Our Iraqi Rosh Hashanah: Apple jam, coconut-stuffed dates and more

ELANA BENJAMIN celebrates the unique dishes and customs that define her family’s Baghdadi heritage.

I’m hosting first night Rosh Hashanah this year. On my shopping list are those must-have items: a pomegranate, a fish head. But I won’t be buying apples. Or honey. As a Sephardi-Mizrahi Jew – my parents were part of Bombay’s Baghdadi Jewish community before moving to Australia – my guests and I will instead feast on cardamom-infused apple jam. And our different Rosh Hashanah culinary customs don’t stop there.

The bible of Jewish cuisine, Claudia Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food, includes a recipe for Iraqi apple preserve, which Roden describes as “very sweet” and “a New Year specialty”. What Roden doesn’t mention is that apple jam – what she calls apple preserve – is one of numerous symbolic foods eaten by Iraqi Jews at Rosh Hashanah.

Many Sephardi-Mizrahi Jews eat a series of ritual foods before their New Year meal. This practice is thought to have begun in Talmudic times, when Rabbi Abaye suggested that at the start of the year, people eat pumpkin, beans, leeks, beetroot and dates, all of which grew in abundance, in the hope that the new year would also be filled with abundance. From this beginning, the ritual expanded to include a range of foods, each with their own bracha (blessing) containing a hope or wish for the year ahead, often with a play on Hebrew words.

So as first-night dinner host, my shopping list also includes the symbolic foods that are customarily eaten by Jews of Iraqi origin: dates, coconut, chives, spinach, zucchini, cucumber and beans. Each item has its own significance, and we’ll say a blessing unique to each food before eating it, in effect asking God for only good things in the year to come.

Some food substitutions are possible: the cucumber, for example, is for blessing a fruit of the ground (ha’adama) so could be replaced with banana; when pomegranate was unavailable in previous years, I’ve used passionfruit. But under no circumstances am I allowed to salt the beans – or any of the other foods – so as not to jinx our chances of a sweet year ahead.