The Jewish Curry Culture Club

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.

05/06/2026

This week, Dianne Jacob left a comment on my essay about Nahoum's Bakery in Calcutta.
Dianne is a James Beard Award-winning food writer and collaborator on Beyond Babylon. Her family is Iraqi Jewish - her parents emigrated from Baghdad to China, where she grew up. She wrote:
Oh, the Iraqi brined white cheese of my childhood. My father made it. My mother put it in sambusak, and we always ate it with kha'ak.
She asked for the recipe for Iraqi plaited cheese - mshallaleh. I sent it.
And as I did, something clicked. The cheese she was describing - stretched, braided, brined, the dairy of the Tigris and Euphrates - led directly back to the butter and milk Abraham served his visitors under the oaks of Mamre four thousand years ago.
That connection became an essay. About Abraham's birthplace, Mesopotamian dairy culture, a pastry that crossed the Indian Ocean with its shape intact, and the food that travels further than faith.
With two recipes - Iraqi plaited cheese and the original Baghdad sambusak.
New on Beyond Babylon: What Abraham Carried. Link in comments.

The Birthplace of Abraham, Plaited Cheese, Sambousak, and the Cord of Diaspora

29/05/2026

I've been working on this essay for a while and I'm genuinely proud of it.
Cardamom is not one spice. It's two - botanically distinct, culinarily opposite, belonging to entirely different culinary civilizations. And hidden inside a single Jewish cookbook from nineteenth-century Aden are two recipes that contain what may be the most precise evidence of cultural contact in the entire culinary record of the Indian Ocean world.
This is the kind of food history I set out to write when I began Beyond Babylon: the argument that what a cook reaches for without thinking is often what a merchant carried for centuries. That the spice grammar of a migratory kitchen outlasts language, religion, and empire.
Written in collaboration with Delhi-based biochemist and food historian Khaja Zafarrullah, of Hyderabadi ancestry, who brought the subcontinent's spice logic to this project from the inside.
The recipes - six dishes, four civilizations, two cardamoms - are coming in the next essay.
Read it here:

The Spice the Indian Ocean Made

24/05/2026

My father loved soda water, and he loved his Sipholux. And he apparently loved me - because when he passed away, he left it to me.
I didn't know, at the time, that a battered glass bottle could contain two thousand years of history: Roman thermal springs, a Leeds brewery, the Jewish tenements of the Lower East Side, and a Viennese siphon trade the Holocaust quietly killed.
This is Part One of a two-part essay on carbonation, migration, and memory. I'd love to know if it resonates.

On seltzer, spa towns, and the intergenerational passing of the effervescence

17/05/2026

🧑‍🍳⚖️ When I shed my legal robes to run a kitchen in Basel, I thought I understood the game.I hired a premier Swiss ad agency, painted giant bagel wheels onto my delivery van, and spent a small fortune building “Nomnom Bagels” into a sleek, Westernized food brand for the pristine streets of Switzerland.

The universe laughed.🏎️🥯

The polished New York bagel - the global pop-culture superstar- completely failed to find its footing.

The runaway hit was the far humbler, oval Jerusalem bagel.

Looking back, I realize Ka’ak al-Quds was never just another bakery product competing with Swiss bread culture.

It belonged to a completely different world: markets, train stations, sesame, movement, open air, torn paper bags, and olive oil dripping onto hands.

🇨🇭✨ And somehow, Basel already understood that language instinctively.

👉 It turns out both the bread and the baker were on the exact same journey of migration, failure, and survival.Read the full story of bread, branding, and adaptation across empires and ovens:

How an Ottoman Street Bread Crossed the Rhine

13/05/2026

Most food writing treats migration as a polite 'fusion' experiment. It isn’t.

It’s an engineering overhaul.

My latest essay for Beyond Babylon is an outing of Saloona - the Baghdadi fish dish that refitted its engine for the Indian monsoon and traded its Mesopotamian sweet-sour sharpness for the curry leaf.

This isn't a decorative flourish; it’s an inheritance.

It’s the moment a classic Iraqi structure stops looking back at a ghost and begins speaking with a permanent Indian accent.

The essay traces a 200-year timeline across three generations of recipes: from Claudia Roden’s classic Iraqi baseline and Mavis Hyman’s Calcutta kitchens, to a brilliant modern rendition by Sandra of Sannie's Kitchen, which captures the migration routes of her Tehran-Iraqi family perfectly.If you want the pale yellow of nostalgia, look elsewhere. If you want to look at the kitchen as a raw historical archive of survival, read the piece. Let’s get to work discovering roots.

🔗 https://open.substack.com/pub/beyondbabylon/p/saloona?r=32dxtv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Special thanks to Sandra over at Sannie's Kitchen (Instagram: ) for the culinary inspiration and preserving this vital diaspora timeline.

The ancient fish recipe that left Baghdad and acquired an Indian accent.

10/05/2026

Turmeric does not travel alone.

It travels through rivers, kitchens, trade routes, memory, and repetition.

My new essay, The Golden Reflex, traces how turmeric transformed the Jewish Baghdadi kitchen after the community settled in India. What began as a spice at the edge of the Mesopotamian kitchen eventually became the colour of Shabbat itself in Calcutta and Bombay.

From ancient trade between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley to aloo makalla, amba, Kerala turmeric leaves, and modern Iraqi masgouf, this piece follows the long journey of a single spice across the Indian Ocean world.

Somewhere between the Tigris and the Hooghly, the Baghdadi kitchen learned to cook in yellow.

One spice, two rivers, and four thousand years of habit. Why food without turmeric feels "unawakened" to the Baghdadi Jewish diaspora.

08/05/2026

What happens when a borrowed food becomes a tradition?

Kahi began as a street pastry of Baghdad - flaky, buttery, eaten at dawn with qei’mar, syrup, or date molasses by Muslims, Jews, and Christians alike.

But in the Jewish Baghdadi world, it took on another life.

By the time the community moved through India and into places like Singapore and Calcutta, kahi had become tied to Shavuot so deeply that some families even called the festival Eid el-Kahi — the festival of kahi.

This is the story that fascinates me most:
not simply where a dish comes from,
but how a community adopts it, reshapes it, and carries it across oceans until the food itself becomes memory.

In the new essay, I explore kahi not just as a pastry, but as part of a larger system of migration, dairy traditions, marsh ecology, trade routes, and diasporic adaptation.

Sometimes the most revealing histories are hidden inside breakfast.

🔗 https://open.substack.com/pub/beyondbabylon/p/what-is-kahi?r=32dxtv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true