Theodore Herzl’s Christmas Cookies: Spiced Chocolate Hazelnut Krokerle
December 24, 2018
Ever have ambivalent feelings about Christmas? So did the Jews of nineteenth-century Germany. While you might have though Chrismukkah is a modern invention, it actually wasn’t dreamed up by the writers of The O.C.—its history is much longer and, arguably, more distinguished than that.
Prewar German and Austrian Jews were well known for having been Europe’s most assimilated. While some went so far as to convert to Christianity in a bid to get ahead in society, others wanted to have their lebkuchen and eat it too, retaining their identities as Jews without missing out on all the perks of bourgeois German life—one key perk being the celebration of Christmas.
Everything Bagel Mixed Nuts
December 17, 2018
There are a bunch of different ways Poppy and Prune recipes come to be. Sometimes I stumble across a cool recipe or historical factoid that I can’t wait to share. Sometimes I get a request. Sometimes I have a brilliant (or not) idea for an original recipe. And sometimes, there’s something I want to make that has no obvious Jewish connection, and I get a little creative trying to make it fit.
Flaming Tea: The Wildest Hanukkah Tradition
December 10, 2018
You know about latkes (even, if you’ve been keeping up with Poppy and Prune, obscure varieties like chestnut and brain). You know about sufganiyot and its predecessors, from awwame to zvingous. But have you ever heard of the flaming tea ceremony?
No? Me either, until a few years ago when I was leafing through Phyllis and Miriam Glazer’s The Essential Book of Jewish Festival Cooking and learned about this wild Russian Hanukkah tradition: basically, at the end of Hanukkah dinner, everyone gets a lump of sugar (broken off from a giant sugar cone—much cooler than your average sugar cube), dips it in brandy (slivovitz, I presume), lights the boozy cube on fire, and drops it into a glass of hot tea, freshly poured from a samovar.
Luqmat: A Little Fritter With A Long History
December 4, 2018
Luqmat. Bumuelos. Sfenj. ʿAwwamé. Lokma. Zvingous.
So many names for one deep-fried dough ball. How did these little-yeasted fritters—whatever you want to call them—spread all across the Mediterranean? And how did they become the preeminent Ḥanukka treat of the Sephardi world, from Morocco to Turkey?
This Hanukkah, I covered the world of Sephardi fritters (and deep fried for only the second time in my life) for haSephardi—head over there to find out, among other things, why some Sephardi authorities thought these little guys were THE biblical manna.
Lazy Latkes: The Poppy and Prune Guide
November 26, 2018
Hanukkah is one week away! But let’s say you’re not in the mood to lovingly recreate three historic latke varieties from scratch this year—what’s a Jewish foodie to do?
Don’t worry. I got you. The fact that I did lovingly recreate three historical latke varieties last week notwithstanding, I’m actually a pretty lazy cook myself most of the time. Most years, the only latkes I eat come from a box in the freezer section of Trader Joe’s. So I’m pretty familiar with the low-energy latke scene.
And so, I bring you the fruits of my non-labor: a field guide to lazy latkes. Three low-effort ways to get your latke on this year, from least to most lazy.
Latkes Before Potato: Taste-testing Cheese, Buckwheat, and Chestnut Pancakes
November 19, 2018
Nothing says “Hanukkah tradition” better than a crispy potato latke, right? WRONG!
Even though potato latkes have come to dominate the Hanukkah food scene here in the US in the twenty-first century, they’re actually a relative newcomer to the Jewish culinary repertoire. The potato, a native of South America, didn’t even arrive in Europe until the sixteenth century, and it took much longer than that to attain popularity on the continent. (Fun fact: in the early days, potatoes were thought by many Europeans not only to be poisonous but also to cause leprosy.)
Eating Black-Eyed Peas in the Caribbean’s Lost Jewish Colony
November 13, 2018
Winter weather getting to you? How about a little trip to the warm, sunny Caribbean.. more specifically, the lost Jewish colony of the Caribbean?
“But P&P, that’s not a thing,” I hear you protesting. Okay, maybe it’s a little bit of an exaggeration—there is no Jewish Roanoke in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle—but the island of Curacao, north of Venezuela, does have an unexpectedly epic Jewish history (fun fact: at one time it was known by the Dutch name of Jodenwijk, Jew Borough).
From Colewort to Cabbage: The Incredible Evolution of Cabbage Noodles
November 5, 2018
Cabbage is one of the world’s oldest cultivated vegetables, and even today it remains one of the most widely grown and eaten. But turns out the original cabbage was pretty different from the green (or red) stuff you might find in your basic 21st-century coleslaw.
Wild cabbage—which, as I just learned in the course of researching this post, is known as colewort (which kind of sounds like something the witches from Macbeth would’ve thrown in their cauldron)—resembled modern kale in shape, and had an extremely bitter flavor. So bitter, in fact, that both leaves and stalks required pickling or boiling to be palatable.
The Unexpected Origins of the Common Marble Cake
October 22, 2018
Originating in early nineteenth-century Germany, the marble cake is a relative newcomer to the Jewish baking pantheon (at least compared to such venerable sweets as honey cake).
But it turns out that marble cake as we know it is even newer than that: rather than the familiar chocolate and vanilla, the earliest variants consisted of kugelhopf (sweet yeast bread), where one half was colored with molasses and spices.
Potatoes Are the New Chestnuts: German Chestnut Crème from The German-Jewish Cookbook
October 15, 2018
Orange is the new black. Thursday is the new Friday. 30 is the new 20. Potatoes are the new… chestnuts?!
Yes, while our sad Eastern European forefathers and mothers were busy chowing down on, like, black radishes and parsley root, their Southern and Central European brethren were living the (comparative) good life on a chestnut-based diet.