by Gil Marks
In medieval Europe, anti-Semitism excluded Jews from the guilds and frequently from agriculture. Therefore, they were generally in the forefront of establishing new ventures and promoting new products, including carp. Ashkenazim emerged as leading pisciculturists, operating fish farms in various lakes and artificial ponds. The other leading medieval fish farmers were monks. Carp cultivation reached Austria in the early thirteenth century and followed three decades later in southern Germany and France. Bohemia (now in the Czech Republic) and southern Germany emerged as the center of European carp cultivation with thousands of little ponds. Carp was mentioned in 1420 in Du Fait de Cuisine by Amiczo Chiquart, chef for the Duke of Savoy (now southeastern France), which indicated that it was used by the upper class. Today, carp remains the most widely cultivated fish in the world.
Carp also spread wildly though Europe. This large, hardy (it can withstand a wide range of temperatures and will eat almost anything), very prolific (a single female can lay up to three million eggs in one season) fish does well in brackish water, and it quickly adapted itself to different environments. Consequently, carp was relatively inexpensive and available everywhere— it could be found near almost any source of fresh water.
The carp's lean, firm, meaty flesh make it a favorite for cooking, although the many small bones do present a problem. Carp drawn from fresh water during the fall and winter (November to April) generally have a firm texture and pleasant flavor, while those taken from mucky water and during warmer temperatures tend to be softer and possess a somewhat muddy flavor.
Because of the instrumental role of Jews in spreading and breeding this European newcomer, carp became associated with Jewish cuisine. Carp emerged as the predominant Ashkenazic Sabbath fish, supplanting pike and sometimes appearing for both Sabbath dinner and lunch. The favorite Jewish method of cooking carp, probably based on the Italian pesce in bianco or Sephardic jelatine di pescado, was to poach steaks with sliced onion in water, boil down the cooking liquid, then let the cooked fish cool in the broth. Due to the large amount of gelatin in the bones, the broth would transform into aspic, creating fish gelee (jellied fish).
As sugar began to become less expensive in Europe in the sixteenth century, and continued to grow cheaper in the ensuing centuries, cooks began to make variations adding sugar. The first record of Jewish-style carp was in Germany in 1758 in the non-Jewish Nieder-Sächsisches Koch-Buch (Example Cook Book of Lower Saxony) by Marcus Looft, published in Altona and Lubeck. Larousse Gastronomique (1938), the compendium of French haute cuisine, included three Alsatian variations of jellied carp that had become part of the cooking repertoire of the non-Jews of the area: "Carpe à la Juive au Persil" (Jewish Carp with Green Sauce), "Carpe à la Juive aux Raisins" (Jewish Sweet-and-Sour Carp), and "Carpe à la Juive à l'Orientale" (Jewish Carp with Almonds). A similar dish made with pike is called "Brochet à la Juive." Even today, Alsatians serve a version of jellied carp with sugar and raisins for Rosh Hashanah, symbolizing a sweet and fruitful year, while jellied carp with green sauce, making use of new spring herbs, is traditional at Alsatian Passover Seders.
Radhanite Routes. From about 600 CE (following the fall of Rome) to 1000 (before the Crusades), Jewish merchants called Radhanites controlled the East-West trade, including the Silk Road. Among the items they introduced to Europe was carp from China, which Ashkerazim then helped cultivate and spread.
Carp became the predominant Ashkenazic Sabbath fish in central and then eastern Europe as well. However, some Jews opted to use carp in a different form—gefilte fish. In Germany, carp replaced or joined pike as the primary ingredient of these ground fish quenelles; cooks initially stuffed the mixture into the skinned fish and baked or poached it. There also emerged versions combining the two dishes—jellied carp stuffed with gefilte fish. Since many carp were too big to cook whole, typically only individual steaks were stuffed. When housewives began cooking the chopped fish mixture as dumplings rather than in the skin, they also began using combinations of fish, especially carp in accompaniment with pike and/or whitefish. Although gefilte fish is now far and away the most well-known Jewish fish dish, actually the most widespread form of Sabbath fish among Ashkenazim before the advent of commercial gefilte fish in the mid-twentieth century was fish gelee, which was much easier to make and, according to many, much tastier, despite the bones.
Although Poland's Jews vanished during World War II, as in Spain, France, and other areas from which thriving Jewish communities were removed, Jewish food remained. Consequently, today, gefilte fish and jellied carp are featured in restaurants and fancy Polish hotels, while "carp Jewish-style" (kap po zydowsku), poached carp in fish aspic with blanched almonds and raisins, has become a traditional Christmas Eve dish in parts of the country.
Carp also became popular, although not the most important fish, among those Sephardim who moved to the Balkans and Turkey. Greek Jews prepare sazan (carp with greengage plums) or peshe en salsa (carp in walnut sauce). In Salonika, a whole carp on the table became a tradition for Rosh Hashanah. Carp roe is commonly used to make the Greek dip taramasalata.
Carp was only imported into the United States in 1877, and subsequently was generally disregarded in North America, except among Jews and Chinese. "Carpe à la Juive" was the first known Jewish recipe to appear in the New York Times, in an 1879 article discussing the preparation of carp, then practically unknown in America. Well into the twentieth century, many Ashkenazic families kept a live carp in cold water in the bathtub, sometimes weekly before each Sabbath, or only before Passover and Rosh Hashanah, to be transformed into jellied fish or gefilte fish. Jewish cooks customarily insisted on live carp, because the flavor greatly deteriorates the longer the fish is dead and, in addition, the changes of cold water in the tub purged any potential muddy flavor. Yet as the twentieth century progressed, jellied fish and carp in general continued to lose popularity among American Ashkenazim.
In 1983, there was a temporary panic in the weeks before Passover when high levels of the dioxin were discovered in Michigan's Lake Huron near one of America's major centers of carp raising. Gefilte fish producers were forced to quickly find alternative sources, and some worried consumers opted to avoid gefilte fish containing carp that year. Normality returned the following spring. However, American commercial brands of gefilte fish increasingly emphasized milder white fish and pike, while diminishing the traditional role of carp.
Carp was initially imported to Israel from eastern Europe in 1927, and the first experimental aquaculture farm was established seven years later south of the city of Acre. By 1939, carp farming was extensive throughout the Bet Shean Valley. By the time the state of Israel was established in 1948, farmed fish accounted for more than 70 percent of all fish consumed in the country, with carp being the predominant one.
(See also Fish, Gefilte Fish, and Taramasalata)
Carrot
The original wild carrot, a member of the Apiaceae family, was quite different from its contemporary sweet, elegant, orange descendant. This native of southern Afghanistan was originally small, fibrous, woody, and not particularly tasty, and had a purple coloring. A wild carrot still around today, called Queen Anne's lace, gives a sense of what early carrots looked like. The roots were used primarily as medicine, while the parsley-like leaves were picked as an herb, and the seeds were treated as a spice, used similarly to the seeds of its relatives—anise, caraway, coriander, and cumin. The wild carrot's belated emergence as a food crop may have been due in part to physical similarities to a relative, the poisonous hemlock.
The carrot, never mentioned in the Talmud or Midrash, was a rather late arrival to the Middle East and Jewish cookery. It was first recorded as being cultivated for its root around 600 CE in Afghanistan. Traders along the Silk Road brought seeds of the purple carrot westward, where the Persians, Arabs, Dutch, and French successively developed longer, straighter, and more succulent varieties. Horticulturists in western Asia bred out the anthocyanin pigment that gave early carrots t
heir purple coloring. The results were yellow and whitish roots, considered preferable because they no longer colored soups and stews. The carrot's taste and texture also improved, although they were certainly not up to modern standards. Subsequently, the carrot and its close relative the parsnip were frequently confused with each other, although the parsnip was at the time more common and popular.
Yellow carrots were first recorded in Anatolia in a tenth-century Arab text and, shortly thereafter, carrots made their initial appearance in Jewish sources, in the writings of medieval Persian rabbis. The Hebrew name of the previously unknown vegetable became gezer, from either the Farsi gazar or Arabic jazar, reflecting the route of the root. The Moors introduced yellow carrots to Spain, where they entered Sephardic cookery. Nevertheless, carrots never became a major player in the cooking of most Sephardim and Mizrachim.
The Spanish eventually brought these new varieties to their territories in Holland, where they spread eastward. By the thirteenth century, yellow carrots were being planted in France and Germany. The now-common orange variety, colored by high levels of carotene, emerged in Holland in the sixteenth century, and was first recorded in a painting by the Flemish artist Joachim Beuckelaer. Orange carrots had already made their way to Spain by 1600, when they appeared in a painting by Juan Sanchez. This new color was particularly attractive to the Dutch ruling family, the House of Orange, then in a heated struggle for independence from Spain. The carrot's now-familiar pronounced sweetness, too, was developed in Holland at that time; the root by that time ranking second only to beets in the amount of sugar it contained. In the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, the French developed new elongated varieties that found commercial success in western Europe and America.
Initially, carrots were a rarity and luxury item in much of Europe. However, they thrive even in poor soil and can be left in the ground or a root cellar through the winter. Therefore, around the early fifteenth century, cultivation grew widespread and carrots became a significant European food. At this time, the carrot emerged as one of the foremost vegetables in the cookery of central European Jews, a position it would shortly achieve in eastern Europe as well.
In the Middle East, carrots are added to soups, stews, pickles, and omelets. Persians add them to a sweet rice dish (shirin polow). Bukharans typically use it in their rice dish palov. Among Syrians, fat carrots are hollowed out, stuffed, and braised for holiday meals. Indians make spicy glazed carrots sweetened with raisins and bananas, as well as carrot halva. For Passover, Jews in the Balkans and Turkey sometimes add carrots to a sweet-and-sour celery dish called apio.
It was in northwestern Africa that carrots, both cooked and raw (gezer chai), became the featured component of salads, typically served as an accompaniment to couscous or offered in an assortment with other salads. Moroccans brought carrot salads to Israel in the 1940s and they quickly emerged as a ubiquitous part of the country's cookery. At many Israeli restaurants, carrot salads automatically appear on the table with the bread, pickles, and hummus. The carrots are usually flavored with charmoula, a Moroccan marinade of oil, lemon juice, garlic, and cumin. Most cooks add heat, sometimes in dangerous proportions, with varying amounts of chilies.
Eastern Europeans viewed raw carrots as unhealthy and only ate them cooked, reciting the benediction for vegetables only when eating a cooked carrot. Ashkenazim commonly exploited and complemented the carrot's sweetness by cooking it with honey in stews, preserves, puddings, and candy. It is also a frequent sight and flavor in soups, especially traditional golden Jewish chicken soup. German Jews adopted the Teutonic dish of carrots glazed with sugar, which eventually spread eastward to Poland. Also at that time in Germany, a soon-to-be-widespread vegetable and meat stew, tzimmes, emerged incorporating various root vegetables.
As the carrot developed into an important European crop, it also became a notable part of the Ashkenazic Rosh Hashanah tradition, supplanting the longstanding role of turnips as the standard symbolic food. The carrot's sweetness fits the theme of the holiday and slices of the yellow carrots of that time resembled gold coins, an omen of future wealth and success. The carrot also befitted the ancient Rosh Hashanah custom of eating foods with symbolic names—carrot in Yiddish is mehren/merren, a homonym of the Yiddish word merin (multiply/increase), an auspicious wish for fertility and prosperity, and the Hebrew name for carrot (gezer) is the same as the Hebrew word for tear, indicating that any unfavorable heavenly decrees should be torn up. A favorite Ashkenazic Rosh Hashanah dish, incorporating slices of carrot, is mehren tzimmes, a long way from its tough purple ancestor.
The term carrot cake made its first appearance in an American source in The Neighborhood Cook Book by the Council of Jewish Women (Portland, Oregon, 1912), along with a Jewish-style carrot pudding. Baked carrot puddings and cakes made with carrots became a staple of Jewish sisterhood cookbooks. Nevertheless, carrot cake caught on rather slowly in mainstream America until, in the 1960s, it was topped with a cream cheese frosting. The carrot cake's popularity increased dramatically and it became one of America's favorite treats.
(See also Pletzlach and Tzimmes)
Cauliflower
The cauliflower's name, derived from the Italian caulis floris (cabbage flower), indicates that it evolved from a colewort, a primitive cabbage. Instead of the stalk or leaves, the prefered part of cauliflower is the mass of immature flower stalks that form its compact head. Cauliflower appeared relatively late in history; it was first recorded in Asia Minor in the twelfth century and soon found its way to Moorish Spain, where it was originally called "Syrian cabbage." It was introduced to Italy only in 1490 and to the rest of Europe in the sixteenth century. During the ensuing two centuries, cauliflower became the rage of western Europe, favored on the tables of royalty and incorporated into a wide array of dishes. Its popularity, however, waned, except in a few areas, most notably China, India, Italy, Scandinavia, and Spain. Today, cauliflower is all too often relegated to the role of a plain side dish.
Sephardim, in particular, retain a fondness for kulupidya ("cauliflower," from the Ladino for cabbage, kol), preparing it in numerous ways, including fried, pickled, drizzled with a little olive oil and lemon juice, and stewed with other vegetables; they also serve it with potatoes in cheese sauce, in stews, in fritadas (omelets), in keftes (patties), and in tomato sauce. Middle Easterners use cauliflower, variously called zahra and karnabeet, among other vegetables to make pickles called turshi, typically tinted yellow with turmeric or pink with beets. They also enjoy it topped with tahini (sesame seed paste). Although not historically Ashkenazic fare, except among Hungarians and Romanians, cauliflower kugels and latkes have recently gained popularity.
In Israel, cauliflower—kruvit in modern Hebrew, derived from kruv (cabbage)—has become extremely popular, particularly during the autumn and winter; it is used in an array of salads, soups, patties, and casseroles.
Celery
Celery originated in marshy areas along the shore of the eastern Mediterranean, where uncultivated rudimentary celery, also called smallage or water parsley, can still be found. Wild celery, inedible raw, was valued primarily for its flavorful seeds and leaves. Celery seeds, possessing a warm, pungent flavor, were used medicinally for a variety of ailments, including colds, indigestion, hangovers, arthritis, gout, and liver problems. The leaves, similar in appearance to those of its relative flat-leaf parsley, were utilized as an herb, sometimes eaten raw but primarily consumed cooked.
Celery was probably first cultivated more than two thousand years ago by the Romans, but remained rather bitter and intensely flavored. Romans incorporated the leaves, stalks, or seeds in everything from appetizers to desserts, adding it profusely to nearly every salad and sauce. The familiar contemporary celery—crisp, sweet, and succulent, with overlapping stalks relatively free of strings—was developed in Italy in the late seventeenth century and barely resembles its wild ancestor. To this day, Italians still grow two types of celery: a mild one for eating fresh and a shar
per one for cooking. Most American celery is the Pascal type, a bright green, crisp, sweet variety introduced in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1874. Pascal is sometimes grown with the stalks shielded from direct sunlight, producing a white, softer stalk.
Celeriac, also known as celery root and knob celery and called cavessas de apio and apio nabo in Ladino, is a variety of celery cultivated for its thickened edible root. Celeriac was developed in Italy from a variety of celery during the Renaissance. The ivory flesh of the knobby roots is crisp and juicy, but larger roots tend to be woody. Although celeriac is sometimes served raw, it is most often cooked and can be substituted for potatoes in mashing and, in most recipes, for cauliflower and cardoons.
Celery and parsley were commonly confused in ancient writings, as they are botanically close, to the point that their leaves are similar and their seeds are nearly indistinguishable. Early Greeks referred to both of these close relatives as selinon—celery was called heleioselinon (selinon of the marshes) to distinguish it from parsley, which was called oreoselinon (selinon of the mountains) or the synonym petroselinum (selinon of the rocks). Similarly, the Mishnah noted that karpas she'baneharot (green of the rivers), meaning wild celery, was not cultivated in Israel, while karpas she'baharot (green of the mountains), regarded as parsley, was a cultivated plant in Israel. Many families adopted celery (some the leaves, others the stalks) or parsley for the karpas, a fresh green herb eaten at the start of the Passover Seder.
In Western cooking, celery is primarily used as a flavoring component for other items, including soups, stews, stuffings, and salads. In the Middle East, celery is sometimes allowed to stand as the central ingredient; it is served stuffed, pickled, and cooked in a vinaigrette. A venerable Sephardic dish features stewed celery in a cumin-accented chickpea sauce. Persians combine the stalks with a few seasonings to create a tasty stew for topping rice. Apio (sweet-and-sour celery) is a popular Passover dish among Jews from Turkey and parts of the Balkans. For the meal before Yom Kippur, Italians make a version of pinzette (veal or chicken patties) in a celery sauce. However, because Middle Eastern celery is usually the harder, more flavorful type, it is rarely used raw in salads.
