Flavors and Aromas of Sepharad
An Exhibition of Historical Sephardic Cuisine
April 20th, 2022 – May 6th, 2022 | Community Meeting Room
Opening Reception: Monday, April 25th, 2022 from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM
The exhibition Flavors and Aromas of Sepharad, by the Red de Juderías de España (Network of Jewish Quarters of Spain) is an invitation to travel through time and discover the history of the Judeo-Spanish gastronomy. It is based on the book Sabores de Sefarad (Flavors of Sepharad), written for Red de Juderías by Xavier Zafra.
HE WHO EXTENDS THE TABLE, EXTENDS LIFE
Talking about medieval cuisine, be it Hebrew, Christian or Muslim, implies, in many cases, talking about women. They have kept alive the flame of the tradition and have custodied the arcane recipe books, the legacies from of their nannies, mothers and mothers-in-law.
Sephardic cuisine is diasporic and has assimilated the way of cooking and the food of the peninsular civilizations with which it lived: the seafood of the Phoenicians, the «Iberian Tetrad»; the «Mediterranean Triad» of the Greco-Roman tradition and the «Andalusian Green Revolution», where home cooking evolved into gastronomy. After the expulsion in 1492, the Arab-influenced cuisine of the Ottoman Empire and other Jewish communities of the Mediterranean became very present as well.
As part of Red de Juderías de España’s research, recovery, dissemination and promotion of Sephardic culture, this exhibition is dedicated to the cuisine history of Sepharad. Its goal is to contrast and document the different aspects of cooking – ingredients, recipes, uses and norms – as well as to re-establish the connection so that it can eventually find its way back into our kitchen.
The exhibition consists of 27 posters. It is accompanied by a web application that translates the texts of each piece and converts them into audio.
