Section IV · Sephardic Recipes
Sephardic recipes
Food is the part of this history that survived in the open. A family that could not keep a name, a language or a liturgy often kept a dish — and kept making it for five hundred years without being able to say why.
This section of the original site was popular, and it stays. It is also the one page here that carries no evidentiary weight at all, which is freeing: nobody needs a citation to make borekas or haminados.
Where a dish has a documented history worth telling — an Inquisition testimony that describes a family's cooking, a recipe that travelled a specific expulsion route from Toledo to Salonica to Seattle — that history will be told alongside it, sourced. Where it does not, it is simply a good recipe.
One honest caution
A dish in your family is not evidence of descent. Sephardic, Morisco, Provençal and ordinary Iberian regional cooking overlap heavily, because the people lived in the same towns and bought from the same markets for centuries. Rice with chicken is not a finding.
It is, however, a perfectly good reason to ask your oldest living relative where the recipe came from — and that conversation has produced more usable genealogical leads than any DNA test ever sold.