What exactly is Ashkenazi cuisine?

Boubalé recently opened in Paris. This festive restaurant, housed in a Marais hotel and designed by Israeli chef Assaf Granit, claims to offer Ashkenazi cuisine. That's not entirely untrue, but it's a long way from what it really is.

Sylvie Berkowicz Published on 11/17/23 at 4:12 PM

Jewish, Israeli, Levantine, Mediterranean... This Middle Eastern cuisine, more or less aptly described, is now enjoying huge success. There are countless new restaurants opening every week or so.

Less well known is Ashkenazi cuisine, that of Central European Jews. A cuisine of memory, far less engaging and colorful than that of the Near East, born of harsh living conditions in cold climates.

A cuisine of patience

In my family, Ashkenazi food is mainly served on Jewish holidays. On the table, a range of beige-brown dishes where the only touch of color is the green of the gherkins, the orange of the carrot slice decorating the fish ball or the purple of the beet horseradish. Dishes that take a long time to prepare, a repertoire that each family declines according to its traditions: stuffed carp (Gefilte Fish), minced poultry livers, pastrami, herring, meatloaf (Klops), calf's trotters in jelly, chicken broth with unleavened bread dumplings (kneidler)... With, for dessert, the unmissable gâcheesecake, macaroons with Pesach almonds (flourless), apple strudel, pancakes filled with cottage cheese (blintzes)... The names of these dishes often provide families with the rare opportunity to practice a little of the Yiddish (a language close to German) spoken by Polish Jews.

"A deeply affective cuisine

For Annabelle Schachmes, author of cookery books, Ashkenazi cuisine is something she does all the time, all year round. She knows it inside out, and has tested it in Poland, Israel and New York. And it's obviously part of her latest book, "Jewish Cuisine in New York", probably the only place in the world where it's still very much alive, served away from home, part, like other immigrant cuisines, of the city's culinary heritage. " This cuisine is my life. It's what I ate as a child, as a teenager, as a young adult and as a mother! It's a cuisine that bears no resemblance to Sephardic or Israeli cuisine, and certainly not to the cuisine of Boubalé! It doesn't have any striking seasonings, because it's a subsistence cuisine. It'll never become a couscous with harissa! In truth, it's a deeply affective cuisine.

Is it possible to make others love this cuisine that we love for its history rather than for its taste? How can we make it appealing by taking it out of the realm of affect? Probably by surfing on this craze for Israeli/Jewish/Sephardic/Mediterranean cuisine... as offered by Assaf Granit in his other establishments, even though they have little in common.

JoannPai

A cuisine steeped in history

As the restaurant's press release states: " Boubalé dares the improbable: to give a contemporary sensuality to specialities reputed to be austere, by the sheer force of memory and talent ". The improbable, for example, is the broth that combines kneidlers (unleavened bread dumplings) with seafood, the latter being forbidden by kosher regulations. A pure creation, then - a provocation, some would say - but the chef has every right to put his foot in it. For Annabelle Schachmes, "on paper, it's very interesting to have an Ashkenazi restaurant in Paris for once, but you have to be very careful, because this cuisine carries a lot of history. Modernizing the recipe for kreplechs (beef ravioli) runs the risk of overusing it. "

In most dishes, with the exception of an excellent chicken liver, he has left only the faintest traces of Ashkenazi cuisine, a breath of memory passed through the mill of culinary mixity and the festive restaurant's shortcomings.

Customers are immersed in the energy of a lively dining room and open kitchen (the strength of Assaf Granit's restaurants).Assaf Granit's restaurants), sharing and munching their way through pretty dishes and antique tureens, with little regard for what's on the plate.

" People will probably think it's good," continues Annabelle Schachmes, "The way it's executed isn't bad, but it's not the reality. In my opinion, what you eat at Boubalé is infinitely Israeli. In other words, it's a cuisine of diversity. Like in New York, where different immigrant communities have, in the same place, at the same time, added their marbles to the construction of a kitchen. It's a form of Ashkenazi Israeli cuisine, but it's absolutely not Ashkenazi cuisine, which for me is a cuisine of people and stories. To change these recipes is to change the history of these people, and make them disappear a second time ".