Sabbath Meals

The Knaidel Quest

I got my current favorite recipe for matzah balls from a very old cookbook put out by the Manischewitz company in 1930. My friend who is the scion of several rabbinical lines had it in her house and gave it to me. It has lost its cover but here is how I would cite it if I were writing a paper:

F.O. Gahr, Tempting Kosher Dishes Prepared from World Famous Manischewitz's Matzo Products. Cinncinati, Ohio: The B. Manischewitz Company, 1930.

(The author's name is kind of buried in the title page--Miss F.O. Gahr, B.S., Domestic Science Expert and Graduate in Institutional Management. If anyone is related to this Miss Gahr, please contact me.)

The book opens in both directions--that is, all the recipes are available both in English and in Yiddish. In 1930, there were still a lot of Jews left in the world who were more comfortable cooking from a Yiddish cookbook. Some items in the English table of contents refer to the Yiddish section only. I have not attempted to translate those recipes yet, but I might. I have not been bold enough to try much of the book besides the matzah ball recipes.

There are some amusing oddities in this book, including Boston Chremsel, which is a sort of pasty with a dough of eggs, matzah meal, chicken shmaltz, water and salt filled with honey-sweetened beets seasoned with ginger and ground nuts. And iced tea, they have you add iced tea. You make a sort of hamantashen out of this. I have not tried to make this, for sooooo many reasons. But if you double dare me, I'll go out and buy some Nyafat and make them for you next year. I know, Nyafat is made of hydrogenated oil. Don't worry, you will be fine.)

There are something like 25 dumpling recipes in this book, though some of them sound horrible. Liver Knoedel, anyone? The one I think most resembles my late great aunt's recipe is Fluffy Knoedel. (Since she never gave her children the recipe, I will never know if this is how she did it. This is a paternal great aunt, not the childless maternal great aunt who carefully wrote all her recipes down for her beloved niece, my mom.)

Fluffy Knoedel
3 eggs
3/4 cup Manischewitz's Matzo Meal
1/2 tsp. salt

Beat whites until stiff, then beat in yolks of eggs. Fold in matzo meal and salt. Let stand 5 minutes, then form balls with a spoon and drop into boiling soup stock or salt water. Cover and cook 45 minutes. Recipe makes 12 large balls.

Obviously, the recipe works quite well with any brand of matzah meal, transliterated any way you like. If you want your eggs to work well, bring them to room temperature by placing the uncracked eggs in a bowl of warm tap water for 15 minutes right before you break and separate them. I also recommend that you add some salt to the egg whites for more successful fluffing.

Now, as you know, there are a lot of theories about how to make matzah balls come out light. Some add seltzer, water, or soup stock. I found that worked pretty well with recipes that call for additional fat (over and above the egg yolks.) Some call for baking powder. Of course, baking powder will help you make fluffier matzah balls, but I have never tried it. It seems crazy to me that Ashkenazi rabbis will allow you to use chemical leavening agents and not put their heksher on something with corn syrup in it. It's very inconsistent. Not that I'm dying to have corn syrup on Pesach, all those folks who like the original coke formula would be quite upset. The most common way to make matzah balls is to make the batter, chill it in the fridge for an hour or more, and then plunge balls of it into a pot of boiling salted water. Everyone agrees, do not lift the lid during cooking. Of course, if you forget and lift the lid because you can't remember what's in the pot, you will still get tasty knaidlach. Especially if your husband, like mine, doesn't care if they are fluffy or not.

Some people really prefer their matzah balls to be dense. I read in some book that South African Jews, who have preserved Litvak culinary traditions, put some hardboiled egg yolk in the center of their knaidlach. Aha, here is a recipe--no, it's not hardboiled egg yolk in this one. Weirder than that, it's half the batter made with yolk and spiced with cinnamon and half made with white, with a ball of the yolk batter inside the egg white batter.

Next year, maybe.

Shabbat dinner 4/29 and the end of Pesach

For Friday night dinner, I made:

Vegetable soup with matzah balls
Braised baby artichokes
Salmon patties
Stuffed zucchini
Cauliflower kugel
organic grape tomatoes (for the baby)
Russian dressing with homemade mayonnaise
Fruit salad (mango, banana, orange and date)

Because it was nearly the end of Pesach and I couldn't get any tomato sauce, because it was nearly the end of Pesach and I accidentally melted our one plastic measuring cup on the stove, because it was nearly the end of Pesach and I didn't have any more patience, I did a lot of improvising.

There is a great stuffed zucchini recipe in Debra Wasserman's No Cholesterol Passover Recipes book, but I didn't have tomato sauce, so I improvised something equally great. I chopped up the last tomato and a half in the house and cooked it with onions in olive oil and added the zucchini innards, sugar, salt and pepper, and I mixed all of that with some matzah meal and some chopped cilantro. I have been using a bottle of whole mixed peppercorns in different colors (it has a grinder on the top) and that gave a great flavor to the zucchini.

This time, I made the soup for the matzah balls by frying onion, shallot and garlic in olive oil until golden, then adding with the water a diced sweet potato, a white potato, some zucchini, and a lot of grated fresh ginger. It came out very well, I think in part because I let the soup simmer for a couple of hours on the stove.

I know I mainly write as a vegetarian here, and I am mostly vegetarian, but sometimes I eat fish. Sort of like a macrobiotic diet, except not really--more like occasional guilty and nostalgic inconsistency. (Some people, my mom for example, consider fish to be legitimately vegetarian, but I do not. I think Jewish culture like many others does not consider fish to be meat, and that is why it is pareve in the kosher laws. But I still feel weird about eating it. Kind of like I feel about the second day of yom tov. This parenthetical comment is turning into a full-blown post so I'd better stop here.) I made salmon patties by mashing up two small cans of salmon with a little lemon juice, salt and peppper, chopped onion, matzah meal and eggs. I fried the whole mashed mess in olive oil. My husband didn't try them I don't think, but our guest and I were transported with nostalgia. She said it was just like her mom used to make. I almost never cook fish at home, for the simple reason that the cat has a little fit until you pay her the fish tax.

I also spontaneously invented the cauliflower kugel. Here is my recipe (I jotted it down before Shabbat so I would have it to give you!)

A Passover Cauliflower Kugel
4 eggs
1 large shallot
1 head cauliflower, boiled for 10 minutes and mashed
approx. 3-4 tablespoons matza meal

Place the whole, unbroken eggs in a bowl of warm tap water to come to room temperature for 15 minutes. Dice the shallot and sautee it in about 2 tablespoons of olive oil until golden. Break and separate the eggs into two vessels. Beat egg whites until stiff with a pinch of salt. (If they are warmed up, you can do this pretty easily with just a wire whisk and your hands!) Mash cauliflower with fried shallot, egg yolks, matzah meal, salt and pepper. Fold beaten egg whites into cauliflower mixture.
Bake for one hour at 350 F.

Unfortunately, I had not purchased any paprika for the holiday. I am sure this kugel would be better with a dusting of paprika on top, or with a very small amount of chopped herbs.Our friend who came to dinner (the one who finds everything delicate) can't abide the taste of dill, so I didn't put dill in the fish, or in the kugel, or in the soup. I did put some in the soup before I froze it for future meals, though.

Junk food on Passover

There are many categories of junk food on Passover. There is prepared food that is kosher for Passover, there are candies and snacks, and there are sweets you make from scratch. Plus the entire phenomenon of making everything out of oil, eggs and matzah meal, it just can't be healthy!

Some would argue that nearly every processed food you can buy for Passover is junk. For one thing, they are almost all made with cottonseed oil. You can taste that this is not the best thing, it often has a slightly off flavor. I totally don't want to get into the dreaded fats and oils discussion, I have read a lot and mainly it seems like people who advocate healthful diets do not agree on which fats and oils are healthful. Saturated fats are bad! No, they are good! Polyunsaturated oils are health promoting! No, they are unstable and rancid! Aargh.

Don't worry, you will be fine. But I am using olive oil anyway.

My number one nomination for disgustingly junky Passover food is the fake wasabi sauce made out of cottonseed oil mayo and regular old horseradish, and dyed green with food coloring. It resembles wasabi in no way whatsoever and is just disappointing.

I did make my own mayonnaise from scratch this year. Why? Because while we were visiting my parents, I made my baby Russian dressing out of Passover mayo (probably made with cottonseed oil) and Passover ketchup. He LOVED it. He began asking for "salad dressing" and dipping everything in it. The Passover ketchup is extra sweet and contains cloves. When we got back home my husband got some of the ketchup but the mayo was unavailable, so I made some with my kosher for Passover mini Cuisinart, organic egg yolk, organic lemon juice, and olive oil. It was splendid with the disgustingly sweet ketchup. Do I normally make concoctions out of raw eggs? I do not. Some eggy madness grips me at this time of year.

This brings me to another point. Many Jewish people who don't buy mayonnaise, or candy, or cookies, or soda pop, or potato chips, during the year, buy them kosher for Passover. Why is that? Or maybe it's only people who live in urban areas with big kosher supermarkets. It's like we lose our minds! I did not do that this year...as much. I did buy a can of chocolate macarooons before the holiday. My husband bought marmalades (the candies also known as fruit slices, or jelly candies).

He also bought potato chips. My mom bought pop (which I did not drink, amazingly--I usually find it difficult to resist) hard candies and fruit taffy. She used to also buy Israeli chewing gum, when we were growing up. It was really weird, we never had pop or gum in our house, and suddenly we had pop, gum, fruit slices, hard candies with soft goo in the middle, homemade cake, homemade brownies, and usually chocolates brought by guests.

Now why do we feel compelled to create so many amazing and strange cakes and candies for Pesach? We make them from scratch when we don't buy them.  You know that now that the holiday is over, Jewish families are looking ruefully at several cans of macaroons, chocolate covered matzah, chocolate lollipops. My husband is sad because he didn't get any Barton's seder mints or his mom's special sponge cake. On Saturday I had the most delicious thing, my friends made it but I am definitely making it next year.

I am not sure why Pesach is so junk-filled. In our house we also eat a lot of vegetables at the same time. Maybe the junk food is just to prove we can?

More Passover Cooking!

This Passover Roll recipe is from one of my mom's community cookbooks, I think from the Temple Beth Zion (Buffalo, NY) cookbook from the 1950s. The recipe is credited to Madeleine F. Epstein, but my great-aunt and I have each added some refinements to this excellent formula.

Passover Rolls

1/4 cup oil (can be made with olive oil)
1 cup water
1 teaspoon salt
4 eggs
1 1/2 cups matzah meal

Put oil, water and salt in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Stir matzah meal in well. Cool completely. (If you feel impatient, put it in the freezer—it has to be cool or the recipe doesn’t work. ) Add eggs whole, one at a time. Mix well after each addition. Put into greased muffin cups. Bake at 400 degree for 45 minutes. Freeze in plastic bags if not to be eaten immediately.

If you are sophisticated, you will say that this is paté choux. If you are health conscious, you will clutch your head and say "Vey iz mir, are you trying to give me a heart attack right here?" Don't worry, you will be fine, as long as you don't also fill these with chicken salad made from the soup chicken. As I used to do, before I stopped eating meat. My husband loves these things so much that one year we waited to turn the kitchen back to our normal dishes after Pesach was actually over so that I could make them for him.

(He's very skinny, my husband, and can stand on his head for ten minutes. Don't worry, he will be fine.)

I am also giving you the nice brownie recipes. Yes, I know that margarine is toxic, and that pareve Passover margarine is the most toxic of all. Don't worry, you will be fine.

Balabusta's Great Auntie's Passover Brownies

Brownies I (with cocoa)

1/4 pound margarine
2 eggs
1 cup sugar
6 tablespoons matzah cake meal and
2 tablespoons potato starch, sifted together
4 tablespoons cocoa
1/2 cup walnuts (optional)

Make a paste of hot water and cocoa (enough water to make a paste.) Add melted margarine, sugar and eggs and beat well. Add cake flour and potato starch and beat. Spoon into a 9” square cake pan and sprinkle walnuts on top of batter. Bake 20 minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

The brownies with cocoa come out lighter in color than the brownies with chocolate, but they both have a rich taste.

Brownies II (with chocolate)

4 eggs
1 1/4 cups sugar
2 tablespoons potato starch sifted with
12 tablespoons (3/4 cup cake flour)
1 cup nuts
1/4 pound margarine
5 oz. bittersweet chocolate

Melt chocolate and margarine and let cool. Beat eggs with sugar and add dry ingredients. Mix in melted chocolate mixture. Use 9X13” pan. Bake 20-25 minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Follow my aunt's wise ways and store all baked goods in the freezer until right before you want them. That way, they won't get stale. Baked goods made with Passover cake meal stale much faster than ones made with regular flour.

Some years I make other baked goods, from Claudia Roden or Joan Nathan, that call for ground nuts instead of matzah meal. Those are very rich and good. You can find good examples on Epicurious. Here is a lovely example from Clotilde, one of my blogging role models.  Feel free to leave me additional examples of yummy Passover baked goods in the comments or as an email.

Passover cooking!

We went to my parents' house for Pesach and as usual, I did a lot of the cooking. This year my mom was pretty good about letting me take part in the meal planning. Probably if I had planned the meals myself I wouldn't have chosen a list of vegetables I knew my father didn't like. I even said, "You know, Daddy doesn't like any of those vegetables" and my mom replied, "Your father never eats any vegetables at the seder anyway." I thought that was hilarious.

Anyway, we arrived Thursday and this is what we made:

artichokes (1st night--this recipe is from Joan Kekst, a Passover maven who writes for the Cleveland Jewish News)
boiled potatoes
boiled eggs
Passover rolls
homemade horseradish
gefilte fish (not homemade, just plated!) 
chicken soup for matzah balls
vegetarian vegetable soup for matzah balls
asparagus (steamed plain)
Chicken—two kinds (made by my mom)
Stuffed eggplant Provençal (adapted from Sundays at Moosewood--2nd night)
Sweet potato kugel (from No Cholesterol Passover Recipes by Debra Wasserman)
sweet and sour leeks (from Claudia Roden New Middle Eastern Cookbook)
two savory matzah kugels (2)
apple matzah kugel
Tzimmes (from Nira Rousso The Passover Gourmet, one of my mom's favorite books)
Cut vegetable platter
Glazed beets (which my mom makes, yucky feh)

Desserts/Baking
Fruit compote (my mom's)
Meringues (my mom made these from a new recipe that I don't know)
Brownies (two varieties, my great-aunt's recipe)
Sponge cake (my great-aunt's chocolate-wine cake recipe)

For Shabbat, I made some roasted cauliflower and potatoes with garlic and some steamed spinach, and we ate one of the savory matzah kugels. My mom also served soup chicken to the meat eaters.

We served the artichokes at karpas, when we handed around the saltwater, boiled potatoes and parsley. I thought this was my original idea, until my mom said that Joan Kekst had suggested artichokes in her column. My sister helped me pare them, which was fun--we cut each one in half and removed the choke, peeled the stem so we could leave it intact, and then snipped off the thorns at the tops of the leaves. I love artichokes and this was a good recipe. What was even more fun was that my son learned to say "artichoke." I think that karpas is a vestige of some Hellenistic salad course, so it makes sense to me to serve a healthy portion of appetizers then. That way, people can sit through more of the seder service without whining.

Though I am apparently not the first person to think of using this recipe in my seder (which I didn't know until I googled) I am going to give you my adaptation of the eggplant recipe from Sundays at Moosewood, with the caveat that you really should get this book for yourself because it is so wonderful.

Stuffed Eggplant Provençal
from Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant (Simon and Schuster, 1990)p. 551-553.
Adapted for Pesach

3 medium or large eggplants (I used 4 small)
1/4 cup olive oil
salt

Slice the eggplants, in half brush with olive oil and sprinkle with salt. Bake in a 500 degree oven for 20 minutes. Turn oven down to 350.

Filling:
2 cups chopped onion
2 garlic cloves
2 carrots
1 red bell pepper, finely chopped
1 cup diced zucchini
(original recipe also calls for 1/4 cup mushrooms)
1/2 cup pine nuts
2 tablespoons currants or other raisins
1 tablespoon fresh marjoram
1 tablespoon fresh thyme

Sauté onions first for 10 minutes until translucent, then garlic and carrots for another 10 minutes, and then add the rest of stuffing ingredients and cook another 15 minutes.

Topping:

Sauté 2 garlic gloves in 1/2 cup olive oil and then add 2 cups matzah meal. I add salt because since the original recipe calls for bread crumbs and parmesan cheese, it needs salt when you make it with matzah meal.

Push the flesh of the cooked eggplant with a spoon, creating hollows to stuff. Stuff the eggplant generously until all the stuffing is evenly distributed among the eggplants. Pat the topping firmly on top of the stuffing so it doesn’t fall out and bake eggplants for 30 minutes in a 350 degree oven.

I made the horseradish by soaking the whole root in water for a couple of hours. Then I peeled it with a vegetable peeler and grated it on the smallest holes of a box grater while wearing super-duper rubber gloves. The fumes were so strong that my father could feel them blast him as he entered the kitchen. The key to very strong horseradish is to keep it moist, and it's best to grate it as finely as you can. I added cider vinegar, sugar and salt according to the instructions of one of my mom's many community cookbooks. I can't tell you proportions, but I added enough vinegar to make it moist, a teaspoon of sugar and a half teaspoon salt. It was very good.

Another reason to miss my grandmother: I think I'm the only one left at the table who really loves horseradish. The second night, my second cousin came with her husband, who is from Venezuela, and he was completely smitten with the horseradish, so that was nice.

Perhaps I will put some more recipes in another post. I think my posts get a bit unwieldy to read, and this was a very long cooking session! To close, let me say that if you like sweet things at all, you had better make that Epicurious apple-matzah kugel because it is so delicious that you could faint, and it's especially good if you use green and red apples together.

Okay, I love you! I hope you are having a wonderful Pesach and being liberated!