J

ews who keep kosher do not cook 
meat with milk or eat meat cooked 
with milk or even make use of 
meat cooked with milk. Imagine how dis-
turbing it feels for a kosher-keeping Jew 
to get served a piece of chicken swim-
ming in what looks like milk! The trick 
that makes this possible: The chef uses 
almond milk. Chicken in almond milk 
was a delicacy and, centuries ago, often 
served on Purim. 
Rabbi Shelomo Luria (1510-1573) 
mentions that “on Purim and such occa-
sions, when we usually eat chicken in 
almond milk,” we must “put almonds 
beside it and on it, as a sign.” 
Rabbi Luria, known as Maharshal, 
wants to make sure that we do not 
mislead people into thinking 
think we have cooked the 

chicken in animal milk, which would, by 
rabbinic law, not be kosher (quoted in 
Siftei Cohen note 6 to Shulhan Arukh, 
Yoreh Deah 87:3).
His contemporary, Rabbi Moshe 
Isserles, (Poland, born about 1520 or 30, 
died 1572) disagrees about the need for 
a garnish: “and they are accustomed to 
make milk out of almonds, and put in it 
the meat of fowl . . . and we do not need 
to put almonds on it.” 
After all, chicken in animal milk 
is itself only rabbinically forbidden. 
Requiring the almond garnish to ward 
off suspicious onlookers would be 
excessive. 

Later, Rabbi Yonatan Eybuschutz 
(1690-1764, Prague and Hamburg) also 
skips the garnish, because “people are 
unlikely to make a mistake,” since “it is 
common to cook chicken with almond 
milk.” Rabbi Eybuschutz adds, “and 
extremely delicious.” 
Anyway, almond milk is not milk at all, 
but only the liquid extracted from a nut. 
Whether we need to garnish the dish 
with almonds or not, chicken in almond 
milk belonged in the Purim feast. 
The rabbis do not give us a recipe for 
this Purim treat, but we do have several 
earlier recipes for similar dishes. In about 
1390, King Richard II of England asked 
his master cooks to write down their 
best recipes, and they produced a 
cookbook called The Forme of 
Cury. Their chicken in 

38 | 

PURIM

What did our ancestors serve at a Purim feast? 
How about Chicken in Almond Milk?

A Purim Recipe 
from the Past

LOUIS FINKELMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER

LO

UIS 

FINK

ELM

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