Unlike most other cuisines, Jewish cuisine - because of sheer age of the worldwide Jewish diaspora - is not one unified cuisine, but collective of worldwide traditions of cookery linked together by general conformity of local cuisine to the rules of kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws.

Certain foods, such as apples, honey, olives, matzo, and lamb are associated with certain Jewish ritual traditions. Other foods, such as pork, octopus, vulture, and cobra are eschewed. Meat may not be combined with dairy in the same dish, and nothing that contains animal blood is kosher.