Cohen

An Iraqi Jewish family kitchen recorded from Baghdad to Tel Aviv.

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Ask someone who remembers

If this record is thin, ask a living kitchen. The question stays in the original words.

Culinary places and migration

Baghdad · Tel Aviv

How food knowledge traveled

This is not a genealogy. It records who cooked, who taught, and how a kitchen moved from one pair of hands to another.

Esther CohenGrandmother, home cook

Dishes

Kubbeh adom · kubbeh adom

Stories and oral histories

Oral history

Demonstration record

Oral history

Beet soup in a new country

Esther Cohen’s kubbeh came out of the pot the color of a pomegranate split open. In Baghdad the beets were cheap in winter. In Tel Aviv she planted them in a tin behind the building because the market ones were pale. She had heard of the sour kubbeh of Aleppo — lemon, mint — and she respected it the way you respect a cousin. Our soup is red, she said. Theirs is yellow. The dumplings are the same idea: bulgur, a little meat, closed with a wet thumb. She would not say which city invented it. She said only: in our house it was Friday, and it was red.

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People

Esther Cohen