Hanukkah Holiday Foods Tell A Story About Early Latinos

*According to the articl, Sofrito, so common in Latino Caribbean cuisine, was used by Sephardic Jews in their slow-cooking techniques. VL

By Arturo Conde, NBC News

NEW YORK, NY — Jewish families coming together to celebrate Hanukkah will be surprised to find out that hidden inside their rich holiday meals—short ribs in red wine sauce, braised brisket with mushrooms, crispy potato latkes (pancakes) with apple sauce or sour cream, and deep-fried sufganiyot (doughnuts) filled with jelly—is a story about early Latinos.

Sephardic Jews and Moors (Spanish Muslims) were expelled from Spain in 1492, but their heritage is embedded in the DNA of Spanish foods today. And this cultural connection would bring the descendants of those Jewish families in New York together with other Latino immigrants like Puerto Rican newspaper publisher Bernardo Vega in 1916.

“Many of the Jews who lived there [Harlem] in those days were recent immigrants, which made the whole area seem like a Tower of Babel. There were Sephardic Jews who spoke ancient Spanish or Portuguese,” Vega wrote in his memoir, referring to Jews who spoke Ladino—a fusion of Spanish, Hebrew, Aramaic and other languages. In the Harlem Jewish restaurant “La Luz” (The Light), the publisher described how both the food and the atmosphere had the “appearance of a café in Spain or Portugal.”

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