Matzo Balls and Chiles? It’s Rosh Hashana With the Flavors of Mexico

In the late 1920s, the chef Fany Gerson’s grandparents, Jewish and facing persecution, fled Ukraine and boarded boats bound for New York City. But they weren't able to immigrate through Ellis Island, for reasons they can't quite remember — perhaps because of financial turmoil preceding the 1929 stock market crash, or because of limits set a few years earlier on the number of immigrants from certain countries.

So they settled in the closest country that would take them: Mexico.

To feel at home, they cooked. They made matzo ball soup, challah, gefilte fish — dishes that were typical of Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine, born of scarcity and cold climates and seemingly far different from Mexican cooking, with its abundant produce and aromatic spices.

But over the years, the family’s colorful surroundings crept into those monochromatic Jewish dishes. The challah became laced with flowery Mexican cinnamon and tart apples, the matzo balls filled with herbs and onions, and the gefilte fish dressed in a guajillo pepper sauce. This is the food Ms. Gerson grew up eating in Mexico City.

Now Ms. Gerson, 42, lives in New York. She runs a Mexican sweet shop, La Newyorkina, is co-owner of a doughnut business, Dough, and celebrates her family’s culinary traditions by cooking a vast Mexican-Jewish meal for her friends on Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year. (The holiday, which marks the start of the Jewish High Holy Days, begins this year on Sunday evening and ends Tuesday at sundown.)

While on the surface Mexican and Jewish cooking couldn’t be more distant, they are both “very tradition-rooted, very proud, very family-oriented,” she said. “Both Mexican and Jewish cultures are very soulful.”