The Jewish Curry Culture Club

The Jewish Curry Culture Club Join me in preserving stories, recipes & heritage. 📖🍛 Author of Beyond Babylon, tracing Sephardi & Indian Jewish cuisine.

Food, history & the Jewish diaspora—one bite at a time. 🍽️✨ Exploring the rich flavors of Beyond Babylon, where Sephardi, Indian & Middle Eastern traditions meet. Criminal lawyer turned restaurateur, then food historian. 🍽️✨ Exploring the Jewish diaspora through food, history & culture. Former chef, passionate storyteller, and lifelong explorer of flavors & traditions.

In Doʿan, in Hadhramaut, they serve spiced rice with camel meat and chilli sauce. When Singaporean researcher Cheryl-Ann...
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

There's a memorial in Berlin's Tiergarten for the Sinti and Roma murdered under National Socialism - a circular pool of ...
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

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

The world's most Jewish dish — the Sabbath stew that Jews have made from Baghdad to Budapest for three thousand years — ...
03/07/2026

The world's most Jewish dish — the Sabbath stew that Jews have made from Baghdad to Budapest for three thousand years — is now available in a Hungarian supermarket with pork sausage in it. Free delivery.
This essay is about how that happened.
It is also about the Spanish Inquisition, a kosher restaurant in Basel, a cantor who came downstairs every Friday to taste my broth, and the moment he nodded without saying anything, which is how I knew I had finally got it right.
And it is about what happened to the Hungarian Jews who gave Hungary this dish. Because the integration that put sólet under vegetables in a Hungarian cookbook did not protect the people who invented it. In 1944, Hungarian police — not German soldiers, Hungarian police — put 440,000 of them on trains to Auschwitz in under two months.
The sólet remained on the menu. The people who invented it did not.
Recipe included. I added vermouth. The cantor would probably have approved.

How the world's most Jewish dish became Hungarian pork stew

My family living room in 1966. Despite developing an early eye for design, at six years old I had no idea what was actua...
30/06/2026

My family living room in 1966.
Despite developing an early eye for design, at six years old I had no idea what was actually in it. But I remember the look of the furniture. And the wood.
That teak sideboard was built from the same forests that built the Royal Navy's finest warships. The wood that helped Britain fight a war in Burma - three thousand elephants, a king deposed, a kingdom annexed - ended up holding drinks glasses in suburban living rooms across Europe.
Nobody connected it. Nobody was supposed to.
This is the story of how an empire's military timber became Danish Modern furniture, and why almost nobody who owned a piece of it ever asked where it came from.

The Wood That Built Worlds

In the sweltering summer of 1833, a Boston merchant named Frederic Tudor shipped 180 tons of ice from New England to Cal...
24/06/2026

In the sweltering summer of 1833, a Boston merchant named Frederic Tudor shipped 180 tons of ice from New England to Calcutta. Everyone thought it was a joke.
In colonial Bombay, Tudor's ice became the most expensive membership card in the city. Serve it at your table and you belonged. Don't, and you didn't.
A Parsi merchant served ice cream at a dinner party and caught cold for his ambition. Eight years later Queen Victoria made him a baronet.
A Baghdadi Jewish family arrived in Bombay one year before the ice. By 1875 they owned the dock it arrived on. Their name was Sassoon.
And somewhere between Boston and Bombay, a Persian drink that needed no ice at all was already waiting - older than the empire, cooler than Tudor.
India's Ice Age is live on Beyond Babylon. The story of what it cost to belong to the ice cube club. With a recipe for Persian Rose and Pomegranate Sharbat. Served chilled.

The Story of an American Ice Cube in India

In the 17th century, a man hid seven coffee beans in his beard and walked out of Yemen.His name was Baba Budan. He was a...
22/06/2026

In the 17th century, a man hid seven coffee beans in his beard and walked out of Yemen.
His name was Baba Budan. He was a Sufi saint from southern India, returning from pilgrimage. The beans were Yemeni. Smuggling them was illegal. Seven, because seven is a sacred number in Islam.
He planted them in the hills of Chikmagalur. Those hills are now called Bababudangiri. Some of Karnataka's finest coffee grows there still.
But before the beans left Yemen, they passed through a city. Al-Mukha - Mocha - on the Red Sea coast, which for nearly three centuries controlled the world's entire coffee supply. Every bean bound for Ottoman coffeehouses, Amsterdam merchants, and London traders passed through its harbour first.
The Dutch broke the monopoly. In 1721, ninety percent of Amsterdam's coffee came through Mocha. By 1726, ninety percent came from Java. The city was rendered redundant in five years.
The port fell silent. The word survived.
My new essay follows that journey - from the Yemeni port, through Gujarati merchants who ran its financial system, to a grandmother's kitchen in Aden where the meaning was kept alive long after the city was left behind.
The plant never left. The port did.

The Yemenite city that caffeinated the world

Here's something that will change how you think about biryani.Everyone calls zurbian "Yemeni biryani." But biryani build...
17/06/2026

Here's something that will change how you think about biryani.
Everyone calls zurbian "Yemeni biryani." But biryani builds flavour through marinade — meat sits in spiced yoghurt before anything touches heat. Zurbian does the opposite: sear the meat first, braise it in broth for hours, then cook the rice in that broth. Same architecture. Completely different soul.

And zurbian has potatoes. Hyderabadi biryani does not. Nobody in the Nizam's kitchen would have put them there. Aden did.
Aden wasn't simply Yemen.

It was a British-Indian port city administered through Bombay - where Indian soldiers, Hadhrami merchants, and Yemenite Jews of ancient provenance cooked in each other's proximity until the absorption became culture. Zurbian is what that looked like on a plate.
And then a kosher restaurant made it with fish. Which turns out to be the only version that can use the original yoghurt. The fish version isn't a workaround. It's the most complete version of the dish.
New essay and recipe on Beyond Babylon.
https://open.substack.com/pub/beyondbabylon/p/at-the-diwan?r=32dxtv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

From Hyderabad to Aden: How a Yemeni festive dish learned to think in biryani

Most condiments know their place - on the side, optional, take it or leave it.Hilbeh, Yemen's whipped fenugreek foam, do...
15/06/2026

Most condiments know their place - on the side, optional, take it or leave it.
Hilbeh, Yemen's whipped fenugreek foam, doesn't. In saltah, Yemen's national dish, it gets poured cold and raw onto a screaming-hot stew and fuses into it in seconds — the side dish becomes the dish.
But that's only half the story. Jewish migration carried hilbeh in another direction entirely - into Cochin, then Calcutta, where it survived for generations as a quieter, Friday-night chutney called olba, or hulba.
New essay on Beyond Babylon, with the full saltah recipe (printable PDF included).


A condiment is supposed to stay on the side.

In 1893, a Jewish surveyor built a synagogue in Karachi. Its signboard spoke three languages, and in the language of the...
12/06/2026

In 1893, a Jewish surveyor built a synagogue in Karachi. Its signboard spoke three languages, and in the language of the street it called itself a mosque - the mosque of the Children of Israel. For ninety-five years it held weddings, a Hebrew school, Bar Mitzvahs. Then two borders, drawn by other people, ended the community - and in 1988, after its last custodian won her case in court, the building was demolished anyway. For a shopping mall.
But a Muslim family still guards the graves, three generations on, because "they were People of the Book." And the kitchen got out: the community's recipes are alive in Israel and New Jersey tonight. I wrote the whole story, with both recipes. Link in comments.

Karachi, 1893–1988. It's a shopping mall now.

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