Related Reading
- The Four Communities of Indian Jews: An Overview
- The Bene Israel of Maharashtra
- The Jews of Cochin
- The Baghdadi Jews of Mumbai and Kolkata
- Books on the Jews of India
Esther David is perhaps best known outside India for her novels, but within the Indian Jewish community and among food writers worldwide, she is equally celebrated for her explorations of the Bene Israel kitchen. Her book Bene Appetit: The Cuisine of Indian Jews gathers recipes, stories, and cultural history from the Bene Israel community of Maharashtra, offering both a practical cookbook and an intimate portrait of a culinary tradition that is rapidly disappearing. In interviews and writings about the book, David has spoken with characteristic warmth and precision about what food means to the Bene Israel community and why preserving their recipes is as urgent as preserving their history.
A Kitchen Between Worlds
The Bene Israel kitchen is a product of two thousand years of adaptation. The community arrived in India, by their own account, as refugees from the ancient Middle East, and over the centuries they adopted the ingredients, cooking techniques, and flavor profiles of their Maharashtrian neighbors while maintaining the Jewish dietary laws that defined their religious identity. The result is a cuisine that is immediately recognizable as both Jewish and Indian, a combination that is far rarer in the global Jewish culinary landscape than might be expected.
Coconut milk replaces cream or butter in many dishes, keeping meat preparations kosher by avoiding any dairy combination. Local spices such as turmeric, cumin, coriander, and cardamom season dishes that might otherwise seem familiar from a Sephardic Jewish tradition. Rice replaces bread as the staple grain for weekday meals, though specially baked breads appear for Shabbat and holidays. The result is a dietary culture that is genuinely its own, neither simply Indian nor simply Jewish but something new that emerged from centuries of creative adaptation.
The Malida: Heart of Bene Israel Ritual Cuisine
At the center of Bene Israel ceremonial life is the malida, a sweet dish made from flattened rice, coconut, raisins, and sugar that is prepared and offered as a thanksgiving to Elijah the Prophet. Elijah occupies a special place in Bene Israel religious culture, and his shrine in Haifa, Israel, is a major pilgrimage destination for the community. The malida ceremony, performed at important life events and on the Jewish sabbath of the month dedicated to Elijah, is the most distinctive ritual in the Bene Israel repertoire.
David has written extensively about the malida, tracing its origins, its regional variations, and its emotional significance for the community. For families who have immigrated to Israel, the preparation of malida connects them to a ritual practice that stretches back generations and links them to a landscape, a community, and a way of being Jewish that Israel’s mainstream culture does not always provide room for.
The Secret Kitchen
David uses the phrase “secret food culture” to describe the way Bene Israel cuisine has existed largely outside the awareness of both the broader Indian food world and the global Jewish culinary tradition. Unlike the cuisines of Moroccan or Yemeni Jews, which have been extensively documented and celebrated, the food of the Bene Israel has received relatively little scholarly or popular attention. This invisibility partly reflects the community’s small size, but it also reflects a broader pattern in which communities on the geographic and cultural margins of the Jewish world tend to receive less documentation than those closer to traditional centers of Jewish life in Europe and the Middle East.
The recipes David collects and writes about are not restaurant food. They are home cooking, passed down through mothers and grandmothers in kitchens in Bombay, Pune, and Ahmedabad, adapted slightly with each generation but retaining their essential character. Bene Appetit is therefore as much an act of cultural recovery as it is a cookbook, rescuing dishes that might otherwise be lost as the older generation that carries them in memory passes away.
Food and Memory
Throughout her discussions of Bene Israel cuisine, David returns repeatedly to the relationship between food and cultural memory. For diaspora communities, food is often one of the most durable carriers of identity, surviving the losses of language, landscape, and community that accompany immigration. The smell of a particular spice combination, the texture of a dish prepared in a specific way, the visual cue of a food associated with a holiday or lifecycle event: these sensory experiences connect people to a past that other forms of cultural transmission cannot always reach.
For the Bene Israel, whose community in India is declining rapidly through emigration and whose cultural institutions in Mumbai and elsewhere have shrunk significantly in recent decades, the preservation of their culinary tradition is a matter of real urgency. Books like Bene Appetit and the interviews and writings David has given about Bene Israel food are essential documents of a culture in transition.