The bond between the Torah portion and food in my kitchen

I would extend this bond between food and Bible, serving a dish that would be a springboard for elevated table talk. Family and guests were to guess the connection to the Torah portion.

By BARBARA SOFER
Cooking for the holiday, 2020 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Cooking for the holiday, 2020
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Veteran Jerusalem radio newscaster Idele Ross was cleaning out her file cabinets during this enforced period at home. She came across a thick paper file with my name on it.
For a few years in the early 1980s, I created and read recipes on a Friday afternoon radio program that came on after the English news. Hosted by Ross’s colleague Ephraim Geffen, known for his mellifluous radiophonic BBC voice, the show was called Thank Goodness It’s Friday (who remembers, dear readers?). There was a feature story, then a short Torah talk, and last, a recipe.
In those years, I was taking my baby steps as an Israeli homemaker, with a house full of babies. I was also growing in my Bible knowledge. The start-ups of the day were women’s academies for Torah study.
I knew enough of Pirkei Avot (The Sayings of the Sages) to have internalized that “when three sit at a table and there are no words of Torah, it is like taking part in a pagan feast.” With my tenure as mom in the kitchen, in an Israel with few prepared foods or take-out restaurants, I was plunged deep into the world of cooking. I began working on a project, a cookbook of sorts, called The Portion of the Week. I must have been inspired by the matza and bitter herbs on Passover, the panoply of Sephardic symbolic foods – beets, leeks, carrots – beyond apples and honey on Rosh Hashanah, and the mystical glosses for eating kreplach on Hoshana Raba or halla shaped like a key after Passover. I would extend this bond between food and Bible, serving a dish that would be a springboard for elevated table talk. Family and guests were to guess the connection to the Torah portion.
I offered my project to Thank Goodness It’s Friday and got the job. Once a month, I would go to the Israel Broadcasting Authority studios on a narrow, curving street behind the Jerusalem main police station and record the four upcoming portions’ recipes.
I typed out the recipes on my Smith Corona (!) and the station staff would make copies and send them out on request.
Who knows why we save things? 40 years later, Ross not only preserved multiple copies of my recipes, but was kind enough to drop them at my home.
Those old pages sent me down memory lane, bringing me back to a different time in my life and in Israeli cuisine.
A WORD about my early cooking skills – or lack of. I immigrated from Colchester, Connecticut where my mother had strict rules about children cooking in her kitchen: we couldn’t. She waved away any cooking ambitions, with the promise that we’d learn to cook on our own time in our own kitchens when we were responsible for our own clean-up. After dinner – which was held rain, snow or shine promptly at 5 p.m. – messing up the sparkling stainless sink was strictly prohibited.
When I entered the world of the Israeli kitchen, saying I was a novice understates it. In Connecticut, nearly everything was cooked in a large oven. My first rental apartments had no ovens, and my first cakes rose or fell in the stove-top wonder pot. No cake mixes. No Minute Rice. No canned soup. My treasured cookbooks from the New London synagogue and Rochester, NY Hadassah called for ingredients like “3 packages of frozen broccoli” and “a can of cranberry sauce.”
Still, I stepped intrepidly into the Reed Sea of culinary commentary.
Some of the Biblical connections were easy. The medieval mega-commentator Shlomo Yitzchaki, better known as Rashi, details the menu for the meal Abraham and Sarah prepared for the visiting angels. They were getting tongue in mustard sauce, said the French sage. In addition, I offered a recipe for Sarah’s Quick Tent Semolina Bread. The red, red pottage that Jacob was cooking when his ravenous brother Esau came in from the field was a lentil soup, chosen for the roundness of the legume, a mourning dish because grandfather Abraham had died. I suggested baking Joseph’s Spice Caravan Spice Cake for Vayeshev. You get the idea.
Looking back at the sepia sheets with the official stamp from the Office of Radiodiffusion Television Israelienne (Israel Broadcasting Authority), I’d have to say that some of the recipes were a stretch. Take Jacob’s Toothbreaker Taffy Crunch for his reunion with his angry brother (Vayishlach) or Joseph’s Many-Colored Jell-O Mold (Jell-O molds were popular in my Connecticut childhood).
The mimeographed papers were faded, but all legible. Some came with the introductions and hints about the liturgical-edible connection. Others are only recipes. Perhaps under hypnosis I could recall why I suggested a homemade sauce that required six seeds of anise. And the most puzzling is a casserole called Eggplant-Banana Bake.
Over the decades, broccoli, asparagus and rhubarb, canned soups and cake mixes have become available. You see tricolor quinoa, Italian Grana Padano and sextuple sirachas on the supermarket shelves. You can buy sifted flour, flattened schnitzel and grated carrot, so the finely meshed, anti-weevil Bnei Brak sifter, wood and metal schnitzel hammer and four-sided grater guaranteed to scrape at least one knuckle are no longer standard chef’s ware.
Because Idele provided me so much fun reading these old recipes, I’m going to make one this week for the Torah portion of Beha’alotcha. In this week’s portion, our forefathers and foremothers, freed from slavery and blessed with the Torah, are complaining about – you guessed it – the food. They miss the delicacies of the Old Country. Sure, the manna is free, but so was the fish in Egypt. You may have imagined them longing for gefilte or chraime, but you might not know that before the Aswan Dam was built and the silt run-off from the Nile stopped, sardines were bountiful in Egypt.
So, this week we’ll be thinking of recipes of yore, and serving Pined-for-Sardine Salad Aforespice.
B’tayavon!
The writer is the Israel director of public relations at Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Her latest book is A Daughter of Many Mothers.


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