“Food is about agriculture… about culture struggles…”Ottolenghi could have been talking about cholent — a dish born from law, survival, exile, and the stubborn determination of a people to keep tradition alive, even when the world kept trying to take it from them.

Cholent isn’t glamorous. It’s not the dish you plate with tweezers. It’s a slow-cooked Sabbath stew — meat, beans, potatoes, barley — thrown together before sundown on Friday, then left to bubble away through the night. By Saturday, it’s transformed into something thick, rich, comforting, and deeply, unmistakably Jewish. Its entire existence is tied to Shabbat, to the prohibition against cooking once the day of rest begins. So Jewish communities across Europe and the Middle East came up with a workaround: cook slowly, cook early, let time do the rest.

Its origins run deep — medieval ghettos and shtetls, Middle Eastern courtyards, families scattered across continents but united by the same pot simmering through the dark. Every community added its own accent. Eastern Europeans threw in barley and beans. Sephardic kitchens added spices, chickpeas, rice. Yemenites built skhina, Iraqis had t’bit. In Israel, all these versions collided and blended, turning cholent into a national patchwork of Jewish history.

Modern Israeli cholent is the sum of its journeys: beef or chicken melting into potatoes, beans softening into creaminess, barley thickening everything into something you could almost cut with a spoon. Cumin, paprika, garlic, onions — a spice profile borrowed from a dozen ancestral homelands. It smells like comfort. It smells like memory.

And it’s more than food. It’s ritual. You eat it on Shabbat afternoon, surrounded by family or friends or whichever strangers you just welcomed in, because that’s how these meals work. The stew is hot, the pace is slow, nobody’s rushing anywhere. Cholent forces you to sit, talk, rest — a small rebellion against the frantic world outside.

In Israel, cholent isn’t just tradition. It’s a cultural anchor. A reminder that Jewish identity was shaped not only by texts and temples, but by kitchens — by families gathering on Friday night, by a pot simmering through uncertainty and exile, by the simple insistence on sharing a hot meal in a world that often made that difficult.