Is Vinegar Jewish?

This past Passover had me thinking a lot about fermentation, and how so much of it isn’t allowed on the Sedar plate (see: matzah) Surely the Jews must have had an interest in fermentables before and after fleeing Egypt, so I went to the experts to see where vinegar may have played a role across the diaspora of Jewish cooking.

Leah Koenig has written more than half a dozen books about the cuisines of the Jewish diaspora, including the comprehensive The Jewish Cookbook (Phaidon 2019), and more regionally, Portico: Cooking and Feasting in Rome's Jewish Kitchen (W.W. Norton 2023). Her first thought was of cucumber salad—even before pickles. “It’s very basic, found in Eastern Europe, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and German, Austrian and Hungarian cuisines, but it’s basically thinly sliced cukes with lots of dill.” It's a summery dish that Jews often have as a side with “heavy, thick to the rib dishes,” says Koenig, and it takes her mind to seasonal vegetable gardens which were tended to in shtetls across Israel. 

“Salt them, mix with vinegar, a little bit of sugar and maybe some garlic, it’s a quick pickle, and a way to get a dose of freshness, which our cuisine is not necessarily known for,” she says. Counter to the lacto-fermented tubs of sour pickles that populate NYC’s Lower East Side, cucumber salad is a vinegar-based condiment as much as it is a salad, great on a sandwich. As Koenig points out, “it’s the simplest thing on the table that people go crazy for.”

Vinegar, in Talmudic times was referred to as chometz, which isn’t far off from chametz, or leavened bread. In fact, depending on the base ingredient, much vinegar is off the table due to what Pesach prohibits. There’s not malt vinegar, nor anything else grain or grape based, so it’s solely spirit vinegars (e.g. white distilled) which can be derived from corn that are usually utilized in Jewish cooking. While there are some kosher brands that clear the regulations, like Lieber’s, Gefen, which are more kitniyot (a group of foods, including legumes, rice, corn … ), vinegar may be a more modern litmus test of where certain Jews came from.

In Portico, Koenig cooks up a Roman delicacy, concia di zucchine, in which zucchini is fried and then vinegar-marinated. “When you go to Mediterranean Jewish cuisines, you’re going to find a lot of lemon and other souring agents,” Koenig says, “pomegranate molasses in Persian cookery, tamarind paste in Syria, but there’s a lot of vinegar in ancient Jewish dishes.” The recipe for concia is over 1000 years old, from when the Roman Jews were so impoverished, they’d take bumper crops of summer squash and fry them — since they didn’t have ovens, much of their cooking was done on the stovetop. Although frying feels decadent now, it was an economic way to cook back then. “In lieu of refrigeration, [marinating in vinegar] was another way to preserve,” Koenig notes. In more everyday applications Koenig thinks vinegar is a flavor worth practicing , “I use red wine vinegar in my rice and beef stuffed cabbage [in tomato sauce] — it gives it this very sweet-and-sour Yiddish-y tam, which means ‘Jewish taste.”” 

Jeffrey Yoskowitz, of Gefilteria and author of The Gefilte Manifesto: New Recipes for Old World Jewish Foods (Flatiron Books, 2016) has long documented that Jewish taste too — from when he first learned to cook from his family of Soviet Jews in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. They would make rusl, a deep purple bathed beet pickle used to sour their borscht; “You can’t make borscht with citric acid!” swears Yoskowitz, instead pointing to this staple ingredient that came from the basement root cellars of many Eastern European Jews. Yoskowitz believes this is partially how the “sweet and sour flavor so often associated with Ashkenzai Judaism became vinegar”. 

This elicits a story from Yoskowitz, in which we was invited into the home of ultra orthodox Jews from Vishnitz, one of the Hasidic sects, “I had this fish dish, it was basically [filets of] white fish instead of gefilte, like pickled herring but it wasn’t herring, with lots of onions and a very vinegar-y flavor.” A bowl of the sauce that fish had been sitting in was used to dip the challah, “like an old school Jewish fish sauce,” Yoskowitz jokes. He goes onto list German Jewish food items, from vinegar krauts, the aforementioned cucumber salad and stuffed cabbage, as well as the role of vinegar in mustard that’s often overlooked, “especially in the Jewish deli,” Yoskowitz quips, “some would argue ketchup too, but I don’t think that has a place in a deli other than French fries. Mustard unlocks pastrami for me, cuts the saltiness, and the cured nature of those meats”. 

Though trained as a lacto-fermenter, Yoskowitz is a sell-professed sucker for a variety of vinegar pickles. “In my schtick for pickling workshops I always trash vinegar pickles, but I actually do love pickled onions, pickled watermelon rinds, and my recipe for pickled grapes.”