least the one that openly recognized itself as such, was the Ashkenazi Jews who came in the second part of the 19th century. By the time the Ashkenazi Jews came, they were speaking Yiddish. They came from another part of Europe. They ate something very different than the Spanish Jews had eaten. They were open and engaging with their identity, and they were eager to arrive at a place where their Jewishness would be able to flourish. 

Let's talk about recipes. Your poached eggs and tomato sauce seems very much like shakshouka, but you say this dish is based on a traditional Yucatan dish, rabo de mestiza? What is the difference between the two?

Ilan Stavans: Rabo de mestiza is a very typical southern Mexican dish that could be easily confused with shakshouka but only if you taste it very superficially. There is a different color pepper that is put in the rabo de mestiza. There can be a boiled egg in it, lots of onion, garlic. It's a kind of stew that is eaten for breakfast. It is something that, in my family, has a little spicy taste, really delicious. On its own, it is eaten with tortillas or with nachos.

This combination that Mexican Jews have adapted, accommodated, assimilated to a different type of palate, the rabo de mestiza, it only really shines in the Yucata. But it has migrated to Mexico City, where the majority of Mexican Jews live today though there are other smaller communities of Mexican Jews that live in Cancun, where a lot of rabo de mestiza is also eaten. That's in Quintana Roo in Yucatan and in Guadalajara.

There are many recipes that call for Queso Yiddish, and the recipe seems like a homemade ricotta, which is basically requeson in Mexico. Is it difficult to source kosher dairy in Mexico?

Margaret Boyle: Now, it is not very difficult to source kosher dairy. This recipe comes from my Baba Malka. When she was making it, she wanted to have the cheese fresh for us every morning, and it was just a staple of our kitchen. 

How lucky you were. 

Margaret Boyle: It was so amazing, and you can see why it instilled such a strong memory for us. 

Oh, 100%. With the high holidays coming up, what are some of the classic Mexican Jewish dishes that your families might have had, or might still have, for Rosh Hashanah and for breaking the fast of Yom Kippur?

Ilan Stavans: One of the favorite dishes that my family had for breaking the fast of Yom Kippur is Pescado a la Veracruzana. It's a delicious fish that can be haddock, can be flounder, and it is cooked with tomatoes and olives in a delicious sauce. That was a fixture that we all, particularly the grandchildren, always waited for. My grandmother Miriam was the perfect cook of that.

What about in your family, Margaret?

Margaret Boyle: I would definitely highlight the variety of matzo ball soup recipes that we have in this collection. I think my family likes to have varieties of matzo ball soup at every holiday meal. The Pati Jinich mushroom version is particularly delicious but I also love the caldo verde, which infuses some corn into the broth that is really so flavorful.

Is all the flavor mostly in the broth or are the matzo balls amped up with anything extra?

Margaret Boyle: Yeah, for example, for the chipotle matzo ball soup recipe, we have chipotle embedded into the matzo ball. I think for those friends of ours who have grown up with very plain but delicious matzo balls, it's a real treat to be able to add some spice and flavor.

We have to talk about the Manischewitz paletas. Do they figure in ritual?

Margaret Boyle: Many of us are nostalgic for the place of Manischewitz at our table, and the way that this turns into a dessert, and the alcohol burns off so it becomes extra kid friendly, and the color is so beautiful. They're really fun to make and to serve.

Ilan Stavans: I would say that nobody's really nostalgic about Manischewitz. Nobody really knows what to do with that cough syrup. I think the best option is to do paletas, because they are sweet, they taste like Manischewitz, but it's not so thick. For us, it was a way to finally have Manischewitz in a digestible form.

We have to have a sweet because for the holidays, there's always a sweet. Pick one. I was thinking about the coffee honey cake but you could talk about something else.

Margaret Boyle: It's very hard to choose. I'm happy to talk about the coffee honey cake because I do make that every year at Rosh Hashanah. It's cinnamon, cloves, and anise, which I think are a familiar combination, but they're not tiny additions of each of the spices. Working together, it really is just a beautiful blend. I think it's the coffee and the cocoa that helps you appreciate the spice a little bit more deeply.

How is the coffee incorporated into the cake?

Margaret Boyle: The coffee is brewed separately and it's added to the batter after it's almost combined.

Sabor Judío highlights the connections between Mexican and Jewish cooking. Photo courtesy of the University of North Carolina Press.