Hélène Jawhara Piñer

Hélène Jawhara Piñeris a French-Spanish historian, educator, and chef. She is the author of a cookbook onSephardic cuisineand a study of medieval Jewish food culture in Spain and France.She has published articles and recipes in English, French, and Spanish in magazines and academic journals, and has lectured in cooking programs on the Sephardic culinary heritage among diasporic communities in Europe and in North and South America.She specializes in the recreation of historical recipes, such ashojuelas, a fried pastry that originated in sixteenth-century Spain which Jews in Argentina make forPurim;mufleta, a pastry made byMoroccan Jewsfor the holiday ofMimouna, which marks the end ofPassover; andalmodrote, a northern Spanish recipe for eggplant dip which closely resembles recipes for mashedeggplantincluded in two thirteenth-century Arabic cookbooks fromAndalusia.In 2021, she presented a twelve-episode online cooking show on Sephardic culinary history for theAmerican Sephardi Federation.
Helene Jawhara Piñer earned her PhD in Medieval History and the History of Food from theUniversity of Tours in France, in 2019.
Piñer teaches at theUniversity of Bordeaux-Montaigneand the University of Tours. She has lectured at institutions such as theJewish Theological Seminary(New York),Carnegie Mellon University,theUniversity of Pennsylvania,theHebrew University of Jerusalem,Bar-Ilan University, andYale University. She is a member of French research groups including theInstitute of European History and Cultures of Food(IEHCA), Centre for Advanced Studies of the Renaissance (CESR), and Cooking Recipes of the Middle Ages Project (CoReMa).
Piñer has collaborated with chefs and cookbook authors includingMichael Solomonovof thePhiladelphiaIsraeli restaurantZahav, with whom she has re-created historic Sephardic foods and menus.
In 2021, Piñer published her first cookbook,Sephardi: Cooking the History. Recipes of the Jews of Spain and the Diaspora, from the 13th Century to Today, in 2021.The book features recipes that highlight the culinary history and culture of the SephardicJewish diaspora. Many recipes come from anAndalusian Arabiccookbook of unknown authorship, calledKitab al-Tabikh("The Book of Cooking"). Others come from contemporaryArabicandCatalansources; still other recipes are her contemporary adaptations of historic recipes, using ingredients common in countries where Sephardic Jews settled, such asBrazil(with regard to manioc andtapioca flour) andMorocco. She suggests in the introduction that "to eat is to remember," and explains how recreating Sephardic meals commemorates Sephardic history. The recipes inSephardicome fromSpain,North Africa(especiallyMorocco), the lands of the formerOttoman Empire(especiallyGreece,Turkey, and the southernBalkans), and theAmericas(especiallyBrazilandMexico). Among the recipes is one forpeot, a braided, leavened dough, scented with saffron and featured in a thirteenth-centuryArabicrecipe from Spain, which she suggests may have been a precursor to thechallah breadnow associated withAshkenazi Jews– except thatpeotwas fried rather than baked.This book won the 2021 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards Prize for Best Jewish Cuisine Book.
Piñer published a monograph,Jews, Food, and Spain, in 2022.In the book, she discusses the role of food in the culture of Jews andconversosin theIberian Peninsula. Using cookbooks and Inquisition tribunal records as her primary sources, she analyzes recipes and food customs against the literary, medical, judicial, and religious history of Sephardic Jews in Spain during the pre-1492 era of Islamic rule, and later, in the sixteenth century, after  theReconquista. Piñer argues that food offers insights into what she calls "culinary ideology," and contends that Christian leaders in post-Reconquista Spain used claims about food practices to assert Christian supremacy and to suppress and persecuteconversos, or Christian converts suspected of practicing Judaism in secret.She considers what made certain dishes "Jewish" in the eyes of Sephardic Jews themselves (for example, through adherence to kashrut, or kosher practices), and later, in the eyes of informants who reported people as "secret Jews" to Inquisitors. She concludes that these legacies of post-Reconquista culinary ideologies persist in the culinary culture of present-day Spain.
In 2024, Piñer published her second cookbook, entitledMatza and Flour: Recipes from the History of the Sephardic Jews,which draws on historical records such as Inquisition tribunal records.  This book reconstructs historic recipes fromSpain,Portugal,Mexico,Brazil,Morocco,Italy, andGreece, which use flours made fromwheat,maize,chickpeas,barley, andriceand which include dishes such asmatzah,tortillas, andempanadas. The recipes follow particular holidays such as RoshHashanah,Sukkot, andPassover.