Recipes Dating Back To The Inquistion Reveal A Family's Secret Jewish Roots, NPR

-- Genie Milgrom, pictured in 2013, stands in the entryway of her Miami home wrapped in a long family tree, filled with the names of 22 generations of grandmothers. Raised Catholic, Milgrom traced her family's hidden Jewish roots with the help of a trove of ancient family recipes written down by the women of her family over generations.

With the holidays approaching, it's the time of year for families to come together and share their traditions. But which traditions?

In a trove of old family recipes, Genie Milgrom found clues that led her to Inquisition-era Spain and her family's hidden Jewish heritage. Milgrom is a Cuban-American, now 65, who was raised a devout Catholic. Several years ago, when her Mom became ill, Milgrom went through her things and found a collection of recipes that had been recorded and handed down by generations of aunts and grandmothers. Some of the recipes traced all the way back to Inquisition-era Spain and Portugal.

At her home in Miami, Milgrom pulls some of the recipes from a shelf. Many are written on yellowed paper in faded ink. "You can see old handwriting and little snippets of paper," she says. "So this was just pages and pages and hundreds of these. ... Some are just crumbling."

As a girl, Milgrom says her maternal grandmother taught her some of the family's food customs. Many years later, she realized they revealed their secret Jewish roots. In the Jewish dietary laws, we're not allowed to consume any blood," she says. "So she taught me how to check for blood in the eggs. You never pour them directly into a recipe."

Milgrom says her grandmother also insisted she learn another family custom that involved burning a small bit of bread dough in the oven. She says, "Jewish women, when they make the bread for Friday nights, they take a little bit of the dough and they burn it like an offering and say a blessing in the oven. And you always have to have five pounds of flour to do this." Her grandmother, she says, didn't teach her to say a blessing. "But she taught me to always bake with five pounds and to always take a little bit and burn it in the back of the oven."

Milgrom has a big personality, short black hair, a permanent smile, and she's constantly in motion. On this day, she has prepared one of the most unusual recipes she uncovered, a sugary dessert called "chuletas," the Spanish word for pork chops. "It's designed to look like a pork chop," Milgrom explains, "but it's really made from bread and milk." Basically, it's French toast that's fried in the shape of a pork chop and dressed up with tomato jam and pimentos...More.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/12/22/789864201/trove-of-recipes-dating-back-to-inquisition-reveals-a-familys-secret-jewish-root