The Jewish Curry Culture Club

18/10/2026

W**e accompanies the Sabbath, weddings and Passover. But what do you do when kosher w**e is hard to obtain?

In India, Jewish families turned to raisins.

My new essay, Raisin d’être, brings together Zilka Joseph’s poetry, Ruby Daniel’s memories of Cochin and the w**e cellar beneath Calcutta’s Beth El Synagogue. Three communities, different preparations, and a shared tradition of providing w**e for the ritual cup.

With Bene Israel, Cochini and Baghdadi recipes.

https://beyondbabylon.substack.com/p/raisin-detre?r=32dxtv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

How Bene Israel, Cochini and Baghdadi Jewish families made ritual w**e from raisins

14/10/2026

My grandmother Ruby used her potato peeler like a pencil sharpener. Every potato had to be perfectly round, even if it ended up much, much smaller.

Her aloo makalla was legendary: a hard golden shell around a buttery-soft middle, fried for the Friday-night table in Calcutta. By Saturday the crust was gone, and the leftovers became an egg salad.

The essay follows one potato across the Sabbath, with her recipes and a guide to choosing, keeping and frying your own.

Granny Ruby’s aloo makalla and the science behind its golden crust

06/10/2026

A building site is an unlikely place to find ingredients for a dessert. Yet that is where Sara Levi’s mother sent her, with a cup, to fetch whitewashing lime for her watermelon-rind sweets.

I followed that childhood errand into the kitchen of Greece’s Romaniote Jews, and into a forthcoming cookbook that sets out to preserve more than recipes.

The lime doesn’t preserve the rind. It helps the rind hold its shape, and the sugar does the preserving. The essay, Holding Its Shape, has the recipe.

https://beyondbabylon.substack.com/p/holding-its-shape?r=32dxtv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Sara Levi’s new Romaniote cookbook and the work of preserving family recipes

24/09/2026

Cochin’s Jews once lived as two communities, called „Black“ and „White,“ that did not intermarry. Rebecca Cohen and Salomon Halevi married across that line. Shunned in Cochin, they made their home in Madras.
Madras usually means checked handkerchiefs and curry powder. For this couple it meant a home and a Jewish community.
Their story, with a family recipe, at the link in bio.
FoodHistory JewishFood IndianFood BeyondBabylon

24/09/2026

The photograph is black and white. So, in the language of Cochin's Jews, was the couple in it.

In Cochin, on India's southwest coast, the Jews lived as two communities that did not intermarry: the "Black Jews," long settled on the Malabar coast, and the "White Jews," whose families had arrived from Europe and the Middle East from the 1500s. Rebecca Cohen and Salomon Halevi married across that line. Shunned in Cochin, they made their life in Madras.

Madras usually means checked handkerchiefs and curry powder, both made famous far from the city. For this couple it became a home and a Jewish community.

This is their story.

https://beyondbabylon.substack.com/p/of-madras?r=32dxtv

of cloth, curry powder, and of a Jewish family’s claim to a city

18/09/2026

We sat at the dining room table in our finest, eating in silence, contemplating the oncoming solemnity.

The Day of Atonement begins at sunset and runs about twenty-five hours with no food and no water. The meal before it has its own name: the meal that divides. It has to be festive enough for the occasion and light enough to leave you standing.

In the Baghdadi Jewish homes of Bombay and Calcutta, that meal was often Hari Kabab — a whole chicken slow-cooked with whole potatoes in turmeric, coriander and cumin.

Hari means green in Hindi. There is nothing green in it. I have four versions of the recipe in front of me, spelled four different ways, and they disagree about almost everything except the potatoes.

My grandmother's is the outlier. I'm printing it anyway.

The meal before the fast

14/09/2026

When Ravi Shemesh's uncle died, the family cooked pappu charu in a big pot on the fire in the yard and served it to all the relatives. It is the same lentil broth every household in coastal Andhra Pradesh makes. There is nothing Jewish about it.

But this household keeps the Sabbath, buys only fish with fins and scales, and slaughters its own meat. And nobody recognises them as Jews. Conversion is available and they refuse it, because using it would concede they began outside, and they say they were always inside.

The synagogue is a hundred and forty kilometres away and most of the community are daily labourers who cannot afford the bus fare. So most Saturdays it happens at home, in a kitchen.

I spent two weeks deciding whether this kitchen belongs in the book I am writing about the Jewish kitchens of Asia. I have decided that it does. Five recipes, and how I got there.

https://beyondbabylon.substack.com/p/the-kitchen-came-first-then-god?r=32dxtv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Five recipes from an emerging Jewish Community in Andhra Pradesh, India

01/09/2026

In Doʿan, in Hadhramaut, they serve spiced rice with camel meat and chilli sauce. When Singaporean researcher Cheryl-Ann Low ate it in 2009, it reminded her of Southeast Asian nasi briyani. More than four thousand miles from Java, deep in southern Arabia.

That rice, not the camel, is why I spent weeks convinced that the Indian Ocean explained my family’s Sabbath rice. Bengali rice arriving at Mukalla. Javanese cooks in the towns of the wadi. Indonesian words still spoken in Hadhrami kitchens.

Then I found what actually connects the Yemeni rice to ours. It isn’t in the rice.

It’s Friday night.

Follow the trail of evidence:

and a recipe for a Yemeni Smoky ghee with Fenugreek

08/07/2026

There's a memorial in Berlin's Tiergarten for the Sinti and Roma murdered under National Socialism - a circular pool of black water, the names of the camps set into the stones around it.

A violin plays over it, continuously, composed by a Sinti musician who said he couldn't bear to play a single mourning note - so instead he took the whistle Roma parents use to call their children home, and set it in a minor key.

Standing there in the rain, I thought: this sounds like klezmer.
It wasn't a coincidence. For centuries, Roma and Jewish musicians in Eastern Europe played the same weddings, the same roads, the same repertoire. That kinship runs in an unbroken line back to a Roma village fiddler who gave a four-year-old boy his first violin lesson - a boy who grew up to teach Yehudi Menuhin.

The recipes never survived the journey out of India. The grammar did. So, it turns out, did the sound.
New essay on Beyond Babylon: "After the Violin - On Jewish klezmer, and the Roma hand that tuned it."

https://open.substack.com/pub/beyondbabylon/p/after-the-violin?r=32dxtv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

On Jewish klezmer, and the Roma hand that tuned it

06/07/2026

When Yehudi Menuhin's rare violin broke just before a concert in Calcutta, he thought all was lost.

Fortunately, he had arrived in a city where repairing broken things was simply what people did - not to preserve them behind glass, but to keep them in use.

The workshop that fixed his violin that day is still open. The certificate he left behind is still hanging on the wall, seventy years later - not framed as a relic, just part of the shop's own account of itself.

This turned out to be a story less about Menuhin than about Calcutta itself - a city that has always measured worth by what's still working, not what's been kept safe.

New on Beyond Babylon: "The Day Yehudi Menuhin's Violin Broke in Calcutta. Remembering by repairing."

https://beyondbabylon.substack.com/p/the-day-yehudi-menuhins-violin-broke?r=32dxtv

How a culture of repair became a way of preserving a city's identity