Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures Margaret Boyle has tapped into her heritage to coauthor a book about Jewish Mexican food and culture.
Boyle, who also directs Bowdoin’s Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx studies program, has teamed up with Amherst professor Ilan Stavans to create Sabor Judío: The Jewish Mexican Cookbook.
The lavishly illustrated book features one hundred recipes exploring the fusion of these two culinary traditions and organizes them into meals: desayuno (breakfast), comida (lunch), and cena (dinner). It also includes dishes made for various holidays, including Rosh Hashanah—the recently celebrated Jewish new year—and Yom Kippur—the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, which will be celebrated this coming Friday (October 11.)
“The book isn’t only a cookbook,” said Boyle, “but tells the histories of Jewish immigration from 1492 to the present, as well as stories of Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and Mizrahi Jews, including newly elected president of Mexico Claudia Sheinbaum.”
Boyle pays tribute to her Mexican-born family, her mother, grandparents, and her great-grandparents who left Poland and Lithuania during the Pogroms of the 1920s. “I trace my love of languages to my family, from Spanish to Yiddish to Hebrew to Ladino,” she said.
Boyle has researched and written about historical recipes, especially as they related to health care practices for Spanish women. While researching this book, she said she was delighted to find numerous connections between past and present, reminiscent of her own background—whether it’s reading family diaspora stories in the Mexican Jewish newspaper Diario Judío, enjoying the uplifting work of current Jewish-Mexican poets and novelists such as Margo Glantz and Myriam Moscona, or discovering that PBS chef Pati Jinich is part of the same family tree as Boyle’s beloved great-grandmother.
Catch this recent interview with Boyle and Stavans on Good Food, a show on KCRW public radio in California, and this new review of the book from the Jewish Book Council. They are also featured in this article from the Jewish Journal. Other media mentions include this write-up in the Forward newsletter.
On November 14, Boyle and Stavans will be talking about the cookbook in a public event at the Bowdoin College’s Hawthorne-Longfellow Library.
Other upcoming book conversations include a celebration at Boston’s Vilna Shul cultural center, which includes the director of the Brandeis Initiative on Jews of the Americas, on October 27; a virtual event later that day organized by San Francisco’s Jewish Community Library; food and storytelling at the Lehrhaus tavern in Somerville, Massachusetts, followed by a conversation at JCC Greater Boston on November 3; and a symposium at UC Santa Barbara on November 17.
The coauthors launched the book with a conversation at New York Public Library on September 26, and Boyle led a further conversation more locally with the Maine Jewish Museum in Portland on September 29.
