A cup of intuition, a pinch of imprecision bakes a new Indian-Jewish cookbook

My Bombay-born grandmother baked a spectacular apple pie. I was already in my late twenties by the time Grandma Hilda died, yet I never thought to ask for her recipe. It’s still one of my greatest regrets. With my mother now in her mid-seventies, I was determined not to make the same mistake.

Last year, I started asking Mum how to cook some of my favourite dishes from our small Indian-Jewish community, such as chakla bakla (pickled vegetables), chittarnee (tomato-based chicken curry) and cheese samoosas (cheese-filled pastries). Along the way, I decided to write a cookbook so I could – in the words of the late food historian, Gil Marks – “spread the culinary wealth”.

I’m thrilled that Indian-Jewish Food: Recipes and Stories from the Backstreets of Bondi will soon be released. Capturing the recipes, however, proved more challenging than I’d expected.

Many Indian-Jewish dishes – and here I’m referring to the food of the Jews of India who were originally from Iraq, like my family – are a synthesis of Iraqi and Indian cooking. 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. (There are a handful of capable male cooks but it’s the women who hold most of the expertise.) My mother, for example, stores many of her recipes in her head.

Admittedly, Mum has attempted to document some of her dishes. But I found her so-called recipes infuriating to follow, with vague quantities such as “some” cumin powder and “a bit of” garam masala, and instructions like “put in oven” – with no temperature specified.

The most perplexing were her instructions for making coriander chutney. Add two plastic cups of water and one plastic cup of desiccated coconut – as if plastic cups are a standardised measurement. When I complained about her lack of precision, I didn’t get any sympathy.

“It’s trial and error”, she said. “You’ll just have to work it out on your own.” So it was a steep learning curve as I experimented in my kitchen and slowly perfected each dish.

Writing the recipes posed another challenge. Do you heat a pan on medium heat or over medium heat? What’s the difference between a pot, a saucepan and a sauté pan? When listing ingredients, is it one tablespoon of chopped coriander or one tablespoon of coriander, chopped? What’s the convention for using numerals instead of numbers in word form? (2 cups or two cups?) Whoever said not to sweat the small stuff has never written a cookbook.

Having complained about my mother’s lack of exactness, I wanted my recipes to be as clear as possible. But as Nigella Lawson warns in Cook, Eat, Repeat, “recipe-writing can be a dangerous job for the control freak”. One morning, during a meat blintz cooking lesson with Mum, she started frying the blintzes while I watched.

“Wait!” I shrieked. “How much oil did you use?” She sighed, exasperated by my endless questions. “I don’t know. I just poured some in.” Then she gave me a stern look. “You can’t baby them, Elana”. By them, of course, she meant you. My readers.

In the end, I did include an exact measurement of oil in my meat blintz recipe, ditching Mum’s tough-love approach for Nigella’s helpful reminder that “the recipe-writer’s role is to be a guide in the kitchen”. But with one person’s “guidance” being another person’s “babying”, it took me some time to strike a balance I was comfortable with. (While meat blintzes sound like they could be a fabulous Sephardi-Ashkenazi fusion food, these savoury pancakes developed as an Anglo-Indian snack during the British Raj; the dish was adopted by the Jews of Calcutta who called them panthras.)

Despite my frustrations, I’m conscious of how lucky I am to have my mother and my eldest aunt, now 91, still alive and able to field my cooking questions. And to have grown up in a home and extended family where food wasn’t just for satisfying hunger, but for bringing people together and showing affection.

I’ve also found it incredibly satisfying to master the dishes I’ve been devouring for much of my life, then sharing them with others. While writing Indian-Jewish Food, I invited friends for dinner and served coriander chutney with our meal. They enjoyed it so much they asked for the recipe. I emailed it with delight, so pleased I’d converted my mother’s imprecise directions into metric measurements which anyone can follow.

As I cooked and wrote, my son asked who I would be dedicating my book to. Although I agonised over recipe wordings, I answered him easily. For home cooks everywhere, my dedication page reads. Those of us who regularly prepare meals for our loved ones often go unrecognised; our efforts taken for granted.

I wanted to acknowledge this unpaid domestic labour, often delivered with great care and affection, as well as the way home cooks shape our lives – especially since taste and memory are so closely connected.

Taste, it turns out, is one of the most effective sensations for encoding memory. Delicious meals can connect us to happy times and warm feelings. For example, even though I haven’t eaten it in decades, I can easily conjure up the flavour of Grandma Hilda’s scrumptious pie: cinnamony apples encased in her sweet, buttery dough. And how all I had to do was phone her, tell her I had a hankering for pie, and one would materialise on our kitchen counter within a day or two.

Similarly, I suspect readers can remember at least some of the meals that were cooked in their  home while were growing up (both loved and  loathed!), and that they have their own attached stories.

With this in mind, I hope my cookbook will inspire readers to try some new recipes based on the flavours of the Indian-Jewish kitchen – onion, ginger and garlic; turmeric, cardamom and chilli; fresh coriander and curry leaves – and share their creations with family and friends to encode new, joyful memories. Especially at this difficult time in Jewish history, when we need all the joy we can get.

Indian-Jewish Food: Recipes and Stories from the Backstreets of Bondi is published by the Sydney Jewish Museum and will be released on August 18.

Read an edited extract from Indian-Jewish Food here

Elana Benjamin will be in conversation with Rebecca Davis for the launch of her book in Melbourne on September 8. Book here.

To register your interest in attending a Sydney launch, please contact sharonb@thejewishindependent.com.au