"jewish food" news and stories

There's nothing that says "Jewish Holiday!" to me more than a big bowl of chopped liver. While not particularly traditional to Hanukkah, it frequently makes an appearance at my family celebrations. My mom still talks about the version that her Auntie Tunkel used to make, in an old wooden chopping bowl with a red-handled chopper. Sadly, Auntie died in 1957 and no one wrote the recipe down while she was alive so I'll never know how hers tasted.

However, I have filled my own need for chopped liver with a recipe I found in the Washington Post in March of 2004. They were doing a series of recipes for Passover and printed Aron Groer's Chopped Liver. I don't remember who Aron Groer was, but he makes some good chopped liver. It isn't exactly like Auntie's, she used schmaltz (chicken fat) and raw onions, but it makes for some fine eating.

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I am nearing the end of my masters thesis these days. It is a collection of essays about women in my family and their relationships to food. One of the essays is about my Auntie Tunkel, the woman who raised my grandmother and her siblings. She immigrated from the Ukraine when she was 14 years in order to marry a man who she had never met. It wasn't a happy marriage, but according to family lore, she still managed to enjoy life and make everyone around her feel loved and appreciated.

Auntie Tunkel was an excellent cook and was particularly known for her stuffed cabbage. For the last few weeks, I've been bugging my mom for her stuffed cabbage recipe because I needed to include it in the thesis draft, and on Tuesday she finally came through. As she talked me through it on the phone, I could tell that she was recalling the taste memory of the dish as well. Writing down the recipe, I started to get hungry and by the time we got off the phone I was ready to bolt out of the house and head to the store for the necessary ingredients.

It's a time-intensive dish, but perfect for the weekend when you want to put a little more energy into cooking. When this dish is done, you'll be rewarded with a fragrant kitchen, an excellent meal and tasty leftovers (unless you are cooking for a crowd). The recipe is after the jump.

My real Jewish friends are off tonight having a "Break Passover" party, a little "celebration" where they're going to indulge in all those foods they couldn't eat for eight days - yeasted breads, cakes, pretty much anything that contains wheat, all of which were replaced during the Passover holiday with matzo.

Since the holiday is over, there might be a lot of leftover matzo. Sure, eating it at three meals for eight days, one might get sick of the hard, cracker-like flatbread, but no one ever gets sick of matzo ball soup. How could they? Matzo ball soup doesn't cause sickness, it cures it. It's known as Jewish penicillin, great for anytime of the year.

By now, most Jewish people are deep into their Seder dinners, as the first night of Passover began at Sundown today. However, I'm not Jewish so I don't get to enjoy the ceremonial storytelling and delicious Seder feast tonight.

Much of the story of Passover is about suffering, so I feel sort of sacrilegous in thinking that haroset is delicious. Haroset has its place on the Seder plate, representing the mortar that the Israelis used for building when they were kept as slaves in Egypt. Haroset can be made in many different ways, but the most basic recipe is made from apples, nuts, and sweet wine.

With Passover starting in a couple of days, many households are preparing for the eight day "Festival on Matzos" that is completely free of leavened breads, crackers, cakes, cookies.

However, many rabbis of some of the most orthodox associations and Jewish food historians say that the holiday has become overly complicated. Jews avoid grain altogether for fear that even without yeast, leavening may have occurred. Jewish people today have been overly cautious and have misunderstood the term for "leavening," simply excluding any ingredient, not just natural yeast, that causes dough to rise.

But the leavening that is mentioned in the Torah as "chametz," according to one author, is natural yeast, which causes leavening by fermentation, and does not refer to baking powder or baking soda.

Now, I'm not a strictly observant Jew. I didn't have to suffer with leaden cakes made of nut flours and matzoh meal for eight days every year, but I still have to wonder that "allowing" this and that and lifting restrictions takes away from one of the points of the holiday, which is to appreciate the suffering of ancestors.

On the other hand, perhaps there has just been too much focus on the rules themselves rather than on what they mean. 

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