The title once attached to this post — “Indian-Jewish Cooking: The Baghdadi Jewish Culinary Tradition” — is, in fact, the exact title of a real cookbook: Mavis Hyman’s Indian-Jewish Cooking, published by Hyman Publishers in 1992. It remains one of the few dedicated cookbooks documenting the food traditions of Calcutta’s Baghdadi Jewish community, a cuisine built from two centuries of Iraqi Jewish families adapting their recipes to Bengali ingredients and spices.
Mavis Hyman’s Family History
Mavis Hyman’s ancestors migrated from Baghdad to what is now Kolkata roughly two hundred years ago, joining a wave of Jewish merchant families who settled across Surat, Bombay, and Calcutta from the eighteenth century onward. In Calcutta specifically, this Baghdadi Jewish community developed a distinctive culinary tradition that blended Iraqi Jewish cooking methods and dietary practice with Bengali ingredients, vegetables, and spices rarely used in Middle Eastern kitchens. Hyman’s book, illustrated with a cover photograph by John Hyman, set out to document these recipes at a point when the Calcutta Jewish community had already shrunk dramatically through emigration.
What the Book Documents
Across 192 pages, Hyman records dishes that fuse Iraqi and Indian culinary traditions, including dishes such as aloo makalla, a whole fried spiced potato dish eaten on Shabbat, and dopiaza-style preparations of chicken or mutton cooked with mango, ginger, and cardamom. The book also documents dishes such as appam, a rice-and-coconut pancake, that were absorbed into Calcutta’s Jewish kitchens from the surrounding Bengali food culture. Rather than presenting a static or purely nostalgic record, Hyman’s recipes show a cuisine formed by genuine day-to-day adaptation, as Baghdadi Jewish cooks in Calcutta substituted, over generations, ingredients available locally for those used in Iraq while keeping to kosher dietary requirements.
Part of a Longer Documentary Tradition
Hyman’s cookbook was not the first attempt to record Calcutta’s Jewish food traditions. As early as 1922, a book titled the Jewish Cookery Book was published in Calcutta by Mrs. H. Brooke and printed locally by the East Bengal Press, documenting kosher Indian-Jewish recipes for what was then a much larger community. Hyman’s 1992 book continued this documentary tradition seven decades later, at a point when Calcutta’s Baghdadi Jewish population had fallen to a small fraction of its earlier size through emigration to Israel, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere.
A Cuisine Documented Elsewhere Too
Indian-Jewish Cooking is not the only book to document this culinary tradition. Esther David’s Bene Appétit: The Cuisine of Indian Jews surveys food traditions across all three of India’s Jewish communities, including the Baghdadi Jews, while Elana Benjamin’s more recent book Indian-Jewish Food: Recipes and Stories from the Backstreets of Bondi documents how Calcutta Baghdadi Jewish cooking was carried onward by families who eventually settled in Sydney, Australia. Read together, these books trace how a single regional Jewish cuisine has been documented, and kept alive, across more than a century and several continents.
Book Details
- Title: Indian-Jewish Cooking
- Author: Mavis Hyman
- Publisher: Hyman Publishers
- Year: 1992
- Length: 192 pages
- ISBN: 978-0-9518150-0-7
Further Reading
For another survey of Indian Jewish food traditions, see our coverage of Esther David’s Bene Appétit: The Cuisine of Indian Jews. Background on the community behind this cuisine is available on the Baghdadi Jews Wikipedia page.
Nahoum & Sons and Calcutta’s Living Food Culture
The cuisine Hyman documents did not exist only in home kitchens. Calcutta’s Baghdadi Jewish community also produced Nahoum & Sons, a confectionary and bakery founded in New Market in the early twentieth century that continues operating today, decades after the city’s Jewish population fell to only a small handful of families. Nahoum’s became known for baking traditional Jewish items such as challah and fruitcake alongside Anglo-Indian and Bengali confections, making it one of the few living, physical remnants of Calcutta’s once-thriving Baghdadi Jewish community that visitors and researchers can still encounter directly rather than read about only in books.
Adapting Kosher Practice to a New Environment
Because Calcutta’s Baghdadi Jewish families kept kosher dietary law, Hyman’s recipes also reflect generations of practical decisions about which local ingredients could be substituted for those used in Iraq and which needed to be sourced separately or avoided. Dairy and meat separation, kosher slaughter requirements, and Passover dietary restrictions all shaped which Bengali ingredients and cooking techniques could be adopted and which could not, meaning the cuisine Hyman documents represents not simply a blending of two food cultures but a deliberate, sustained negotiation between religious law and local availability carried out over multiple generations of home cooks.
A Record of a Vanishing Community
By the time Hyman’s book appeared in 1992, most of Calcutta’s Baghdadi Jewish community had already emigrated, primarily to Israel, the United Kingdom, and Australia, leaving only a small remaining population in the city. Cookbooks like Hyman’s therefore serve a documentary function beyond the kitchen: they preserve, in specific and repeatable form, domestic knowledge that was otherwise at risk of disappearing along with the last generation of cooks who had learned the recipes directly from parents and grandparents in Calcutta itself, rather than from a written source.
Why This Cuisine Is Distinct
Unlike Bene Israel or Cochin Jewish cooking, which developed over many centuries of continuous residence in India, Calcutta’s Baghdadi Jewish cuisine reflects a comparatively recent and rapid fusion, built within roughly two hundred years by a community that arrived already possessing a fully formed Iraqi Jewish culinary tradition. That relatively compressed timeline is part of what makes Hyman’s documentation valuable: it captures a specific, datable process of culinary adaptation, from identifiable Iraqi dishes toward their Calcutta-adapted forms, rather than a tradition whose origins are too old to trace precisely.
Recipes as Historical Evidence
Food historians researching Indian Jewish communities increasingly treat cookbooks like Hyman’s as primary evidence alongside synagogue records, oral histories, and immigration documents, since a recipe’s specific combination of ingredients, techniques, and occasions can reveal migration routes and trade contacts that are harder to reconstruct from other kinds of records alone. A dish that combines Iraqi spicing with a Bengali vegetable available only locally, for instance, can indicate roughly when and how a particular adaptation likely took place, even without a written date attached to the recipe itself.