Every year on the first night of Rosh Hashanah, Sam Miller, 22, and his family gather around a table to dip apples in honey and eat seeds scooped out of red, juicy pomegranates to usher in a year full of sweetness and abundance. But the real star of the Millers’ Rosh Hashanah dinner is a stew made up of beans, beets, squash, eggplant and beef tongue. “It’s the family’s favorite Rosh Hashanah food,” Miller says. “People fight over the leftovers.”
Known as the Stew (or Soup) of Seven Tastes, the dish is traditional to the Jews who for over 2,000 years lived in the mountains surrounding Lake Urmia in Iranian Azerbaijan (a province of the Islamic Republic populated predominantly by Azerbaijanis but distinct from the independent Republic of Azerbaijan). These Jews trace their presence in the region to the Babylonian exile, when Judeans were sent into what was then the Assyrian Empire. Life in a secluded area may explain how they managed to maintain their unique Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialect—Lishan Didan (“our language”), as they refer to it—even as the area switched hands among regional powers.
Scholars estimate that prior to World War I, approximately 2,000 Jews lived in the Lake Urmia region. The majority left during and after the war, ending up in present-day Iraq, Turkey, Georgia and Azerbaijan. Eventually many joined the 1950s wave of immigration to Israel, where they were placed in transit camps—makeshift tent cities built to house the newcomers until the nascent state figured out how to absorb them. It was a chaotic setting, within which Jewish refugees from around the world, speaking dozens of different languages, tried to connect with their own communities. The small Aramaic-speaking group stood out: Its members walked through the tents asking, in a dialect not many had ever heard before, “Nash Didan?” (“Are you one of our people?”) This was followed by the question: “Shifteh hakh lanne?” (“Do you eat shifteh?”), shifteh being dumplings made of bulgur and meat. If so, the implication was, you’re one of us.
The community became known as the Nash Didan, and as they integrated into Israel, their language was slowly forgotten. Their cuisine, however, endured. Yagil Yitzhakov is a Nash Didan chef in Israel whose family moved to Jerusalem in the 1920s. “Unfortunately, I do not speak Lishan Didan, although my father always warned me that I would regret it one day,” Yitzhakov says. But he did pay extra attention to the culinary heritage he inherited from his paternal grandmother, and he is currently working on a Nash Didan cookbook. When he was a child, Yitzhakov’s family liked to mash shifteh onto the flatbread (l’vashe, similar to lavash) that his grandfather would buy every Friday for Shabbat. The family rolled the flatbread and served it with the chickpea soup the dumplings were cooked in, with a side of safzi—fresh greens such as mint, cilantro, green onion and radish—that was placed in the center of the table.
The Miller family, who moved from Iran to the United States in the 1980s, also cooks shifteh, which they make spicy and serve cold, sliced and with a drizzle of honey. But the Nash Didan dish his family most looks forward to every year, Sam Miller says, is the Stew of Seven Tastes, or Ušwa t mme in Lishan Didan. He is quick to acknowledge the ingredient count is actually five. “I’m honestly not sure why it’s called ‘Seven Tastes,’” says Miller, a half-Nash Didan, half-Ashkenazi Jew who helps document and preserve endangered Jewish languages with the Jewish Language Project. He suggests that salt and pepper must be the sixth and seventh tastes.
The stew is not only delicious, but full of meaning. Each of the ingredients symbolizes a good omen. Known as simanim, which literally means “signs,” this tradition dates back to the Babylonian Talmud, circa 300 CE. The practice has no biblical roots and may have been copied from local pagan customs. To avoid the appearance of sorcery or divination, rabbis added accompanying blessings based on the foods’ Aramaic names. Originally the blessings were centered on five symbolic foods: black-eyed peas, Swiss chard, gourds, leeks and dates.
Black-eyed peas, for example, are called rubia or lubia in Aramaic, which sound like the words “many” and “heart” in Hebrew. The accompanying blessing asks that our merits become many and that God hearten us. Swiss chard (or beets in some communities), silk in Aramaic, has the same root as the Hebrew word for the verb “depart.” And date, tamar in Hebrew, shares its root with the verb “finish,” tam in Hebrew. The blessings for both the chard and the date ask that our enemies and haters depart or end. Gourd (although most people substitute squash), kara in Aramaic, has the same root as the Hebrew word meaning “tear,” and goes with the blessing that the decree of our sentence be ripped up and that our merits be read before God. Leeks, karti in Aramaic, related to the verb “cut” in Hebrew, are accompanied by the wish that our enemies should be cut off (sheyikartu).
The small Aramaic group walked through the tents asking, ‘Nash Didan?’ (‘Are you one of our people?’)
Throughout the years, Sephardi and Mizrahi communities—and eventually Ashkenazi ones as well—added other symbolic foods to the list of simanim, forming what is now known by many as the Rosh Hashanah seder, a ritual popular in many Israeli households and beginning to gain traction in the United States as well. Miller’s family follows an English-Farsi guide for the Rosh Hashanah simanim and reads the blessings aloud from there. “We give everyone all the ingredients in a bowl, and we do five separate brachot [blessings], but then eat them together,” says Miller.
The Millers use red kidney beans instead of black-eyed peas, adapting millennia-old traditions to ingredients commonly available in the United States, just like generations of Jews before them.
The tongue in the Nash Didan Stew of Seven Tastes replaced the tradition of serving a ram’s head for Rosh Hashanah and asking to be seated “at the head, and not at the tail” (Deuteronomy, 28:13). The ram’s head custom came about during the Geonic period (6th to 11th centuries CE).
Lamb lungs are another symbolic ingredient that was added later and was served in Jewish Persian communities, sometimes dipped in honey, as a wish for a light year, not heavy with the burden of troubles. “The problem is, you can’t really get lungs,” says Miller. So many in the Nash Didan community replaced them with eggplant, since the eggplant is airy inside. He notes that in the Persian Jewish community in Los Angeles, some serve popcorn as a replacement for lungs.
There are no concrete approximations of the number of Nash Didan Jews today. Miller estimates a few thousand, with a few hundred in the United States. In a beautiful example of how traditions evolve with time and place, Nash Didan families have preserved their holiday tradition by incorporating creative substitutions such as the ones the Miller family have adopted, thus making every Rosh Hashanah meal, like every new year, a mix of the old and the new.
The recipe for the Stew of Seven Tastes is hard to come by. Sam Miller’s grandmother, Zhilla, does not have a written recipe but suggests first preparing the tongue by peeling it and cutting it into cubes. Then she advises putting the tongue, dried red kidney beans, cut beets, salt and pepper in a large pot and covering them with water, about 1 inch over the ingredients. Bring the mixture to a boil over medium-high heat, then reduce the heat, cover and cook the stew on low until the beans are just about ready. Add large cubes of squash, and after 10 minutes add chunks of eggplant. Cook for an extra 5-8 minutes until the eggplant is just done (be careful not to overcook, as the eggplant will disintegrate into the stew). Add salt to taste and remove from the heat.
I wonder what vegetarian items can be substituted for the tongue. Shana tova!
Since it symbolizes the “head” (of the year), perhaps a “head” of cabbage!