A Drizzle of Honey

New in paperback! When Iberian Jews were converted to Catholicism under duress during the Inquisition, many struggled to retain their Jewish identity in private while projecting Christian conformity in the public sphere. To root out these heretics, the courts of the Inquisition published checklists of koshering practices and grilled the servants, neighbors and even the children of those suspected of practicing their religion at home. From these testimonies and other primary sources, Gitlitz and Davidson have drawn a fascinating picture of this precarious sense of Jewish identity and have re-created these recipes, which combine Christian and Islamic traditions in cooking meats, fish and varied vegetables and use seasonings such as saffron, ginger and cinnamon. The recipes and the accompanying stories of the people who created them, promise to delight the adventurous palate and give insights into the foundations of modern Sephardic cuisine.