What’s Cooking? Jewish Culinary Culture

Show me your plate and I will tell you who you are: where you hail from, who your ancestors were, who your neighbours are and what lifestyle you lead.
In the new exposition, we show our audience what is cooking in the Jewish world – we acquaint the wide public with Jewish culture in various corners of the globe by showing typical Jewish dishes, the way they are fixed, their origin and symbolism.

“What’s Cooking? Jewish Culinary Culture” exhibition takes you on a journey across time and space. We present the diversity of traditions and dishes consumed by Jews residing in the diaspora over the centuries. We demonstrate how certain dishes and products became widespread as a result of numerous migrations, from the Middle Ages to the great waves of migration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We show the religious foundation which holds Jewish cuisine together – the rules of kashrut which inform the way certain dishes are prepared, as well as breaking away from that tradition today and rediscovering culinary roots. We also encourage our visitors to take a moment to reflect after viewing the four sculptures by Anna Królikiewicz produced especially for the POLIN Museum exposition.