Romancing the Recipe

A fifteenth-century medical-magical compendium replete with recipes for women’s beautification and gynecological concerns, the Sefer ‘ ahavat nashim ( Book of Women ’ s Love ) has most often been studied within the scholarship on medieval Hebrew medicine. Yet, it is a manuscript that evades easy categorization, especially given the frequent employment of Hebrew-Aljamiado — ‘Spanish’ Romance words written in Hebrew characters — throughout the text. In this chapter, I consider the Sefer ‘ ahavat nashim as a linguistic contact zone through an emphasis on and exploration of its aljamiado usage. A majority of the Spanish loanwords included in the compendium are food-related, appearing as ingredients and preparation techniques. The chapter thus gathers an annotated list of the Hebrew-Aljamiado words that appear in the manuscript and analyzes these food-related terms for what they indicate about the lived culinary practices of the text’s author and his communal context. By focusing on its linguistic and culinary aspects, I contend that the Sefer ‘ahavat nashim demonstrates the material embodiment of language and cultural contact that shaped the foodways, as much as the medicine and magic, of the premodern Iberian Jewish community.