A Jewish Librarian's Lifelong Quest to Preserve Sephardic Cookbooks
For more than four decades, Eleanor Cappon has walked the same narrow aisle of a university library, past the same shelves of bound periodicals, to reach a small reading room where she keeps her life's work. The Jewish librarian built what is now considered one of the most significant collections of Sephardic cookbooks in the world, gathering handwritten manuscripts, dog-eared community pamphlets, leather-bound family volumes, and slim paperback translations from across the Mediterranean. Her archive, tucked inside a modest reading room in the northeastern United States, draws scholars from places as far-flung as Tel Aviv, Thessaloniki, Buenos Aires, and Melbourne.
Cappon's path into Sephardic culinary history began not in a seminar room but at her grandmother's stove. Growing up in a household shaped by Ladino lullabies and the scent of syrup-soaked pastries, she absorbed a heritage that she would later learn was vanishing faster than anyone had anticipated. The cookbooks she preserves record the foods of Sephardic Jews from Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Rhodes, Egypt, and Morocco. They also document the migrations, expulsions, and quiet domestic rituals that defined a civilisation scattered by the Iberian expulsions of 1492 and the diasporic movements that followed.
| Regional tradition | Origins and migrations | Signature dishes | Common ingredients |
|---|---|---|---|
| Greek Sephardic | Thessaloniki, Rhodes, Athens | Boyos de harina, keftedes de prasa, almond pastries | Phyllo, ground almonds, lamb, honey, mahleb |
| Turkish Sephardic | Istanbul, Izmir, Edirne | Boyos, kulak, syrup-soaked sweets | Tahini, simit crumbs, pistachios, sour cherry |
| North African Sephardic | Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya | Skhina, tagine, mbattan | Preserved lemon, ras el hanout, cumin, dates |
From family stove to reading room
Eleanor Cappon never set out to become a curator of Sephardic cookbooks. Trained as a reference librarian at a small liberal arts college, she spent her early career fielding requests for everything from botanical journals to biblical concordances. Her interest in Jewish foodways surfaced almost by accident, when a patron asked whether the library held any Ladino recipes from the Ottoman Sephardic tradition. The answer, in 1981, was almost nothing. That absence became a calling.
She began photocopying recipes from borrowed community cookbooks shared by elderly Sephardic women in her Boston-area synagogue. As word spread among congregations from Worcester to Providence, donations trickled in: a wedding register from a Rhodesli family, a translation of an Istanbul sweet shop's recipe file, a brittle notebook belonging to a Sephardic grandmother from Alexandria. Cappon catalogued each item by hand, writing provenance notes on index cards that now fill four filing cabinets in her office.
The Sephardic cookbook as historical artifact
To outsiders, a cookbook may seem a humble record of ingredients and instructions. Within Cappon's archive, each volume is treated as a primary source, scrutinised for the social history embedded in its pages. Ladino phrases appear in the margins of Greek Sephardic recipe books, while Ottoman-era Hebrew script marks the bindings of manuals produced in Salonika. Recipes for almond macaroons documented in Bulgarian manuscripts reveal the migration of techniques across the Balkans, while North African tagine preparations carry the unmistakable imprint of Berber and Arab neighbours.
Cappon approaches her work with the rigour of a historian. She tracks down original publishers, traces the path of a recipe through successive editions, and records whose hands touched each book. Many volumes bear witness to the Shoah, including an Egyptian Jewish household manual whose final entry, an unfinished lemon pickle recipe, was written in 1942 by a woman who did not survive the upheavals that scattered Cairo's Jewish community. Such details transform a humble recipe into evidence of an interrupted life.
Building a collection, one kitchen at a time
The acquisition methods Cappon developed over the years are as eclectic as the cookbooks themselves. She maintains correspondence with Sephardic heritage organisations from the Greek island of Rhodes to the Turkish port of Izmir, accepts donations from descendants scattered across France, Israel, and Latin America, and occasionally buys volumes from antiquarian dealers in New York and London. Estate sales in Brookline, Massachusetts, where many Sephardic families settled after 1948, have yielded several of the archive's most prized items.
Preservation is a constant challenge. Many of the older books arrived water-stained, crumbling at the spine, or infested with silverfish. Cappon has worked with conservators to encapsulate fragile pages in archival polyester sleeves, while digitisation projects have allowed her to share high-resolution scans with researchers who cannot travel to the archive. The collection now holds more than 2,400 items, ranging from sixteenth-century manuscript fragments to community cookbooks self-published in 2023 by Sephardic women's circles in São Paulo and Melbourne.
Voices in the margins
What distinguishes Cappon's scholarship is her attention to the marginalia. She has spent years photographing handwritten notes that descendants left in family cookbooks: adjustments to recipes, substitutions for unavailable ingredients, names of guests served, dates of weddings and births. A single Sephardic cookbook may contain several generations of culinary memory in a single binding, with each hand leaving a small trace.
Her method has attracted collaborators worldwide. In Sydney, members of the Australian Jewish Genealogical Society have used scans from her collection to trace family lines back to the island of Rhodes and the port of Thessaloniki. In Melbourne, where a sizeable Sephardic community descended from Greek, Egyptian, and Turkish Jewish migrants has shaped the city's celebrated food culture, chefs and food writers have consulted her archive to revive dishes once served at suburban Rosh Hashanah tables in Caulfield and St Kilda. Cappon has also contributed to Australian academic work on Mediterranean foodways, providing scans and translations for a 2022 volume produced by researchers at Monash University.
Reaching across the diaspora
The collection has become a quiet meeting point for a far-flung diaspora. Researchers from Buenos Aires, Paris, and Jerusalem travel to consult her materials, while a growing network of digital correspondents reaches places as varied as Auckland, Toronto, and Perth. Cappon has welcomed Australian visitors with particular warmth, noting that Sephardic Australians - concentrated in Melbourne's bayside suburbs and in Sydney's eastern neighbourhoods - have contributed generously to the archive, sharing community cookbooks produced for fundraisers at Caulfield's Sephardic synagogues and within the long-standing congregations of the Sydney Sephardic community.
The broader relevance of her work extends beyond Jewish scholarship. Australian food historians have drawn on the collection to understand how Mediterranean migrants shaped local markets, including Melbourne's famous Queen Victoria Market, where Sephardic grocery families once dominated the deli trade. Under Australia's Country of Origin Labelling laws, which require packaged foods to identify where they were grown, produced, or made, the culinary origins Cappon documents carry renewed commercial and cultural meaning. Restaurants in Sydney and Melbourne now market Sephardic dishes with explicit reference to the family's place of origin, an exercise in transparency that mirrors the precision of Cappon's archival records.
The librarian's archive is a reminder that cookbooks are never just cookbooks. They are passports, diaries, family trees, and at times tombstones. Eleanor Cappon has spent her career listening to what these volumes say, and her collection ensures that Sephardic voices, in Ladino and Greek, Turkish and Arabic, Hebrew and Spanish, continue to speak from the kitchen shelves of history.