What Is Jewish Southern Food?

During Yahoo Y’All week, we’re celebrating the food culture of the American South. Expect profiles of cooks, makers, and bartenders, plus recipes showcasing the classics (and twists on those classics) you love.

Southern-style latkes at Domenica in New Orleans, Louisiana. Photo credit: Domenica

Of the approximately 5.3 million Jews living in the United States today, fewer than five percent reside in the American South. My father used to be one of them: He grew up in Cordele, Georgia and later Chattanooga, Tennessee, where denizens worship at the altars of barbecue and MoonPie. But for Jews like my Dad, the Southern Jewish experience is about negotiating a balance of heritage with local culture—an equation that has resulted in one of the country’s least-discussed fusion cuisines.

Dr. Marcie Cohen Ferris, an associate professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, hails from a corner of northeastern Arkansas and is the author of Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South. "I think food is one of the strongest and most powerful ways [people] hold on to ethnic identity," Ferris told me. "In looking at papers and sisterhood records and party invitations, you just see how what [Southern Jews] ate either made them more Southern… or did not.”

In my family, Southern tweaks to traditional Jewish dishes were the norm. During Passover, the nuts-and-apple dish called “charoset" was made not with walnuts, as is traditional in Eastern European iterations, but pecans. Noodle kugels for the Sabbath came flecked with stewed peaches.

But there came a point where tiny “tweaks” to traditional Jewish food became… a moot point. My great-grandmother—who for several years arranged for kosher meat to be trucked the 150-some miles from Atlanta to Cordele, a journey on which it would often spoil—finally caved and fried up pork steaks for my great grandfather. (She never did eat them herself.)

All of these foods reflect some element of wanting to fit in. Despite the best efforts of his grandmother, my father heartily embraced bacon fat–laced collard greens and pork ribs. So did Ferris, who reasoned: “This is my right as an Arkansas person, this is the foodway of my place.” But there was also an instinct to blend the two heritages, to preserve the essence of traditional Jewish dishes while making effective use of local ingredients.

This is how a Southern restaurant does challah. Photo credit: Domenica

Few people know this better than David Slater, chef de cuisine of the Cajun-inflected New Orleans, Louisiana restaurant Emeril’s. Although Slater, who is Jewish, grew up in Toronto, Canada, he has called the Big Easy home for nearly 16 years, and knows the landscape well.

"Because of our past and our heritage and being exiled from so many places, I think Jewish people thrive everywhere. And they thrived in the South," Slater told me. "You can make kosher gumbo if you want to. That’s the thing when you migrate from one place to another: You have to adapt. And you adapt by using local ingredients."

During Chanukah at Emeril’s, Slater fries up latkes made from a potato-based batter swirled with sweet corn and buttermilk, both Southern staples. The rest of the year, Slater sups on smoked beef brisket served with collards—quite a departure from the braised version with carrots and potatoes with which many American Jews are familiar.

Slater counts among his close friends another regional Jewish chef, Israeli-born Alon Shaya, who similarly loves to put Southern spins on dishes from his homeland. Like Slater, Shaya has called New Orleans home for more than a decade. These days, he is executive chef of Domenica, a John Besh-run, Southern-influenced Italian eatery. For Chanukah,”I’ll do matzoh ball soup [with] Meyer lemon, slow-cooked stock, and mustard greens,” Shaya told me. “To me, that’s Southern because [I’m using] all these ingredients that I have in my backyard here.”

He also puts a latke dish on the Domenica menu around Chanukah, which swaps out the usual accoutrements of sour cream and apple sauce for a local goat cheese feta puree and a jam made from the Creole fruit mirliton. (Shaya describes the fruit as tasting like a cross between an apple and squash.) And for the 400 people who visit his restaurant every year specifically for his special Passover menu, Shaya bakes sea salt-flecked matzoh in the restaurant’s pizza oven.

These dishes might not appeal to every Southern Jew—observance of kosher laws vary wildly from the tight-knit Orthodox enclaves of Memphis, Tennessee to more assimilated communities in cities such as New Orleans and Atlanta—but for Shaya, that’s just fine.

"For me, I’m not the most religious person in the world, but I’m Jewish and I really enjoy my faith," Shaya explained. "I eat pork and I have a salumi shrine in my dining room"—he really does—”but I’m not afraid to light a menorah right next to the meat slicer every year. It’s my life, and there are a bunch of people out there that are just like me.” 

Hungry for more Jewish food stories? Here you go:
Order Smarter at Jewish Delis
Hamantaschen Get a Modern Makeover
We’re Seeing It Everywhere: Pastrami Everything

What’s your favorite Jewish food? Let us know below!