In 1992, Donald I. Fine published Sephardic Cooking, a comprehensive cookbook by Copeland Marks documenting the culinary traditions of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish communities stretching from Morocco to India. Marks, a career cookbook author who specialized in documenting regional world cuisines, devoted a significant portion of the book to the distinctive food traditions of India’s Jewish communities, treating Indian Jewish cuisine as a genuine and distinct culinary tradition within the much broader Sephardic culinary world rather than a minor footnote to Middle Eastern or North African Jewish cooking.
A Career Built on Culinary Field Research
Marks, born in Burlington, Vermont, in 1921, brought an unusual career path to cookbook writing. After earning an agriculture degree from the University of Vermont and serving in the Burma campaign during the Second World War, he spent eight years in the Foreign Service before opening an import-export business – a career trajectory that took him to live for extended periods in Mexico, Guatemala, India, and South Africa before he turned to writing about food professionally in his later years. This background in international trade and extended residence abroad, rather than formal culinary training, shaped his approach to cookbook writing: across sixteen published cookbooks, Marks specialized in researching and documenting regional cuisines that had received comparatively little attention from English-language food writers, including The Indonesian Kitchen (1981), False Tongues and Sunday Bread: A Guatemalan and Mayan Cookbook (1985), The Great Book of Couscous (1994), The Korean Kitchen (1993), and, drawing directly on his time living in India, Indian & Chinese Cooking from the Himalayan Rim (1996).
Placing Indian Jewish Cuisine Within a Global Sephardic Tradition
Sephardic Cooking’s scope – explicitly ranging from Morocco to India according to its subtitle – reflects a scholarly and culinary argument as much as a practical organizing principle: that Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish cooking traditions, though shaped by dramatically different local ingredients and neighboring cuisines across the vast geographic range of the Sephardic diaspora, share enough common structural and historical threads to be treated as a single coherent culinary tradition. Within this framework, Marks situated the food traditions of India’s Jewish communities – drawing on Cochin Jewish, Bene Israel, and Baghdadi Jewish culinary practices – as a genuinely distinct regional expression of Sephardic and Mizrahi cooking, shaped by centuries of exchange with the Malayalam, Marathi, and Bengali culinary traditions of the specific Indian regions each community called home, while still recognizably connected to the broader dietary laws, festival foods, and culinary techniques shared across the wider Sephardic Jewish world.
This approach distinguishes Marks’s treatment of Indian Jewish food from cookbooks focused narrowly on a single Indian Jewish community’s cuisine, such as the later community-specific cookbook collaborations documented elsewhere in this collection between Esther David and various Indian Jewish community members. By placing Indian Jewish recipes within the same volume as Moroccan, Turkish, Greek, and other Sephardic culinary traditions, Marks implicitly made the case that understanding Indian Jewish cooking requires understanding it comparatively, against the backdrop of how Jewish communities elsewhere in the Sephardic and Mizrahi diaspora adapted their dietary traditions to dramatically different local culinary environments.
A Non-Specialist’s Outside Documentation
Unlike several of the other food-focused books covered elsewhere in this collection – Elana Benjamin’s essay and cookbook on Iraqi-Indian Jewish cuisine in Australia, or Esther David’s documentation of Indian Jewish cooking traditions from within her own Bene Israel and broader Gujarati Jewish background – Marks approached Indian Jewish cuisine as an outside culinary researcher rather than as a member of any Jewish community himself. This gave his work a comparative breadth that an insider cookbook focused on a single community’s traditions would not typically attempt, but it also meant his documentation of Indian Jewish cooking specifically depended on the kind of fieldwork, interviews, and recipe collection that a career spent researching dozens of different world cuisines – Indonesian, Guatemalan, Korean, Peruvian, North African, and Himalayan cuisines among them – had made him unusually well practiced at conducting even in unfamiliar cultural and religious contexts.
Why a Comparative Cookbook Matters for Indian Jewish Studies
Cookbooks documenting minority or endangered culinary traditions serve a function related to, but distinct from, the heritage-documentation books covered elsewhere in this collection: where a book like Sha’ul Sapir’s urban-geographic survey of Bombay’s Jewish heritage documents physical buildings and neighborhoods, and Dalia Ray’s broader survey documents synagogues and communal institutions, a comprehensive cookbook like Marks’s documents domestic and culinary practice – the recipes, techniques, and food-related customs that rarely appear in synagogue records, communal histories, or academic ethnography, but that nonetheless constitute a significant part of how any diaspora Jewish community maintains and transmits its distinct identity across generations, particularly once emigration has scattered a community’s members across multiple countries and continents.
For a community as demographically diminished within India as the Cochin Jews, Bene Israel, and Baghdadi Jews have become, comprehensive culinary documentation of this kind carries a particular urgency: recipes and cooking techniques, unlike synagogue buildings, have no fixed physical location that can be preserved through heritage tourism or institutional stewardship, and depend entirely on being actively practiced, taught, and recorded before the specific knowledge of how a dish was traditionally prepared disappears along with the generation that last cooked it regularly at home.
A Global Career Pattern Applied to a Specific Community
Marks’s approach to Sephardic Cooking followed a pattern already well established across his career: identifying a culinary tradition that had received comparatively little dedicated attention from English-language cookbook publishing, then conducting the kind of extended fieldwork and recipe collection needed to document it comprehensively for a general readership. His Indonesian Kitchen brought detailed regional Indonesian cooking to an English-speaking audience years before Indonesian cuisine became broadly familiar outside specialist circles; his Guatemalan and Mayan cookbook performed a similar function for Central American indigenous culinary traditions; and his later Himalayan Rim cookbook, drawing directly on his time in India, extended this same documentary approach to Indian and Chinese culinary traditions found along India’s Himalayan border regions. Sephardic Cooking, and its substantial coverage of Indian Jewish culinary tradition specifically, represents this same career-long pattern applied to a religious and ethnic culinary tradition, rather than a purely regional or national one – treating Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish cooking, including its Indian expressions, as exactly the kind of underdocumented culinary tradition his entire body of work was built around bringing to wider public attention.
Recipes as a Form of Historical Evidence
Beyond their practical culinary value, comprehensive recipe collections like those in Sephardic Cooking function as a form of historical evidence in their own right, documenting which specific ingredients, preparation techniques, and festival food customs a community maintained at a particular historical moment, information that can later illuminate broader patterns of migration, trade, and cultural exchange. A recipe that combines locally sourced South Asian spices and vegetables with dietary structures and festival timing derived from wider Jewish religious law offers direct, tangible evidence of exactly the kind of cultural synthesis that more abstract historical or anthropological accounts of Indian Jewish communities can only describe in general terms. In this sense, a cookbook like Marks’s functions as a complementary primary source alongside the more conventional historical and ethnographic literature on Indian Jewry, preserving a category of evidence – domestic culinary practice – that few other kinds of documentation capture with comparable specificity and detail.
Read alongside the more community-specific cookbooks covered elsewhere in this collection – Elana Benjamin’s essay and cookbook on Iraqi-Indian Jewish cuisine in Australia among them – Marks’s broader, comparative Sephardic Cooking offers a genuinely useful complementary perspective: placing India’s Jewish culinary traditions within their full global Sephardic and Mizrahi context, rather than treating Indian Jewish cooking as an isolated regional curiosity disconnected from the much wider diaspora culinary world that shaped, and was in turn enriched by, the specific adaptations Indian Jewish communities made to their own local South Asian culinary environments.
Nearly three decades after its original publication, Marks’s book remains a useful reference for readers and researchers seeking to understand Indian Jewish cuisine not in isolation, but as one thread within the much larger, geographically dispersed tapestry of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish culinary tradition that his career-long documentary project set out, book by book and region by region, to record before it could be lost to the same forces of migration and modernization that have already reshaped so much of the Sephardic diaspora’s traditional way of life.