Gomez Mill House: Jewish Cooking

New Foods for Old Taste Buds: The First Jewish Immigrants Arrive in America

Not too long ago, while on a family vacation, I visited Mill House, the earliest known standing Jewish residence in the United States. This flintstone block house, built around 1720, is adjacent to Route 9W, about twelve miles north of Newburgh, New York, in the Hudson Highlands. The house, part of a trading station, was built by Luis Moses Gomez, the first of a distinguished Sephardic family to emigrate from Spain to America. Outside, near what became known as Jew’s Creek, Mr. Gomez, known in Ulster County as “Gomez the Jew,” traded furs with the Indians.

Inside are two open-hearth fireplaces, which kept Gomez, his assistants, and visiting Indians warm in winter and, more important for my quest, were used for cooking. One of the fireplaces includes a Dutch oven for baking, possibly used to warm the Sabbath stew or chamim — in those days a simple mixture of beans, onions, and beef. After simmering for several hours in an iron pot, which hung over the open fire on an iron chain with a hook or sometimes rested on three long legs within the fire itself, the stew would be kept warm in the dying embers of the closed oven until the Sabbath lunch. This oven may also have been used to bake bread. The flour was ground in the mill just down the hill along Jew’s Creek, where Mr. Gomez fished for his trout. Ceramic crocks in the kitchen were probably used for the pickling of tongues and beef that were eaten by the early Jewish settlers.

No doubt Mr. Gomez, like many of his Sephardic brethren, slaughtered his own beef, lamb, and chickens, since it was impossible to hire a schochet in this remote area.

I had already seen the Gomez Bible, a leather-bound tome with the dates of births and deaths of Gomez ancestors recorded in Portuguese, Spanish, and English. This Bible dates from Spain in the sixteenth century when the family became Marranos (secret Jews). It mentions Gomez as well as his granddaughter’s husband, Uriah Hendricks, who came to the Colonies in 1755 A Dutch-born Jew, who emigrated from England, he bartered goods against American raw products, primarily West India sugar. Very observant and devout, he looked contemptuously on anyone who desecrated the Sabbath and ate forbidden food. He became president in 1788 of Shearith Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in New York, which had supervised kosher slaughtering in the city of New York since I752.

Ruth Hendricks-Schulson, an active member of Shearith Israel today, and a great-great-great-granddaughter of Uriah Hendricks, is the custodian of this Bible as well as the family recipes, which she shared with me. For me Jewish and American history blended at that moment. I knew that this kitchen, along with Mrs. Schulson’s recipes, would provide clues to the early Jewish culinary past in the United States.

The story of Jewish food in America begins, however, sixty years earlier, when twenty-three Sephardic Jews arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654. As a result of the expulsion the Iberian peninsula in I492, Sephardic Jews had fled to Greece, the Middle East, the Netherlands, and the Americas. This particular New Amsterdam band first sought haven from the Spanish Inquisition in Recife, Brazil.

Under the Dutch, about one thousand Jews prospered in Recife, calling it the “New Jerusalem.” Although the majority were petit shopkeepers, some were involved in sugar mills and sugar plantations. But when the Portuguese took over again, bringing with them Inquisition, the Jews faced the choice of either going back to Amsterdam or to parts of the Dutch West Indies, such as Suriname and Jamaica, where some of their kinsmen had fled. Instead, this time they sought refuge in Dutch New Amsterdam. Their relocation took place during the time when the discoveries of exotic and unfamiliar foods in the Americas and the production of sugar changed forever the cuisines of the Old and New Worlds. The triangular trade route, established to satisfy the world’s craving for sugar, involved ships that picked up slaves in Africa and brought them to the West Indies and the Americas to work the sugar plantations. From there sugar, molasses, rum, vanilla, and foods such as white and sweet potatoes, turkeys, chocolate, peppers, corn, tomatoes, and kidney and string beans, which had all been discovered in the Americas with the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Hernando Cortes, made their way to Europe. Later, these foods returned to the Americas with immigrants bringing new ways of using them.

For centuries Jews and Muslim Arabs had been sending almonds, olive oil, dates, chick-peas, fava beans, grapes, pomegranates, lentils, and other Mediterranean goods from the Middle East to the Iberian Peninsula. It was the Jews who introduced their ways of preparing these foods to the New World. As a result, some dishes like escabeche (pickled fish) and almond desserts, prepared by Jews and Arabs alike, became known in England and the New World as Jewish foods.

The business of food continued when Jews came to the Americas. On the boat in I654 there were several butchers, including one Asser Levy.

For the most part, Jews during the Colonial period cooked and ate like everyone else. They learned to use corn, beans, and the abundant halibut, cod, shad, herring, and salmon. Their diet was seasonal: fresh food in the summer, dried and preserved fruits and vegetables in the winter, pickled vegetables in the late summer and fall, and dandelion greens and even meats and fish dressed with a vinegar sauce in the spring — a popular pickling practice frequently used in the days before refrigeration.

But unlike other colonists, most Jews observed the laws of kashrut in their homes. Some of their dishes, like cod or haddock fried “Jewish style” (in olive oil, not lard), soon became popular among non-Jews.

Before Jewish communities were well organized, most Jewish men learned how to slaughter meat according to the dietary laws. If they did not, they went without meat. Mordecai Sheftall of Georgia, for example, one of the most famous American Jews during the Revolution, received a letter from a Christian friend, John Wereat, on December 2, 1788. “Don’t forget to bring your sharp knife with you,” he wrote. “And then you shall not fast here unless it’s your own fault, as I am putting up some sheep to fatten.”

As opportunities arose, some of these kosher butchers, who lived on the Atlantic seacoast, expanded their businesses and became merchants. They included kosher meat as a commodity to sell on their voyages. Before the days of refrigeration, the kosher way of preserving beef by carefully selecting the animal, slaughtering it, washing the meat in cold water, then salting it, ensured safer meat for transport.

Probably the most famous of these merchants during the Revolutionary period was Aaron Lopez, Newport’s largest taxpayer. Mr. Lopez came in 1752 from Portugal, where his family had been New Christians and secret Jews for two generations before returning to Judaism. Having made his initial fortune in whale oil and the spermaceti candle industries, he was one of the few American Jews active in the slave trade. A distiller of rum and manufacturer of clothing, barrels, ships, and foods, he built an extensive transatlantic mercantile empire. From the West Indies he brought commodities like sugar, molasses, cocoa, coffee, pimento, ginger, nutmeg, allspice, pepper, and cloves to satisfy the tastes of the colonists.

When the British took Newport, Mr. Lopez, a rebel sympathizer, fled the city, but on his return, in 1782 after the Revolution, drowned in quicksand. His now-tattered leather-bound ledger books contain accounts showing items sold in his shop and other goods included in cargoes sent to Suriname and Jamaica. Kosher articles in the ledgers were marked with a “cashier” (kosher) stamp for “Jew beef” (salted beet), meat tongues, rendered fat, smoked beef, “chorissa” (smoked beef sausages), as well as cheese, all packed in barrels. Chorissa is defined in The Jewish Manual, the first Jewish cookbook in English, published in London in I846, as “that most refined and savoury of all sausages.” It may have been the chorissa sausages that the Portuguese still talk about as the smoked beef, not pork sausage, of northern Portugal drying in the chimneys of New Christian homes. To this day, in Portugal, a pork-loving land, there are small towns that specialize in beef, rather than pork, sausage.

Aaron Lopez had a ready market in the Jewish community of Newport, the Colonial Jewish settlement second only to New York. Clearly his relationship to the Jewish community was more than mere business. In a letter dated 1779, he wrote, “The Jews in particular were suffering due to a scarcity of kosher food. They had not tasted any meat, but once in two months. Fish was not to be had, and they were forced to subsist on chocolate and coffee.” Of the two thousand or so Jews living in the Colonies during the Revolutionary period, there were many Ashkenazim, perhaps more even than Sephardic. Even so, it was the Sephardic Jews in Newport, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Savannah who set the tone of Judaism in this country, both in the synagogues and in the kitchens.

Because many of their dishes were holiday foods, bound for centuries to tradition, they were the last to go during cultural and culinary assimilation in this country. Allspice or hot pepper might have been added to a fish or meat stew during their sojourn in Brazil or a stopover in the West Indies, but the basic recipes of stewed and fish fried in olive oil, beef and bean stews, almond puddings, and egg custards come directly from the Iberian peninsula and represent the most authentic Sephardic foods we know in this country. Jewish Cookery by Esther Levy, the first kosher cookbook in America, which appeared in Philadelphia in 1871, included many of these old recipes.

At the same time that Sephardic Jews were setting the tone on the East Coast, there in the Southwest the descendants of crypto or hidden Jews who had fled the Inquisition. They had come from Mexico even before the New Amsterdam group, in the sixteenth century. Anthropologists are now discovering that crypto Jews retained many of their three-centuries-old cultural and culinary traditions, which they continued to practice in secret. Many of them have no idea of the origin of their customs.

Some still light candles on Friday night while attending Catholic churches on Sunday. Some salt meats, others eschew pork, using beef for tamales and albondigas (meatballs). Even their empanaditas (an empanada is often stuffed with pork in Spain today) are filled chopped beef and with ground tongue. At Passover some secret family customs include eating crackers that they call “pan de semite.” While it is important to keep this group in mind when studying the foods of the early Sephardic Jews, I have used instead the recipes that I have found on the East Coast, since many of the foods were the same and the evidence about the crypto Jews of New Mexico is still very tentative.