"It was only after he moved a world away, and began to view it with the eyes of the scholar he had become, that he appreciated the history of those Eastern European recipes, handed down and rewritten over the decades. The grandchild of Eastern European, Yiddish-speaking Jews who arrived in Mexico in the early 20th century, Stavans himself became an immigrant, moving to New York City in 1985."
"When his mother died, Stavans received a precious memento in the form of a handwritten recipe book she'd inherited from his great-great-grandmother. Each generation had annotated the book. "So there are five generations of women that have written on that document in different languages," he said. "And then the beautiful thing is that they cross out something of the previous woman [and add their own notes]. ... So they dialogue with each other.""
""That's when I myself started looking at many of the aspects of my education - including the food that I had been eating - under a new lens and started cooking for the first time with ingredients from the United States," he said during a video call from Amherst, Mass., where he is a professor of humanities and Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College."
Ilan Stavans grew up in Mexico City and initially did not appreciate his family's Eastern European Jewish food. After moving to New York in 1985 and encountering U.S. ingredients, he re-evaluated and began cooking with new ingredients. He received a handwritten recipe collection from his great-great-grandmother that had been annotated by five generations, with family members crossing out and adding notes. That multigenerational dialogue and similar communal recipe caches from other immigrant families show how Jewish-Mexican cuisine blends Eastern European roots with local influences across the diaspora. Contributions came from Mexicans and emigrants in Spain, Argentina and Israel, reflecting transnational culinary exchange.
Read at Boston Herald
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