Bagels, borscht and brisket

In matters of culture and ethnicity, I take my lead from my old friend and guide Sir Jonathan Miller. Like him, I count myself as Jew-ish, and, as every Jew-ish person knows, you are what you eat; these traits are expressed most poignantly in our food. Not in the ancient (and incoherent) Hebrew dietary laws, which make it impractical, impossible even  —  for the few observant Jews who remain on this planet — to eat an everyday British or American diet; but in the foods that we relish, cherish and feel nostalgia for.

These almost never include the ritual foods or meals associated with Jewish religious festivals, such as the sweet apple-and-nut charoset of the Passover Seder repast, which represents the mortar (or clay bricks) our Egyptian-enslaved Israelite ancestors used. (Though Ben & Jerry’s did market a charoset ice cream flavour in Israel in 2015.) While it does embrace celebratory foods, the category of ritual dishes doesn’t really encompass potato pancakes, latkes, which Ashkenazi Jews love eating at Chanukah —  the feast of lights that commemorates the Hasmonean rebellion when a guerrilla army, led by Judas Maccabee, chucked the Hellenised Jews and Seleucid Greeks out of the Second Temple in 167–160 BCE. This was the occasion for an apocryphal Talmudic miracle: though there was only enough lamp oil for one day, the supply lasted for the eight days of Chanukah,  a holiday marked by consuming oil-fried foods, such as the Sephardi jam-filled doughnuts.

In fact, as I read the amusing pages of The 100 Most Jewish Foods: A Highly Debatable List, I could count only the matzo (unleavened bread), maror (bitter herbs, viz. horseradish) and charoset of Passover as true ritual foods. You could, I suppose, make a case for the braided, egg-enriched Challah and other breads associated with Sabbath observance, and for the Sephardi spicy chickpea, dried-fruit, grain and long-cooked eggs adafina, and Ashkenazi beef, bean and barley cholent, both of which are prepared before sundown on Friday to comply with the prohibition of cooking (or doing any other work) on the Sabbath.