Susan Weingarten, "Ancient Jewish Food in its Geographical and Cultural Contexts: What’s Cooking in the Talmuds?" (Taylor & Francis, 2025

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Susan Weingarten, "Ancient Jewish Food in its Geographical and Cultural Contexts: What’s Cooking in the Talmuds?"

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Renee Garfinkel
Guest: Dr. Susan Weingarten
Date: December 13, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the deep and delicious world of ancient Jewish food as reconstructed from rabbinic texts and archaeology, centered around Susan Weingarten’s new book, Ancient Jewish Food in Its Geographical and Cultural Contexts: What’s Cooking in the Talmuds? The discussion peels back the layers of history to reveal how food in late antiquity was not just about nutrition, but also about identity, status, memory, and a porous exchange with neighboring Roman, Persian, and Arab cultures. Weingarten also discusses the challenges of reconstructing ancient diets, the social meanings of foods, culinary experimentation, and her previous work on charoset.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Origins of the Project (03:24–06:09)

• Spark for the Research:
  Dr. Weingarten shared how her interest was piqued by an academic claim that little is known about food preparation in late antiquity—an assertion she refutes due to the richness of Talmudic sources, especially those concerning Sabbath food laws.

  "This learned professor... has obviously never opened the Babylonian Talmud in her life... where it's very important to know exactly how food is prepared because you want to know whether you're allowed to do certain activities on the Sabbath or not."
  — Susan Weingarten, 03:48

• The Scholarly Gap:
  Much of the prior research had not gone beyond early 20th-century German scholarship. Weingarten saw an opportunity to explore untouched culinary material, noting parallels with research on Greek, Roman, and early Arab cookery.

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Kosher Laws vs. Cultural Reality (06:09–08:11)

• Beyond Kashrut:
  Kosher laws are only one aspect of ancient Jewish food culture; everyday practices, sharing, and curiosity were equally important. She gives an example from rabbinic literature describing women's curiosity about neighbors' cooking—a sign of how information flowed.

  "There's a beautiful example where they say women are insatiable... if a woman goes out and leaves her pot in the charge of her neighbor while it's still cooking, then you can be sure that she's going to lift the lid and see what's happening inside..."
  — Susan Weingarten, 06:37

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Combining Textual and Archaeological Evidence (08:11–10:40)

• Challenges:
  Weingarten discusses the difficulty of distinguishing prescriptive from descriptive elements in rabbinic sources, and how archaeology can clarify ambiguities—such as the identification of grain types.

  "In the archaeological record, we get plenty of wheat and barley, but almost no oats, and... maybe just one grain of rye. So... perhaps it wasn't oats and rye. Perhaps... different forms of wheat and barley..."
  — Susan Weingarten, 09:24

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Food and Social Status (10:40–13:19)

• Class Distinctions:
  Food was a clear indicator of wealth and status:

  • Wheat vs. Barley: Wheat bread, twice as expensive, was the food of the rich; barley was for the poor or even used as punishment rations in the Roman army.

  • Meat: In land-poor Palestine, meat was rare and reserved for special occasions. In contrast, Babylonian Jews, benefiting from fertile land, consumed more meat.

    "Wheat was priced on the market at twice the rate of barley. It was considered... much better... wheat bread rises, whereas barley... makes very heavy bread. And this was considered...punishment rations..."
    — Susan Weingarten, 10:55

    "Ordinary people probably didn't eat very much meat... if you killed a cow, you were not only getting rid of a cow, but... a work animal. So it was something that people did very rarely..."
    — Susan Weingarten, 11:47

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Cultural Exchange Through Food (14:01–16:52)

• Bread and Dips:
  Bread dominated the diet. To make it less monotonous, people from different regions dipped their bread into various sauces, reflecting cultural transmission:

  • In Roman Palestine: Fermented fish sauce (garum, murias, alek) was widely consumed, mirroring Roman practices.
  • In Babylonia: Fish sauce was less popular; instead, people used fermented barley and milk sauce (kutach), drawing from local resources and Persian influence.

  "It's clear to me anyway, from the Talmudic literature that there were different sort of dips in different places...people took on the Roman, Greco Roman habit of dipping their bread into a fermented fish sauce...When it came to Babylonia...the only thing to do with that barley sauce, which was called kutach...is to spit it out."
  — Susan Weingarten, 14:13; 15:40

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The Lens of Food Compared to Other Lenses (19:00–24:25)

• Food as Political and Social Statement:
  Weingarten draws parallels between ancient foodways and political, cultural patterns (e.g., Greeks and Romans mocking Persian luxury), and how Jewish elites mirrored surrounding empires in conspicuous consumption.

  "The Greeks...satirized the Persian habits of very luxurious living...You do get echoes of this in the Talmudic literature. They tell us that the patriarch, the head of the Jewish community...had the same sort of food on his table as the emperor..."
  — Susan Weingarten, 19:30–21:30

  "You get an echo of the rivalry between Greece and Rome and Persia in the rivalry between the heads of the Jewish community...in the food that they had on their tables."
  — Susan Weingarten, 23:30

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Recreating Ancient Food (24:25–34:07)

• Personal Insights:
  Studying ancient food changed Weingarten’s perspective—even making her appreciate that enjoyment of food is a luxury not always available in history.

  "Studying ancient food...made me understand that you really don't have to enjoy food, you have to eat it and you need it to live on. But enjoyment is an extra."
  — Susan Weingarten, 24:52

• Culinary Experiments:
  Weingarten describes:

  • Making a "mustard foam" from wild mustard seeds with her grandchildren, using techniques hinted at in Talmudic and Arab sources
  • Attempting to replicate Roman fish sauce (garum)—only to be bested by maggots due to a too-loose cloth covering.

  "I collected wild mustard...and made a mustard foam, which was great fun...On the way, I discovered again, the sort of things that the ancient sources don't tell you..."
  — Susan Weingarten, 26:33

  "We cut it up and put it with salt and did everything...but you need to tie the cloth very tightly to make sure flies don't get in. And flies got in and the whole fermenting mass got full of maggots. And the smell was unbelievable."
  — Susan Weingarten, 32:20

• Modern Equivalents:
  You can buy modern fermented fish sauces (like "Red Boat" from the Far East) that use ancient-style processes and are even kosher-certified.

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The Charoset Book and Connecting Projects (34:39–36:43)

• Scope of Previous Work:
  Weingarten’s earlier book on charoset is temporally broader (covering the food’s history from antiquity to today) and geographically wider than her Talmudic study—documenting charoset recipes across Jewish communities worldwide.

  "With haroset, I took one very limited subject, but it's much broader than the Talmudic book in that it goes all through history...So it was broader temporally...but I also dealt...with people from all over the world..."
  — Susan Weingarten, 34:53–36:32

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On reconstructing ancient recipes:

  "It's absolutely impossible to reproduce everything exactly...A lot of things would have had different tastes. So you just can't exactly reproduce them."
  — Weingarten, 25:39

• On social meaning of food:

  "Wheat bread rises...whereas barley has very little gluten and doesn't rise so quickly...In the Roman army, at least, [barley] was considered...punishment rations. But it's what the poor subsisted on."
  — Weingarten, 11:00

• On cross-cultural flavors:

  "The only thing to do with that barley sauce, which was called kutach, the only thing to do with Babylonian kuttach, is to spit it out. They didn't like each other's typical foods."
  — Weingarten, 15:53

• On the challenges of food archaeology:

  "[The ancient sources] don't tell you...if you allow [the mustard pods] to dry...they were very easy to break up...but it's the sort of thing that you do learn from experience."
  — Weingarten, 27:48

• On culinary failure:

  "We didn't have the right tools...the whole fermenting mass got full of maggots. And the smell was unbelievable..."
  — Weingarten, 32:40

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Suggested Listen-By-Timestamp

• [03:24] — Research Spark and Scholarly Background
• [06:32] — Beyond Kosher: Everyday Food Practice
• [08:11] — Integrating Texts & Archaeology
• [10:40] — Socioeconomics of Ancient Diets
• [14:01] — Cross-Cultural Foodways (Roman Palestine vs. Babylonian Jewish practice)
• [19:00] — Food as Political and Social Mirror
• [24:25] — Personal Impact & Experimental Archaeology
• [34:39] — Charoset Project and Broader Research Context

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Conclusion

This episode gives a vivid, scholarly, and at times humorous account of ancient Jewish culinary life. It challenges the notion of a timeless, sealed-off Jewish food tradition, instead showing that Jewish food was a product of its time—shaped by economics, gendered knowledge, class, neighboring cultures, and changing historical circumstances. The dialogue is rich with lived experiment and peppered with memorable failures and illuminating discoveries, offering new perspectives for both food historians and curious eaters.

Transcript

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[Podcast Host/Announcer]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Renee Garfinkel]

Is it true that you are what you eat? Stay tuned and find out. Welcome to the Van Leer Institute series on ideas. I'm your host, Renee Garfinkel. Today we're diving into a subject that is both ancient and surprisingly modern. Food. But not just any food. Food that Jewish people ate in late antiquity and how their diets shaped culture, identity and daily life. Our guide to this journey is Dr. Susan Weingarten, a food historian based in Jerusalem. She studied at Oxford in Tel Aviv and is an associate fellow of the Albright Institute for Archaeological Research. You may know her from her earlier works, including A Taste of Jewish History. Her new book, Ancient Jewish Food in Its Geographical and Cultural what's Cooking in the Talmuds? Is the first in depth study of what Jews were really eating in the centuries when the Mishnah and the Talmud were written. It shows us that back then as now, food is not only about nourishment, it's about status, identity, power, and even humor. And it reveals that Jewish food culture was never sealed off. It was porous, shared with and influenced by the surrounding Roman, Persian and Arab worlds. Why should this matter to us today? Because food is memory. It's identity. It's celebratory. It's the way communities define themselves and interact with their neighbors. By looking at the table of the past, we see ourselves more clearly in the present. Susan Weingarten, welcome to the podcast.

[Dr. Susan Weingarten]

Thank you, Rene, for that nice introduction.

[Renee Garfinkel]

What first drew you to the subject of food in the Talmud?

[Dr. Susan Weingarten]

Well, I wrote my doctorate on the church fathers in the Holy Land. And as part of my research, I picked up a book called Women in Late Antiquity. And I came across a very surprising statement in the book. It said, we know a great deal about food in late antiquity, but we know almost nothing about how it was prepared. And I thought this learned professor, Gillian Clarke she's called, and I actually know her, has obviously never opened the Babylonian Talmud in her life, and certainly not the tractate, which deals with the laws of the Sabbath, where it's very important to know exactly how food is prepared because you want to know whether you're allowed to do certain activities on the Sabbath or not. And I thought, well, if she doesn't know about it, then perhaps nobody else does. And you know that there's an unwritten law of research that anything you might want to research, somebody wrote a doctorate on it in Germany in the 19th century. Well, this was almost true for the subject of food. There was a man called, oh, I'm blanking out on his name, Shmuel Krauss, who wrote a book called Talmudisha Akhyr Loggia. And ever since his book, nobody seems to have done anything except for quote him. Even some archaeologists who were interested in the subject didn't get very much further. And I thought, great, this is something that hasn't been done and will be very interesting because there's been a lot of work done on Greek and Roman food and food habits and cookery. And later on I discovered that there'd been work done on early Arab cookery. And so I have two, in fact, two recipe books that I could use as comparisons for the Talmudic material.

[Renee Garfinkel]

Well, that's very interesting because I would have imagined before I read your book that many people might assume that Jewish food in antiquity was defined only by kosher laws and as you mentioned, the laws of cooking on Shabbat. Talk about how your research challenges and complicates that view.

[Dr. Susan Weingarten]

Yes, definitely. In fact, the Talmudic literature itself is quite aware of how information about food gets passed on. There's a beautiful example where they say women are insatiable. They can never resist the opportunity to know what's cooking. And if a woman goes out and leaves her pot in the charge of her neighbor while it's still cooking, then you can be sure that she's going to lift the lid and see what's happening inside. And I thought this was beautiful. This was a way of seeing how information about food was communicated through the women that did it.

[Renee Garfinkel]

And I hear that also as a compliment to the curiosity, intellectual and otherwise, of the women in ancient times.

[Dr. Susan Weingarten]

I'm not too sure that the rabbis meant it as a compliment. I mean, we can see it as a compliment, but.

[Renee Garfinkel]

And now, when you did the research, how did you balance using rabbinic texts, which are often prescriptive, with archaeological evidence, which is kind of hit and miss, I imagine, and also shows what people actually ate? How did you work that harmoniously?

[Dr. Susan Weingarten]

Yeah, that's very interesting. It's true that rabbinic texts are very often prescriptive, but they can sometimes be descriptive as well. And we can't always tell. We can't always tell exactly what happened. When the rabbis say, this is the minimum diet, was this really what everybody agreed on as a minimum diet, or were they just telling people? Archaeological evidence has its own problems, but certainly it can very often confirm what we read in the texts. The different types of grain, for example. The rabbis identified five of them, and we found it very difficult as modern scholars to know what these five grains were. Obviously there was wheat and barley, but what are the other words that are used in the text? Some of the words that are used have been translated as oats and rye. However, in the archaeological record, we get plenty of wheat and barley, but almost no oats, and I think maybe just one grain of rye. So that the interpretation that scholars have made of these other terms mean that perhaps it wasn't oats and rye. Perhaps rye seems to have been domesticated much further north than wheat and barley. And so scholars have suggested that these might simply be different forms of wheat and barley. There's two row wheat and six row wheat. And perhaps this is what the rabbinic texts were talking about. And the archaeological evidence here can be used to back up the claims that, no, it probably wasn't rye and oats that they were talking about.

[Renee Garfinkel]

Were there foods associated with different socioeconomic groups, Foods associated with wealth and status that separated the elites from the common people?

[Dr. Susan Weingarten]

Yes, definitely. I mean, talking of wheat and barley, wheat was priced on the market at twice the rate of barley. It was considered to be much, much better because wheat has plenty of gluten in it, and wheat bread rises, whereas barley has very little gluten. And doesn't rise so quickly. It makes very heavy bread. And this was considered in the Roman army, at least as punishment rations. But it's what the poor subsisted on. There were other foods, of course, that.

[Renee Garfinkel]

What about meat? How much meat did ordinary people eat? And did it have any social meaning when they ate it?

[Dr. Susan Weingarten]

Ordinary people probably didn't eat very much meat. If you killed an animal, if you killed a cow, you were not only getting rid of a cow, but you were getting rid of a work animal. So it was something that people did very rarely, perhaps just for a festival or perhaps for a wedding, but really rather little. There's been a great deal of discussion as to how much meat people did eat. And of course, archaeologists find bones all over the place. But certainly in the land of Israel in Palestine, people didn't eat very much meat. Whereas in Babylonia, where conditions were better and there was a great deal more well watered, fertile land, and they dug all sorts of canals to bring the water from the rivers to the land, they would eat a great deal more meat. And you have stories in the Talmudic literature of rabbis arriving from Babylonia in Palestine and not understanding that the local culture was to eat a great deal less meat and going to buy meat and getting very antagonistic responses from people who thought, how could he be buying so much meat on a weekday?

[Renee Garfinkel]

I understand. Actually, we had a similar experience when we lived in a European city. The quantity of meat that we wanted to buy to serve to guests was considered appalling and inappropriate. So some things haven't changed, right?

[Dr. Susan Weingarten]

Absolutely.

[Renee Garfinkel]

And another thing that your book argues that is similar to today, you argue that Jewish food was not sealed off, but rather it was shared with surrounding cultures. Could you give us one striking example of that cultural exchange?

[Dr. Susan Weingarten]

Yes. The made food in antiquity and certainly throughout the Talmudic literature was bread. And the estimates that it made up something between 50 to 80% of the diet. Now, eating bread all the time was boring and people wanted to have something to dip their bread into. And so there was a culture of dipping sauces for bread and for other foods, if you could get them, that was very widespread. Now, it's very interesting that it's clear to me anyway, from the Talmudic literature that there were different sort of dips in different places. That in Palestine, which was a Roman province, Provincia Palestina, people took on the Roman, Greco Roman habit of dipping their bread into a fermented fish sauce. The main source was called garum. And then there were other different products which I talk about as belonging to the Garum family, Murias and Alek. And the names of these appear in the Talmudic sources. And we've no reason to doubt that they're talking about the same thing. When it came to Babylonia, there were fish in the two rivers of Mesopotamia, but fish sauce was not so popular from very early times. They made a similar sort of sauce from fermented barley, from actually mouldy and then fermented barley and milk. And the two Talmudic communities kept very strongly to these preferences. And you get the head of the Palestinian rabbis saying the only thing to do with that barley sauce, which was called kutach, the only thing to do with Babylonian kuttach, is to spit it out. They didn't like each other's typical foods.

[Renee Garfinkel]

That is very understandable.

[Dr. Susan Weingarten]

Right, exactly.

[Renee Garfinkel]

I mean, people don't like things that are strange often. Although nowadays some of us who really like to eat find the strange preparation of a familiar food interesting if not immediately appealing.

[Dr. Susan Weingarten]

Right, right. And I don't know how far this was the case in antiquity, how long it took for changes to be introduced. It's something that I couldn't get my hands on.

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[Renee Garfinkel]

Well, you looked at history through a lens of food. How does what is revealed through that lens different from, similar to or revealing in a different way than looking through the more conventional lenses of politics or even theology?

[Dr. Susan Weingarten]

I think that in some cases you can identify very similar trends. The Greeks and later on the Romans were on and off, almost permanently at war with the Persians. Right from very, very early times, there was antagonism to the Persians. And the Greeks satirized the Persian habits of very luxurious living. They disapproved of it. And you have to remember that in ancient times, a lot of this luxur living, this banqueting, was very public. Things were done in city squares and so on, and people saw what was eaten at banquets. So this banquet culture of the Persians was disapproved of by the Greeks and Romans, even though they themselves eventually came to use it as part of their political propaganda, part of building up their image. An American Scholar About 100 years ago, Thorsten Veblen, talked about conspicuous consumption. People who want to be seen eating the most expensive foods, lying on the most expensive cushions with silk and gold and so on around them. And you do get echoes of this in the Talmudic literature. They tell us that the patriarch, the head of the Jewish community, the Nasi rabbi, Yehudaha Nasi Judah, the patriarch, was friendly with one of the Roman emperors and had the same sort of food on his table as the emperor had on his table. And they tell us about these foods that the rabbi and the emperor had on their table. And these foods are foods that, that are not seasonal. In antiquity, food was very, very much seasonal. We've lost the concept of seasonality. We get oranges in the middle of the summer, we get grapes in the middle of the winter, and things are transported for thousands of miles. In antiquity, things weren't like that. Or although the very rich could to a certain extent overcome the restrictions of seasonality, the Roman emperor had cucumbers grown for him under glass so that he could have them even out of season. And Rabbi Judah Anasi had imported attitude. A very rich man, the Talmud tells us, sent 200 and something artichokes from a long way away to the patriarch, to Rabbi Judah Hanasi. So he was visibly doing the same sort of things as the Roman emperor. And the same thing was happening in Babylonia. The head of the Jewish Babylonian community, the exilarch, the Resh Galuta, also copied Persian and Arab habits of eating. He had the same exotic foods on his table. He had hunted gazelle on his table. Now, it's a bit difficult to hunt a gazelle in a kosher way, but obviously he managed. And so he had the same foods on his table as the Persian king. So that you get an echo of the rivalry between Greece and Rome and Persia in the rivalry between the heads of the Jewish community who were, who were echoing the heads of the Roman and Persian world in the food that they had on their tables.

[Renee Garfinkel]

Fascinating. Susan, you've spent many years with this material. How has studying ancient food changed the way you think about your own meals? And did you ever try to recreate Talmud era recipes in the kitchen?

[Dr. Susan Weingarten]

Well, I remember once, my late husband, whose parents were survivors of the Holocaust, saying you don't have to enjoy food. Now, coming from a slightly more normal Jewish family, I remember being absolutely horrified by this statement on his part. How could he say such a thing? But studying ancient food and studying the situation of the people that ate the food made me understand that you really don't have to enjoy food, you have to eat it and you need it to live on. But enjoyment is an extra. It's something that doesn't have to be there. And I must say I have tried out some things that appeared on the ancient table. But of course it's absolutely impossible to reproduce everything. Exactly. You can't reproduce the ancient conditions. If you have meat, then it's from a cow that's been brought up in a very sedentary fashion, being given lots of food. It's not a free roaming cow that was with very muscular, with very tough meat. That would be the sort of cow whose meat they would eat if they ever ate cow's meat. And similarly, a lot of the vegetables and fruits hadn't been, they've been domesticated perhaps, but they haven't been changed and bred the way we breed food today. Our apples are almost always extremely sweet. And their apples, Pliny says, hit you like knives. They were very sour. So a lot of things would have had different tastes. So you just can't exactly reproduce them. But I did try a few experiments to try and look at properties of different foods. For example, if you take wild mustard, it's different from the cultivated mustard that you'll buy in a shop. Even if you buy the mustard seeds, if you take the seeds of wild mustard and soak them in water, they produce a sort of jelly. Now we know from recipes in Arab cookery books that people took this jelly and whipped it with a whisk and it became a foam. You might know the Yemenite food that's called chilbe, which is also made from a foam, from jelly coming from seeds, but different seeds, fenugreek seeds. Well, they made a mustard foam. And there are some hints in Talmudic literature that. The rabbis of the Talmud were also referring to foams because they said, you shouldn't whip mustard on Shabbat on the Sabbath. In other words, it was a normal thing to do to whip it and to make a foam, but it wasn't something that was allowed on the Sabbath. And I collected wild mustard. I had a most enjoyable time because my grandchildren thought this was great fun. And I broke up the seed pods and got out the seeds and soaked them and made a mustard foam, which was great fun. On the way, I discovered again, the sort of things that the ancient sources don't tell you. I went with. I've got twin grandsons, and I went with one of them to begin with to pick the mustard. And it was very difficult to break up the pods. I had to use a pestle and mortar for it. A few months later, his twin brother said, I want to go and collect mustard with you. So I took him to collect mustard. And the mustard pods had been drying out in the sun for a further couple of months from the first occasion for my first grandson. And this time I discovered that because they dried, they were very easy to break up. And it wasn't such a difficult process if you allow them to dry. Well, no ancient sources tell you that, but it's the sort of thing that you do learn from experience. I also, in trying to work out how things were made, I also decided that I'd like to make this fermented fish sauce. And my colleague, Tover Dickstein and I decided that this was something that was really worth trying out. Fish you see today as well comes in great shoals according to the season. So most of the time there are not many fish. And then suddenly you get a huge amount, and you have to learn. You have to work out what to do, otherwise it gets wasted. So in the ancient world, they developed a method of taking all this huge glut of fish and fermenting it. So we thought, great, we'll have a go at this. And I have another colleague who actually has done. Has written a book about all this fermented fish sauce. And she said, you've got to have the fish really fresh, because when you're fermenting them, the enzymes in the guts of the fish, if the fish is fresh, will break down the flesh of the fish and start you on the whole process. So you must have really fresh fish. So how do you get really fresh fish? We got up at five o' clock in the morning and went down to Jaffa to the port to meet the fishermen and bought the fish off the boat. Great. So we get back.

[Renee Garfinkel]

That's dedication.

[Dr. Susan Weingarten]

Yeah, absolute dedication. And then we get back to my friend's house and we start cutting up the fish. And we bought large, beautiful fish, but it was very prickly and very difficult to cut up. We didn't have the right tools. We really should have had an axe, not just a knife. And we cut it up and we put it with salt and we did everything that it said. But in the Roman sources this time. Some of the Roman sources give you quite good details about how to deal with fermenting fish. However, one of the things that they did not say was that true, you cover the bowls of the fish when you put them out in the sun with cloth, but you need to tie the cloth very tightly to make sure flies don't get in. And flies got in and the whole fermenting mass got full of maggots. And the smell was unbelievable. And my friend, I'm afraid, was shocked by this and just threw it all out. Now, if we'd have known that this might happen, she might have simply removed the maggots and we might have carried on with our experiment, but we didn't. So this taught us a great deal about how much is in the ancient sources, how much is taken for granted and we don't know about, and how long it actually takes, even if you have a great deal of information, to learn how to deal with complex processes like fermenting fish. You can incidentally buy fermented fish made in a very similar process, fermented fish sauce from the Far east. And they even sell it with a rabbinical hechsha. You can get it ou.

[Renee Garfinkel]

I've seen it on the shelves. Yes, right.

[Dr. Susan Weingarten]

Red Boat is one of the makes that makes according to the ancient processes. So if you really want to try what ancient fish sauce that the rabbis called muries tastes like, then you can get this sauce from the Far East.

[Renee Garfinkel]

Well, I hope they don't remove the maggots. They just prevent them from.

[Dr. Susan Weingarten]

I hope they prevent the maggots. Yes, exactly.

[Renee Garfinkel]

And finally, sue, you've also written a book on charoset, a ritual food. How does that earlier project connect to this broader study?

[Dr. Susan Weingarten]

Ah, well, you're quite right that in some ways this study is broader, but it's only broader in. It's broader from the point of view of geography. No, it's not broader from the point of view of geography. It's broader from the point of view of the number of different foods. With haroset, I took one very limited subject, but it's much broader than the Talmudic book in that it goes all through history from the time when you have the first hints of charoset, which is around the time when the second temple was still there and bringing it right up to modern times. So it was broader temporally, you could say, from the point of view of time, although it dealt with just one.

[Renee Garfinkel]

Particular small subject and a food that's only eaten once a year.

[Dr. Susan Weingarten]

It's a food that's only eaten once a year. Right. But I also dealt. It was also broader geographically because I talked to people from all over the world about their haroset and I have haroset from India and I didn't at that time, unfortunately, have the haroset from Curacao that I now have, but it definitely went over the whole world. And I do discuss the American situation as well. So, yeah, it was certainly broader geographically than just Palestine and Babylonia.

[Renee Garfinkel]

Yes. And that book is a fascinating, delightful read. This book, the new book is Ancient Jewish Food in Its Geographical and Cultural what's Cooking in the Talmuds by Susan Weingarten. Thanks so much for sharing your work with us today, Sue.

[Dr. Susan Weingarten]

Thank you very much, Reddy. It's been interesting. It's always interesting every time to think again about what I've been working on for the last 20 years. And I'd like to thank you and Bela very much for setting this up.

[Renee Garfinkel]

And I will add my thanks to our researcher, Bela Pasakov. Bye. Bye.

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