By Gabriella Gershenson
Every Rosh Hashanah, my grandmother Rhoda, a proud Rigan, boiled knots of dough in honey syrup until they were as golden and shiny as amber, and almost as hard. She’d place each pastry in a cupcake liner, where the remnants of the glaze would drip down and solidify into a chewy foot that could yank out your fillings. These were teiglach, as beautiful as they were austere, and a delicacy in my family. You may be more familiar with the teiglach made by Lithuanians, a heap of dough nuggets held together by the sticky glaze they were cooked in, sometimes with nuts or candied fruit thrown in. And if those sound like Italian struffoli, you wouldn’t be wrong. Teiglach’s roots go back to the vermiculos of ancient Rome, fried squiggles of dough smothered in honey and seasoned with pepper.
And, like many things Jewish, teiglach’s sweet rewards come with the risk of pain. Or, at least, a visit to the dentist.
Teiglach
Serves 4 to 6
1 cup plus 1 tablespoon (137 grams) unbleached all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting
⅛ teaspoon salt
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
Zest of ½ orange
Zest of ½ lemon
Canola oil, for frying
½ cup (120 milliliters) honey
⅛ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper (optional)
In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine the flour, salt, eggs, ½ teaspoon of the vanilla, the orange zest, and the lemon zest. (You can also combine all these in a large bowl and mix by hand.) Mix on medium-high speed until thoroughly combined, 2 to 3 minutes; the dough will be sticky.
Using flour as needed to prevent the dough from sticking to the counter, turn the dough out onto a work surface. Divide the dough into three roughly equal pieces and roll each into a ½-inch-thick (1.5-centimeter) log.
Cut the logs crosswise into ¼-inch (6-millimeter) nubs using a sharp knife, a bench scraper, or a pair of scissors dusted with flour. Quickly roll the pieces between your fingers to give them a rustic, irregular shape—the crevices and nooks will allow for better glaze adherence. Set aside.
Heat 2 inches (5 centimeters) of canola oil in a large, heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium-high heat until it reaches 350ºF (177ºC). Line a baking sheet or a bowl with paper towels.
Fry the dough balls in batches, a couple of handfuls at a time, making sure not to overcrowd the pot. Use a slotted spoon or a spider to turn them over as they cook until they are golden brown all over, 45 seconds to 1 minute. Transfer to the paper towel–lined pan or bowl to drain. Repeat to cook the remaining dough balls. Transfer the drained fried dough balls to a large mixing bowl.
Combine the honey, remaining ½ teaspoon vanilla, and the pepper (if using) in a small saucepan. Bring the honey to a simmer over medium-high heat—it will loosen at first and become syrup-like—and cook until it reduces slightly, about 10 minutes. (While the honey is hot, it may not appear to have thickened, but once it cools, it’ll have a slightly stiffer body.) Pour the honey over the fried dough balls, tossing them in the syrup with a spoon to coat.
Transfer to a cake platter or a shallow serving bowl and serve immediately.
By Esther Werdiger
Jews made dairy-free ice cream happen, and it wasn’t for health or environmental reasons. It was because they wanted to eat a dessert on the Sabbath that wasn’t compote (sorry, Mom). I still find it funny when earnest vegans discover pareve food, because while they’re making conscious choices, we just wanted to eat what we wanted—all the time.
Tofutti is the poster child for this concept and well predates the surge of dairy-free desserts available today. Tofutti was invented in 1981, after some difficulty, by David Mintz, an Orthodox Jew who was encouraged to persevere by the Lubavitcher Rebbe, a man who clearly understood the importance of a treat that makes it easier to be kosher. With Tofutti’s dorky dad humor (butter pecan became “Better Pecan”) and Jewish simcha-themed packaging (see “Marry Me” ice cream bars), the whole operation strikes me as very haimish. Tofutti Cutie is still a perfect name for an ice cream sandwich, and I could probably pull together a minyan of people anywhere who at some point had a dependency on Tofutti’s 30-calorie fudge pops. Mintz also credits his wife, Rachel, with having faith during the arduous process of developing his now famous secret formula, which is my favorite part of the origin story. Because it’s hard to decide which is more Jewish: a pareve dessert or a steadfast wife named Rachel.
By Liel Leibovitz
For anyone contemplating the laws of kashrut, the decision is inevitably reduced to a crude culinary arithmetic. Consider parting with treyf, and, soon enough, you’ll find yourself mentally dividing everything edible into three groups.
In the first, entitled “Food I’m Not Likely to Miss,” I put shrimp cocktail and fried calamari and ham sandwiches, all of which I have always enjoyed but none of which, I realized, I would ever miss if I resolved to no longer be a few cheeseburgers removed from the faith of my fathers.
Speaking of cheeseburgers, I put them in group number two, “Food I’m Somewhat Likely to Miss,” together with the oysters I enjoyed slurping with my dry martinis and the lobster I loved drowning in butter on breezy summer evenings with my family on Cape Cod.
But group number three, reserved for food I absolutely could not imagine living without, contained one single entry: bacon.
It was, after all, my original sin, the instrument of my fall from grace. I had spent the first decade and a half of my life blissfully unaware of its scent or its taste, raised in a kosher home in Israel where a hearty cholent was the peak of fleshy goodness. And then, one day, slogging through puberty, I slouched into a friend’s home and smelled something transcendent. I understood, with that one whiff, what it must’ve been like to stand in the ancient Temple and take in the smoke rising from the burnt offering, every breath making clearer the spiritual affinities between meat and the divine. I asked my friend’s mother what she was making, and she replied that it was bacon. She might as well have said Kryptonite: Bacon was a substance I had never imagined actually existed on the same planet I, myself, inhabited. She asked me if I wanted a strip. Without thinking, I said that I did.
Reader, I loved it. The appeal was more than gustatory; it was emotional. Eating bacon was like taking communion in a religion of my choosing, casting off the yoke of tradition my parents had placed on my back without my comprehension or consent. I still believed in God, still felt deeply Jewish, was still proud of my heritage, but with every crispy, fatty bite, I felt I was forging my own path forward, a path that didn’t require me to forgo life’s pleasures to pledge my allegiance to my people and my faith. I delivered a version of this sermon often, frequently over breakfast buffets where bacon took its rightful place beside the potatoes and next to the eggs.
When I got older, when the wisdom of old ideas shone brightly and kashrut began to beckon to me, I hesitated for a long time—mainly because of bacon. Giving it up felt like surrender. I was never, I realized, going to rationalize my way into submission. If I was going to return to the purities of my youth, I had to just plunge in and do it.
At first, every meal was a small heartbreak, defined by the meat that wasn’t there. Was this burger really good without a strip or two on top? Was that salad really healthy without the gift of crumbled goodness? And, most important, was my spirit growing even as my waist trimmed down?
I got my answer one balmy afternoon as we New Yorkers often do: on the street. I was hurrying somewhere when I passed an outdoor café where a young woman had just received her order: a BLT, the very spiritual balm I had ordered on so many drunken nights. I slowed down, allowing the familiar smell to settle in my nostrils. I expected to feel jittery, angry, distressed. Instead, I felt what might’ve been the greatest calm of my life. It wasn’t the calm of comprehension, since I still can’t fully articulate why I decided to once again keep kosher. It was the calm of mastery and of mystery, of knowing that my soul, responding to strange signals from the primordial past, is being called upon to do something it doesn’t yet understand and that it can still command the gullet to do its bidding.
By not eating bacon, in other words, I felt at the same time completely in charge and not at all in charge, which is about as good a description of life as you’re likely to find. I still miss bacon, though less every day. Meat is great, but meaning is better.
By Michael Wex
The funny-sounding name comes from the Middle High German zuomuese, which means “side dish”; the contents are defined by the fruits or vegetables available and the cook’s imagination. While a mango–passion fruit tsimmes is theoretically possible, the first thing to come into the mind of any native eater of Yiddish food who hears the word tsimmes is likely to be a carrot. The carrot tsimmes is to tsimmes what the gin martini is to martinis––the standard to which all others must aspire. Sliced carrots, honey, a nice luminous roux made of flour, schmaltz, and the liquid from the carrots and honey––when it doesn’t spell “Shabbos,” it spells “Rosh Hashanah.”
So where does tropical fruit come in? Far from being newfangled or inauthentic, the canned pineapple prominent in so many a modern tsimmes started out as a token of freedom, stewed proof that the old country was really behind us. Introduced into Russia in the eighteenth century, pineapples were grown in hothouses, usually by members of the aristocracy, and, as food historian Joyce Toomre says, quickly became “a symbol of luxury and Western culture.” Exactly. This apparently incongruous addition to one of our oldest traditional dishes was really a tangy fuck-you to the czar and all his policies. Pineapple-happy Jewish immigrants were putting American abundance into the service of a hitherto unrealizable European ideal.
But don’t look to tsimmes for political consistency. An upper-class person, one to the manner born, can be described as coming from the tsimmes, much as you’d call the same person a member of the upper crust in English. In Yiddish, as in English, you could also say that he or she is from the same smetene, the very cream of society, but only Yiddish can portray Caroline Kennedy as a glistening vegetable stew.
Tsimmes
Serves 4
2 cups plus 2 tablespoons (510 milliliters) cold water
1¼ teaspoons kosher salt, plus more to taste
2 long strips of orange zest (peeled with a vegetable peeler)
6 large carrots (1 pound/455 grams), thick ends split lengthwise, cut crosswise into 1½-inch (4-centimeter) pieces
½ cup (120 milliliters) fresh orange juice
2 tablespoons (30 milliliters) honey, plus more to taste
12 to 15 pitted prunes (¾ cup/165 grams)
2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
½ teaspoon cornstarch
2 tablespoons (6 grams) finely chopped fresh parsley
Combine 2 cups (480 milliliters) of the water, 1 teaspoon of the salt, and the orange zest in a medium saucepan and bring to a boil over high heat. Add the carrots, bring back to a boil, then reduce the heat to medium. Cover the pot with the lid ajar and simmer until the carrots are soft enough that a sharp knife can go through without resistance, but they still have some bite, about 15 minutes. Remove from the heat, strain the cooking liquid into a bowl, and reserve it. Discard the orange peel and set the carrots aside.
In the same pot, stir together ½ cup (120 milliliters) of the reserved cooking liquid, the orange juice, honey, and the remaining ¼ teaspoon of the salt, then add the carrots. If they are not completely submerged in the liquid, add more of the reserved cooking water. Bring to a boil over high heat, boil for about 3 minutes, then reduce the heat to low. Cover the pot with the lid ajar and simmer until the carrots are very soft, about 30 minutes.
Add the prunes and cook until they are soft but still whole, about 15 minutes more. Add the lemon juice. Taste and add more salt and honey, if needed, to achieve a subtle sweet-and-sour flavor.
Dissolve the cornstarch in the remaining 2 tablespoons (30 milliliters) cold water and add it to the pot. Briefly increase the heat to high to bring the liquid to a boil and cook for 2 to 3 minutes. Carefully stir to coat the carrots and prunes with the thickened liquid.
Transfer the tsimmes to a serving dish and sprinkle with the parsley before serving.
The tsimmes will keep in an airtight container in the refrigerator for 3 to 4 days.
By Esther Werdiger
A friend of mine whose young family had outgrown the confines of Brooklyn-apartment living recently bought a house in Pomona, New York. Suspecting I may be a few years behind him on the leaving-the-city timeline, I asked what the Jewish community was like there.
“Well,” he answered, “there are Chabadniks, Toonabygels—”
I interrupted and asked, “What is a Toonabygel?”
And he said, “You know, Chassidish people who aren’t so Chassidish anymore but they still order a ‘toonabygel’!”
I grew up in a strictly kosher household in Australia; the only thing we’d ever get at a nonkosher restaurant was a drink that came in a sealed bottle. And that drink would have to be on the kosher list, a small and thick book that my mother kept in her handbag.
I’m still quite strict—I genuinely feel a sort of visceral clenching when I hear or read about pork—but I do now patronize regular-person restaurants. That world is still somewhat novel to me. For example: diners! I grew up seeing diners only in movies. To eat at a diner, for me, is a borderline cinematic experience, full of pleasurably borrowed nostalgia. But when the mere mention of treyf meat still makes me lose my hearing for a split second, similar to the way I imagine people hear nothing after a bomb explodes, what could I even eat at one of these mythic spots?
Tuna fish, of course. On toasted rye, which is obviously packaged and probably has an OU certification. And the toaster gets used only to make toast. The tuna itself, from a can, is most certainly certified kosher. Hellmann’s mayonnaise, kosher, too. I could win a medal in this kind of mental gymnastics, by the way. But it’s the most kosher thing you can order, even in a very treyf place. And these are all ingredients you can buy in any supermarket, anywhere in the country. And it’s pareve, so you never have to wait.
God bless America. Turns out I’m a Toonabygel, too.
Tuna Salad
Serves 4 to 6
2 (5-ounce/141.7-gram) cans tuna in water, drained
¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons (90 milliliters) mayonnaise
3 tablespoons (30 grams) finely diced red onion (from ½ onion)
2 tablespoons (8 grams) finely chopped fresh parsley
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon (20 milliliters) fresh lemon juice
1 tablespoon (15 milliliters) Dijon mustard
½ teaspoon kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
Place the tuna in a medium bowl and mash it with a fork. Add the mayonnaise, onion, parsley, lemon juice, mustard, and salt. Thoroughly combine. Season with pepper. Refrigerate in an airtight container for at least 1 hour or up to overnight before serving. The flavors will deepen after a night in the fridge.
The tuna will keep in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 5 days.
By Wayne Hoffman
One of the most common features of the Jewish kitchen isn’t found in a pantry, or a cupboard, or a refrigerator. It’s a tea bag—specifically, a used tea bag, air-drying on the counter or creating a tiny puddle on a saucer.
For my parents, who were otherwise coffee drinkers, a cup of tea was a nightly ritual when I was growing up. They didn’t go for anything fancy or herbal or decaffeinated; it was Lipton all the way. They’d share a single tea bag between the two of them . . . and then leave it on the counter for the next night. I didn’t keep track of how long they’d make it last. It’s entirely possible that they had only the one tea bag for my entire childhood.
I’ve heard similar stories from other Jewish households for decades. Maybe it’s a reflection of the ancient Talmudic principle of bal tashchit, preventing needless waste, or perhaps it’s a more generationally specific tendency among children of the Depression. Growing up poor in Jersey City, my mother (and my aunt) picked this up from my grandmother, who’d lived through the Depression and would never have wasted something as precious as a tea bag.
When I moved away to New York, I kept a small box of Lipton in my cupboard for my parents’ annual weekend visits. Once, when my parents and my aunt were all at my apartment, I made them tea, being careful to use one tea bag to make all three cups. But when I tossed the used bag in the garbage afterward, they howled. “It’s still good!” they shouted. “You can use it again!”
“I don’t drink tea,” I protested. (To me, tea tastes exactly how you’d expect: like hot grass clippings.) “I make it only once a year, for you—and you’re leaving tomorrow.”
They relented, grumbling, but I could almost hear them wondering if it would be so bad to keep the bag on the counter until the next year.
