How One Cook in Switzerland Is Preserving the Flavors of India’s Baghdadi Jews

Last week, Elli Benaiah shared his family’s Shabbat dinner recipes with us. To see those recipes and learn more about the origins of the Baghdadi Jewish community, check out this story. 

In the 18th and 19th centuries, thousands of Jewish families from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria migrated to India. Working with the British, they established ports of trade in Bombay (now Mumbai) and Kolkata, and business in Pune. As cooks from the community migrated with their families, they brought Middle Eastern culinary traditions with them along with Jewish customs. Here, Indian-Bagdadi Jews or the Baghdadi Jewish of India, as they are known, created a unique community and cuisine, unlike the one they left in the Middle East and unlike the one they settled into in India. 

Elli Benaiah, a lawyer and caterer who lives in Basel, Switzerland is a descendant of this community and determined to preserve its unique culinary traditions. Using ingredients available in local markets, he explains, Indian-Baghdadi cooks created a new cuisine. “They incorporated Indian spices into Iraqi cuisine and that created a unique Jewish Indian kitchen that is very different from what Indians know,” Elli explains. “A lot of the food was created for Jewish festivals [and] for Friday nights.”  

In his childhood home in Israel and his grandmother’s home in England, the Friday night menu was always the same. Elli likens the tradition to returning to a beloved restaurant and ordering the #72 each time. “It was always the same and it was always good and we always looked forward to Friday nights,” he adds. 

There was chicken with bamboo and coconut, potatoes fried with turmeric called aloo makala, stuffed tomatoes and onions, and rice pilau made fragrant with cardamom and cinnamon and turned golden with turmeric. With leftovers on some Saturdays, the potatoes were repurposed to make an elaborate Shabbat salad. Added to the mix were chicken, hard boiled eggs, green onions, chili, and cilantro, served with halba, a sauce made with fenugreek, ginger, and cilantro. Today, this dish is reserved for special occasions in Elli’s family. 

Elli has kept other recipes from his community alive through his catering company Numnum Dellicious, which will soon take over the culinary operations of a kosher restaurant in Basel that will offer his food for take-away. On his menu there will be kachori or fried dumplings filled with peas flavored with garam masala, fennel seeds, and chili that were served in the Baghdadi Jewish community for special gatherings. 

Elli also hopes to prepare them along with other small bites for an interfaith gathering of Muslims, Jews, and Christians, to honor the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther later this year. He says, “That way I can keep the memory of these foods by broadcasting it internationally.”