"jewish" news and stories

Writing in Slate, Jewish food maven Joan Nathan ponders the bagel, that thick steering wheel of boiled dough that's such a cultural touchstone for American Jews. Now, a new book, The Bagel: A Cultural History delves into the subject, sussing out the bagel's ancient roots and exposing amusing details of the bagel's role in 20th century life.

Apparently, breads with holes have been around for centuries. Italians had hard crackers called taralli, Romans had something called buccellatum and the Chinese something called girde. Egyptians, Nathan adds, had their own - you can see the doughnut-shaped rolls in hieroglyphic displays at the Louvre. Polish Jews may have invented the modern bagel, when the Polish king first allowed Jews to begin commercial baking (they had previously been banned) and a baker made a round bread in his honor. Bagels found their way to the Lower East Side by the 19th century, and they burst into the non-Jewish American consciousness in the 1950s, when Lender's frozen bagels were invented. Today you can get them in Dunkin' Donuts stores from Albuquerque to Bangor.

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This year's Boston Marathon falls in the middle of the Jewish holiday of Passover, where observant Jews remember their ancestor's flight from enslavement in Egypt by not eating leavened foods. "Leavened" food products include bread, pasta, cookies, etc. - runners' favorite carb-loading meals. Can you really run 26.2 miles fueled with nothing but matzoh?

MSNBC has an interesting story about observant Jewish runners and their personal decisions about whether or not to keep kosher during the marathon. One Boston-area rabbi, who describes running as a "spiritual quest," plans to fuel up on potatoes and matzoh. Another runner plans to Passover rules with dry oatmeal on the morning of the race,

Dry oatmeal? I'd rather have matzoh brei, a childhood Passover specialty of eggy fried matzoh, which can be served savory with cheese and veggies, or sweet (my favorite) with maple syrup.

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Hanukkah is known as the "festival of lights" and is a holiday in which oil has a special meaning. To put it very, very briefly, Hanukkah celebrates a miraculous occurrence where one night's worth of oil burned for eight. There is a lot of oil used in foods that are served for this holiday and much of it is used for frying. The two most well-know Hanukkah staples are sufganiyah (jelly-filled donuts) and latkes, or potato pancakes. As good as these two foods are, health-conscious holiday revelers don't always want to completely blow their diet with a meal of entirely fried foods, nor do they want to restrict themselves to only a few bites of this holiday favorite.

Challah is a popular type of bread, lighter than brioche but still soft and very rich, so it is excellent on its own, when toasted or in a variety of dishes, such as french toast or bread pudding. It is a traditionally Jewish bread, though it has wide-ranging popularity now, and is a main feature of many Jewish dinners, especially around the holidays. The bread is usually made with lots of eggs and vegetable oil, rather than butter, because of the kosher laws against mixing meat and dairy. This Chocolate & Apricot Challah, made by Ariela of Baking and Books, uses eggs and oil, but is definitely not the ideal challah for serving with dinner. The bread is generously dotted with pieces of chopped up dried apricot and chunks of semisweet chocolate. She recommends serving it with tea or coffee as part of breakfast or a mid-morning snack, but with the delicious add-ins already in place, a chopped up loaf of this bread would probably make a wonderful bread pudding.

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The start of Hanukah is just under two weeks away and there are a lot of food traditions associated with it, as there are with most Jewish holidays. Any holiday that has a food tradition is worth taking note of as far as we're concerned, whether it is one you usually celebrate or not, if for no other reason than to expose yourself to some new food. In the case of A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking, the foods probably aren't all that "new" to most of us, but that only makes learning the history behind the recipes more interesting. The author discusses dietary laws, the symbolism of particular foods and how Jewish cooking has been influenced by other cultures. The recipes include NY Style Water Bagels, Traditional Friday Night Challah, Frozen Cheesecake and My Trademark, Most Requested, Absolutely Magnificent Caramel Matzoh Crunch. The instructions, even for the most complex breads and pastries, are easy enough for the the "baking challenged" to follow without problems

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