For many years, my preferred mode of communication - whether of joy or of sadness - has been through song. Ladino songs, specifically. But like so many during the start of the pandemic, I found myself in my kitchen working through my emotions. While many of my friends were making sourdough starters, I was making the recipes from worn-out cards passed down to me by my family from Monastir. From tadlikoos to masedekoos, making these dishes of my heritage filled me with a sense of comfort and connection in an otherwise disconnected time. And while I was cooking, I started singing.
I discovered that there was a rich treasure trove of Ladino songs about food! If I was making a boreka, I found a song for one. A grape leaf? There was a song for that, too! By the end of two years, I had an entire repertoire of fascinating songs about beloved Sephardic foods. Fascinating because each one gave a glimpse of life from Ottoman times, and through a primarily female lens at that. One song, Una Muchacha en Selanika, for example, tells the story of a girl who was exiled from her community because she could not properly prepare a grape leaf. What pressure! But also, what a historical goldmine these songs could offer. My mind was already in high gear about how I wanted to turn these songs into an album. But recording the music could only tell half the story.
Several years earlier, I had met chef Susan Barocas at a Shabbat dinner party, and we quickly bonded over the fact that we each had roots from Monastir. When the food album idea came to me, which I already knew I would name Savor (taste, or flavor, in Ladino), I immediately thought of Susan. I called her up with my crazy idea, and soon after, Savor: A Sephardic Music and Food Experience was born.
Sarah Aroeste
For as long as I can remember, I have been cooking, always finding the kitchen to be a comfortable, creative place. I grew up in Denver with almost no extended family around, but I was lucky because my Sephardic father was a terrific cook and not just at the barbeque like so many other fathers at that time. His mother was from Monastir and his father from Corlu, a small city southwest of Istanbul where many Barocases lived, both coming to the US in the early 20th century. From my father, I learned to cook Sephardic dishes like prasa, yaprakas, lentil soup, his version of fasulya which was a chickpea and green bean soup, arroz kon tomat and other dishes. And in our house, there was always feta cheese and kalamata olives in the refrigerator.
Fast forward to my thirties when I moved to New York and started exploring my Sephardic heritage in new ways, especially connecting to the food and its relationship to history and culture. These connections deepened over the years, encouraged also during the years I was one of the people running the public relations campaign for the Quincentennial Foundation of Istanbul and traveling several times to Turkey. Then, about a decade ago, I decided to change my professional focus to a culinary career of writing, teaching and cooking with a special focus on Sephardic cuisine, culture and history.
By the time Sarah called me in January 2022, presenting this exciting new idea called Savor, I had spent the previous two years of the pandemic going deeper into exploring Sephardic food and teaching many Zoom classes about stuffed vegetables, burekas, tishpishti and more!
Susan Barocas
We have created Savor to explore and celebrate Sephardic culture and history through the intersection of music and food. We gathered a group of women chefs from around the world who all work to promote and preserve Sephardic food, and they contributed recipes and cooking videos, each in conversation with one of the songs on Sarah’s latest album, also titled Savor. Food and music are at the heart of Sephardic culture and of the multi-sensory program experiences we want to create with our project. Savor is a conversation and a continuation of Sephardic food and music and of centuries of Sephardic culture and our lives today and tomorrow.
Kome i sinti kon gana!
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