Modern Balabusta

Jenni Person

(561) 628-JUCY

What is Culinary Midrash?

Culinary Midrash is a process much like traditional midrash. It involves the study and interpretation of a Jewish text and the process of identifying meaning and symbols. Except those symbols and meaning are manifested as ingredients and textures and nutritional components. Connections are made between nutritional or aesthetic (taste, smell, texture) value and moral value. Sometimes the very process of the recipe represents an interpretation or meaning.

While it’s easy to take a story like that of Jacob and Esau and derive a lentil soup in their honor – it is less obvious to create a dish out of the story of, for example, Noah. Stopping to think of the implications of Noah’s story can take you farther.

Noah’s story starts with him being identified by God as “the most righteous of his generation”. The famous question here is – does that mean, they were all losers and he simply wasn’t, but not enough to compare to tzaddikim before or after him? So to represent this sort of singular-within-a-framework notion, a culinary interpretation might be to use an artichoke heart as the center of this recipe. There are lots of leaves and hair on an artichoke. The leaves are partially eaten and then discarded, the hairs are discarded completely – all a means to get to the singular center of goodness within that vegetable. From there it might by wise to make a sauce from artichoke hearts, serve it over two flavors each of two kinds of pasta (spinach and whole wheat fussilli and penne) to represent two (male and female) animals from each species – with the water for boiling representing the flood water serving a positive purpose. To create the sauce, clues from the period or the understood geography might come in to play. “At the end of the hundred and fifty days the water had gone down, and on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.” (Genesis 8:3-4). Mount Ararat is located in Eastern Turkey – so perhaps some seasonings particular to Turkish cooking, such as the cardamom that sweetly eminates from a cup of Turkish coffee along with allspice and cinnamon which are popular in Turkish cooking. One thing that seems to feel right is to keep this to a vegan recipe. God told Noah to take all the species of animals and all the kinds of food on the earth “for you and for them” (Genesis 6:21). Clearly, the animals were not food in this story – even if they were spared in order to be bred for food in later generations.

As described above, the choices come from many angles of looking at many variables and many platforms of a text. Modern and creative interpretation mingles with those of the Sages and yeshivah bochers of generations and generations. Contemporary relationships to products and geography can even have a role, as well as contemporary ethics. The central idea is a three-dimensional embodiment of text bringing the reader that much closer to the text through something that is done every day: eating. Nourishment.

Jenni Person Ó 2001