In retired ambassador Jeremy Issacharoff’s family, there’s a tradition of the men tending to and maintaining some of the most treasured recipes. His late father Avraham, who went by Abrasha, was known for his Bukharian pilaf called osh pilau, a signature chopped salad dressed with pickle brine, and osavo (also spelled oshsavo), a rich dish of tender hunks of beef, rice, and prunes that cooks overnight on Shabbat until the house is fragrant with it. “My father loved cooking, and he was a marvelous chef. I always say: ‘He had golden hands,’” Jeremy shares. 

Born in 1955, Jeremy was raised in London and didn’t learn to make his father’s recipes until he was a young adult living on his own in Israel. On Shabbat, “I was dying for some home cooking. And the only way I'd ever have home cooking at that point, was to do it myself,” he says. He drew on his memory, asked his father and mother — who was a talented Sephardi cook — for guidance and started making the family recipes. 

“In the beginning [my father] wouldn't tell me all of his secrets. But in the end, I finally gathered all of them — I hope,” Jeremy says. 

Many of the recipes on Avraham’s side of the family have roots in Central Asia where two brothers settled in the early 1770s after leaving Aleppo, Syria. They established themselves along the Silk Road in Samarkand, setting up a fruitful textile mill and becoming members of the Bukharian community. Around the turn of the 20th century, the family moved to Jerusalem, opening an orphanage, and a synagogue that is still standing. And in the late 1940s, part of the family moved to London. 

Despite a long journey over generations, the family recipes remained. Jeremy took them on the road as he served in posts in New York, Washington D.C., and Berlin, making them for friends. And he’s proud that his children know the scent of the osavo as one of home. “It gave me a sense of passing on something important,” Jeremy says. “It’s something that really cements the family.” His son Dean remembers the dish wafting through the house in Jerusalem on Shabbat and shares that, “My contribution to the culinary tradition is splitting the eggs open and taking the yolk out and then putting a spoon of salad inside the egg.” 

Today, Dean lives in New York with his fiance, JFS culinary manager Talya Avisar who prepared the dish in their home for the first time this winter. Thinking of his ancestors hundreds of years ago, he says: “We speak different languages, have different outlooks on life, and live in completely different worlds. But, somehow, some things manage to cross time and place. Food is such a tangible example of that heritage.” It’s one he is proud to be part of and to share with his bride to be.