Template talk:Jewish cuisine

Chicken bouillon

@Yallayallaletsgo: can we talk about this edit? When you piped Osem under chicken bouillon, were you referring to the Osem (company)? Or is it correct as it stands today, piped as the red link Osem (food), unrelated to the Israeli food company? Is there a reason why chicken bouillon powder isn't used? Hoof Hearted (talk) 17:06, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

I meant Osem the company. Sorry I didn’t get around to fixing it. If you want you can change it to chicken bouillon powder instead, IDK there was an article for that.Yallayallaletsgo (talk) 03:41, 24 October 2019 (UTC)

 Done [1] Hoof Hearted (talk) 12:21, 24 October 2019 (UTC)

Too long and broad

The edits @Yallayallaletsgo: made over the course of a month make this template too long, broad and hard to navigate in my opinion. I am not an expert on Jewish cuisine so I am not here to review each and every dish and judge whether it belongs or not but there are some that in general I would consider are "broadly Eurasian" or "broadly American" like milk, wine, yogurt or hot dog. These look out of place next to latkes or challah. Something to consider...--TFerenczy (talk) 13:58, 5 November 2019 (UTC)

@TFerenczy: I share your opinion, and had the same reservations about undoing those changes. Even during the discussion above, I didn't see what made chicken bouillon definitively Jewish, but was willing to accept someone's opinion who seemed to know what he was talking about. If Yalla doesn't respond over the next few days, I'll undo. Hoof Hearted (talk) 19:18, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

Hi. The chicken bouillon one is only there because there is not an article about the particular kind I am referring to, particularly the kind made by Osem (company). This is very popular in Jewish cuisine especially in Israeli cuisine, but also in American Jewish cuisine as well, and believe it or not it is actually a very common ingredient in everything from brisket to schnitzel, and of course soups, and even knishes. I don’t have the time to list references for this at this time, but if you google this you will see what I’m talking about. Also hot dogs are very common in Jewish cuisine, and they were popularized by Jewish immigrants in New York City such as Nathan's Famous and also Hebrew National is a very popular brand in the United States, and originated from the Jewish community of the United Stats. Of course hot dogs exist in other cultures as well, but I think it is worthy of inclusion. There are many more dishes that need to be added IMO to this template, but many of them are very rare and some also have hard to spell names so I forget them before I can add them to this template. It is not a broad template, but rather a long one, as the canon of Jewish cuisine is very large and there are thousands upon thousands of Jewish dishes in the world, and this template is really only scratching the surface of them. But I think the current length is good enough. If milk is there I can remove that, if you’d like.

I would appreciate it if anyone interested in Jewish cuisine could create some of the articles where I have mentioned in this template, but have not provided a link due to there being no page there yet. That would be of much help.Yallayallaletsgo (talk) 17:48, 23 November 2019 (UTC)

I agree completely with @TFerenczy: and @Hoof Hearted:. This template is far too broad, and far too large.

The section on chefs should be about those who are known for their Jewish cuisine, not chefs who happen to be Jewish such as Heston Blumenthal, Anthony Bourdain, Nigella Lawson, etc.

The foods mentioned should be those that are distinctively Jewish, not those that are found in many cuisines around the world (egg noodles, corned beef, wine, chicken noodle soup, really?), or that have famous origins in some place but have now become international (Linzer torte, strudel, ...).

It is problematic to count as "Jewish cuisine" dishes which are found in Israel because they are shared by the entire region. Things like pita, manakish, baboon bread, kofta/keftes, lavash, halva, baklava, dolma, freekeh, shish kebab, kadaif, kibbeh, pomegranate juice, strained yogurt, tarator, za'atar, etc. are typically Levantine, but on the other hand are not part of the cuisine of most Jews in North American and Europe; they are shared among the cuisines of Muslims, Christians, and Jews (and others) in the Middle East.

It is especially strange to list dishes which are particularly characteristic of some other region, like Ethiopian injera, Iranian tahdig, Georgian khachapuri, North African brik -- of course Jews who emigrated from those places prepare those foods, but in what sense are they Jewish foods? There are also some strange listings of standard American foods, like tuna salad (?!).

Should a template about Greek cuisine include, say, roast chicken and pasta with meat sauce, both of which are very widely eaten in Greece? Of course not, they are shared with Europe and the Middle East.

This template should focus on what is distinctively Jewish food, and not cover all food eaten by Jews and Israelis. --Macrakis (talk) 23:34, 23 November 2019 (UTC)

Re some of the specific items that User:Yallayallaletsgo mentions above:

Hot dogs are hardly Jewish in origin. They are, after all Wienerwurst (from Vienna) or Frankfurter (from Frankfurt), and originally made of pork or mixed beef and pork, hardly kosher. I don't believe that hot dogs were popularized by Jewish immigrants, either. Of course there are popular kosher brands of hot dog; so what?

I don't know anything about the Osem brand of dehydrated bouillon, but what makes this "Jewish cuisine" rather than just a popular kosher brand of a pretty much universal food? Maggi is a popular brand of dehydrated bouillon cubes in India -- does that make them part of Indian cuisine? --Macrakis (talk) 23:48, 23 November 2019 (UTC)

@Yallayallaletsgo: if there are thousands upon thousands of dishes and this template is only scratching the surface of Jewish cuisine, then I suggest editing the article Jewish cuisine or List of Jewish cuisine dishes rather than bloating this template. Templates like these are meant to give an at-a-glance overview, so that readers can quickly see related concepts and navigate to more information. You might look at other templates from Category:Cuisine templates by country for an idea on appropriate length and items to include.

As for specific items, you seem to be confusing "brand" with "cuisine". If I went into a restaurant and asked for a "typical Jewish meal", I would scratch my head if they brought out hot dogs, pretzels, and mint tea. Hoof Hearted (talk) 16:52, 2 December 2019 (UTC)

Also, I think this template would be more effective if you could put a dish into a single category, and not duplicate it the way you have Brisket (dish) (I believe you mean Brisket (Jewish dish)), Challah, and Cholent. Those are some examples that I think are appropriate, but the template would be more streamlined if they were only listed once.

A "minor" edit with three major groups of changes

This recent edit is problematic in several ways.

1) This template is clearly titled "Jewish cuisine", so it is redundant to add the adjective "Jewish" before every subheading. This principle is discussed in MOS:Head: "section headings should ... Not redundantly refer back to the subject of the article". Though that is about headings in articles, the principle is the same. I removed the redundant adjectives in [2] with the comment "Remove redundant "Jewish" before each subheading" which I think is pretty clear. You restored them in this edit without an Edit summary.

2) In that same edit, you added several chefs/cooks without any obvious connection to Jewish cuisine, namely Ina Garten and Ruth Reichl:

• Ina Garten is known for her store, her cookbooks, her TV show, etc. branded "Barefoot Contessa", which have no particular Jewish orientation. Our Wikipedia article on her does not mention anything about Jewish cuisine. Her website [barefootcontessa.com] does not use the word "Jewish" even once. It does use the word "kosher", but only in referring to kosher salt! It does have suggested menus for Passover (including prosciutto) and Chanukah, but that page also includes a suggested menu for Christmas.
• Ruth Reichl, again, she is not particularly identified with Jewish food, and our Wikipedia article on her mentions nothing about Jewish food.
• In an earlier edit, you added Molly Yeh, whose cookbook mentions nothing Jewish.

There's no question that all these people have Jewish backgrounds, and some of them even talk about nostalgia for the Jewish food of their parents. But they are not known for Jewish cuisine. This is a template about Jewish cuisine, not about people of Jewish origin.

3) You also added back some foods which are not specifically Jewish. Injera, for example, is a well-known Ethiopian bread. Naturally Ethiopian Jews will eat it, just as French Jews might eat crêpes and German Jews might eat sauerkraut. That doesn't make crêpes and sauerkraut into "Jewish cuisine".

Finally, all three of these groups of edits were done in a single edit which you marked as "Minor" and which had no Edit summary:

• A Help:Minor edit is defined as "one that the editor believes requires no review and could never be the subject of a dispute". Clearly that is false in all three cases here, since you were reverting changes than another editor (me) had made.
• Help:Edit summary: "It is considered good practice to provide a summary for every edit, especially when reverting (undoing) the actions of other editors or deleting existing text; otherwise, people may question your motives for the edit.

Wikipedia is edited collaboratively. This sort of behavior is not helpful. --Macrakis (talk) 21:29, 17 December 2019 (UTC)

Your latest series of edits was very unhelpful and in my opinion was detrimental to the template. I believe you had good intentions, but you removed many important dishes is Jewish cuisine, most of which are exclusively Jewish or are of Jewish origin, while some others may be found in other cuisines but are also found in Jewish cuisine and are culturally and in some cases religiously significant (such as sfinj, the traditional Hanukkah doughnut of the Moroccan Jews, which you removed from this template for no reason.) I understand that you may be approaching this template as an outsider, and likely through the lens of American Jewish cuisine. That is alright, but the dishes I and others have added to this template all are one of the following:

•Exclusively found in Jewish cuisine

•Mainly found in Jewish cuisine

•Found in a particular Jewish cuisine (such as Mizrahi, Sephardi, Yemenite or Ethiopian, etc).

•Are of Jewish origins.

•Not exclusively of Jewish origin, but is found or is popular in Jewish cuisine, etc.

Jewish cuisine is a very vast cuisine, it spans every continent and many different cultures as Jews were dispersed beginning with the Greeks, Romans, etc. This template has been designed to reflect that ethnic and cultural diversity within the Jewish community and its cuisine. If you would like to create a template consisting of the stereotypical Ashkenazi American Jewish cuisine such as matzo ball soup and chopped liver, then be my guest. I think this template is great the way it is, what would be helpful for me and other editors and members of the Jewish culture, Israel, and Food and drink WikiProjects would be if you or someone else would create articles for some of the foods that need one such as pashtida. If you would like to discuss this further, I would be happy to however as you may or may not know it will soon be Shabbat and I am under various religious restrictions during this time and will be unable to reply.Yallayallaletsgo (talk) 22:17, 10 January 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for sharing your list of criteria. Some comments:

Dishes that are exclusively found in Jewish cuisine

Of course.

Dishes that are mainly found in Jewish cuisine

No problem.

Of Jewish origin

When this is well-established by reliable sources, sure. But in many cases, it isn't.

The sachertorte article, for example, claims that Sachertorte is "of Austrian Jewish origin" based simply on the fact that its inventor was Jewish. As I say in Talk:Sachertorte, this is an unreasonable criterion, which opens the doors to absurdities like saying that Google is a Jewish search engine. I see nothing connecting Jewish culinary culture to Sachertorte, and there are no reliable sources identifying it as a Jewish dish. In fact, one source you added to the article makes the point that Sacher was particularly assimilated. The article also makes broad claims about Sachertorte's popularity among Jewish emigres from Austria, with no source, and no indication that it is more or less popular among non-Jewish emigres from Austria.

Found in a particular Jewish cuisine

This is an open door to incorporating dishes from every culture where Jews have lived.

Of course it is unsurprising that Jews in Tunisia or Persia or Germany incorporate many Tunisian or Persian or German dishes and bring them with them when they migrate to Israel, the US, or elsewhere. But characterizing those foods as specifically "Jewish" is peculiar.

For example, the famous Persian dish Shirin polow has magically become a "Persian Jewish" dish. But "the Jews of Iran... have been so intertwined with Persian culture for so long that little difference is seen in their food". (Najmieh Batmanglij, Cooking in Iran) Of course Persian Jews serve it for holidays -- so do Persian Muslims and probably Persian Zoroastrians. Does that now make it into "Muslim cuisine" and "Zoroastrian cuisine" as well?

Similarly, fried cauliflower, which is found in Indian, Italian, Levantine, French, and Israeli cuisine somehow becomes part of "Jewish cuisine".

And hardboiled egg -- really!?

Popular in Jewish cuisine

This is circular. Do you mean "popular among Jews"? How would you establish that? Do you mean "popular in Israel"? Would that, include, say, McDonald's hamburgers and French Fries? -- after all, there are 180 McDonald's outlets in Israel.

General

The template is too big. Even if all these items should be covered, the template needs to be more modular. Compare, for example, Template:Chinese cuisine or Template:Cuisine of the United States. Those cuisines surely have a similarly vast repertoire of dishes. --Macrakis (talk) 22:35, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

Collaboration on this page

User:Yallayallaletsgo (YYL for short) did a bulk revert removing a number of changes I made, with the edit comment "All the items Macrakid removed were not discussed prior to their removal, furthermore the vast majority of them were exclusively Jewish or of Jewish origin, such as kubbeh and sachertorte, to name just a few. Others are very important in Jewish cuisine, such as Sfinj, etc. Just because you may have a limited view of what Jewish cuisine is, does not mean this template must reflect that."

In fact, I brought up a number of these issues in the discussion above (December 17), to which YYL did not reply until after several weeks waiting for an answer -- YYL only replied after I made these changes to the article, and not to all the points. For example, the bulk revert re-added Ina Garten, who is Jewish, but whose cookbooks have little to say about Jewish cuisine.

YYL also has been ignoring the comments of other editors -- @TFerenczy:, @Hoof Hearted: -- who agree that this template is too long and sprawling.

This is not collaborative editing. --Macrakis (talk) 21:58, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

I agree 100% with Macrakis on on this point and his points above, specifically that "found in a particular Jewish cuisine" and "popular in Jewish cuisine" can be problematic. I'd much prefer to see these nuance cases discussed more broadly in the Jewish cuisine article rather than name-dropped with no context on this gigantic template. Hoof Hearted (talk) 16:06, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

I have to agree as well, with the supplementary point that we probably also want to develop sub-templates for regional things like American Jewish cuisine.--Pharos (talk) 22:08, 14 January 2020 (UTC)