From KCRW, I'm Evan Klyman, and this is Good Food.

When we talk about Sephardic Jews in Diaspora, we tend to focus on the cuisines that formed

as the Jews of Spain and Portugal sought safety in other countries, places all over the world from

Turkey and Italy to Morocco, Mexico, and Brazil. And as always, food morphs with travel. But we rarely

speak of what caused this immigration, the Spanish Inquisition, and the expulsion of Jews from

the Iberian Peninsula.

Helene Joara Piniere is a French Spanish scholar whose focus is medieval history and the history of food.

Her meticulously researched book, Mata and Flower, recipes from the history of the Sephardic Jews,

uses Inquisition Court transcripts

to tease out what Iberian Jews were eating at that time. She's created a fascinating document

that's unlike any other. Hi, Alain. Hi, Ivan. How are you? I'm good. It's so great to get

to talk to you again. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

You're an academic, a scholar of medieval studies. The amount of research in this book is considerable.

Tell us a little bit about where you're from and how you found your academic focus? Well, I live in France,

so as you said, I'm Spanish and I'm French as well, live in Bordeaux, so like two hours from

the Spanish border. And since I am very young, I was fascinating about the relation between

food and religion. So I decided

to work on this. And when I started my PhD in medieval history, in history of food, I decided to

really focus on the relation between the food practices of the Jews and religion and how they had to find a way

to eat and to survive at the same time. Is there a personal connection? Are you Sephardic?

Yes, I'm Sephardic. You open your book with the sentence,

at the core of Savardic cuisine lies the transformative potential

...