Recipes of My 15 Grandmothers is a collection of recipes and stories from the times of the Crypto-Jews – who were hiding and pretending to be Catholic during the Spanish Inquisition while practicing their Judaism underground – through the present. The grandmothers of the family devised clever ways to disguise the fact that they were still keeping kosher while appearing to be eating pork. Until modern times, the family pretended to be devout Catholics, yet passed many of the Jewish customs on, sometimes in the form of these recipes, their true legacy. For several hundred years they hid their fasts and celebration of Jewish holidays, revealing them only via their recipes and some kosher kitchen customs. This collection was found recently, hidden away at Genie Milgrom’s mother’s house.
Genie Milgrom was born in Havana, Cuba, into a Roman Catholic family of Spanish ancestry. In an unparalleled work of genealogy, she was able to fully document her unbroken maternal lineage 22 generations going back as far as 1405 to pre-Inquisition Spain and Portugal. She has traveled extensively into Fermoselle, the village of her ancestors in the Zamora region of Spain, while doing field research on the past Jews of Fermoselle and the surrounding area. She is the past president of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Miami, current president of Tarbut Sefarad-Fermoselle in Spain, and also past president of the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies. Genie is the author of the book My 15 Grandmothers, as well as How I found My 15 Grandmothers: A Step by Step Guide, and her latest book, Pyre to Fire. The books have won the 2015 and 2018 Latino Author Book Awards. She also writes for several on-line sites as well as the Journal of Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian Crypto-Jews. She has spoken at the Knesset in Israel and lectures around the world, bringing awareness of the topic of people tracing their Jewish roots to the time of the Inquisition who are returning to Judaism. Her work has been showcased in The Jerusalem Post, the Miami Herald, and other publications around the world. She was awarded the State of Florida Genealogy Award for her outstanding achievements and advances in the pioneer work she has done in genealogy. Genie is now director of the Converso Genealogy Project, digitizing Inquisition files around the world. Most recently, she was awarded the coveted Medal of the Four Sephardic Synagogues in Jerusalem for her decades of work in recuperation of Sephardic Memory.
