Modern Day Gleaning of the Fields When the Miller Family opened their farm for gleaning, 40,000 people showed up. Epicurious and the Denver Post each cover the story with a different bent.
So, this year marked my first Thanksgiving as a newly wed in New York. After all the amazing simcha of engagement parties, auf rufs (we had two), the wedding, and sheva brachot celebrations over the last month, a very small {quiet} Thanksgiving dinner with our downstairs neighbors seemed like a good way to detox. Maybe there’d be a little Boggle, maybe a little football watching, and perhaps some crafting and good beer drinking. But fuss? That was definitely not on the menu.
My husband, Yosh, was psyched to make his first turkey - a Wise Organic Pastures (kosher, organic, free-range) 14 pounder stuffed with sage and oranges. I was in charge of sweet potatoes, biscuits, a citrus, avocado, and raddish salad, and seasonal dessert of some kind. Simple enough except, as a milchigtarian, I am used to having butter, milk, and cream as my building blocks.
I turned to my cookbooks looking for parve inspiration, and was delighted to find this amazing recipe for vegan caramel apple spice cupcakes in the pinnacle of all vegan cookbooks (thus far), Veganomicon. Moist (very moist!), incredibly sweet, and studded with chunks of caramelized apple, they were the perfect end to a relaxing Brooklyn Thanksgiving. I doubt that author, Isa Chandra Moskowitz, intended for the recipes in her vegan treasure trove to accompany kosher meat meals, but I was certainly thankful to find them.
My 4-year-old son’s pre-school class held a mock election today: After each student tasted one bite each of banana, apple, & pear (the equivalent of one presidential debate?), they “voted” by placing a paper cutout of their favorite fruit into a cardboard box. The results? Banana won in a landslide.
If this informal poll is to be believed, things aren’t looking so good for the Macoun/Pear ticket, but B. Anana shouldn’t get too overconfident, either. After all, no one knows how the Blueberry effect will come into play on election day.
(It looks like my son’s class is on to something. While Googling for a good image to use for this post, I came across a site called veggiefruit election).
The joy of Diaspora is the variety of experience it brings into our tradition. Almost any kind of food has analogues in every tributary of Jewish heritage and candy is no exception. We’ve sifted through the internet and our cookbook collections to bring you Jewish candy recipes from Eastern Europe, South Asia and the Mediterranean, including, of course, the sticky and celebrated halvah, in its classic sesame rendition and with a serendipitous autumnal twist.
1/2 cup Sesame Seeds (ground)
2 tablespoons Sesame Seeds (whole)
3 tablespoons Raw honey
1/4 cup Sesame Tahini (use the driest part of the jar)
1/8 teaspoon Almond extract
Grind 1/2 cup seeds in a blender. Mix ground seeds, whole seeds, tahini, honey and extract in a bowl all together until thoroughly blended. Roll into small balls or into a long roll and refrigerate.
There’s a joke that all fun secular holidays have “Jewish” equivalents. Halloween has Purim, Christmas has Chanukah, etc. But Chanukah, in all its fried deliciousness, does not offer an opportunity to bake the mother of architectural sweets: The Gingerbread House. Now, the Jewish harvest holiday of Sukkot has stepped in to fill this wide gap in the Jewish culinary calendar with The Gingerbread Sukkah.
Boston resident Julia Greenstein (daughter of renowned baker, George Greenstein) makes gingerbread sukkahs every year with her family. These miniature “dwelling structures” are as temporary as their real-sized cousins - if only because they are irresistible to eat! Find out how she does it, and how you can build your own cookie sukkah below.
As a teacher of Judaism, I am often at a loss to explain one of the most beautiful and yet most pagan Jewish rituals: the celebration of Sukkot with the four species (arba minim) of the lulav and etrog.
Sukkot is both a harvest festival and a creation festival, and these two aspects come together in the moment of the procession around the synagogue with the bounty of the earth. It’s a joyous moment befitting of Sukkot’s title of z’man simchateinu, the time of our happiness.
We read in Vayrika (Leviticus) 23:40: “And you shall take for yourselves on the first day [of Sukkot], the fruit of the beautiful tree, tightly bound branches of date palms, the branch of the braided tree, and willows of the brook, and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God seven days.” This has come to be understood as the four species used in the lulav: the fruit of the beautiful tree is a citron or etrog (a type of citrus fruit), together with palm leaves, three myrtle springs (the braided tree or hadass), and two willow branches (arvei nachal). During both the hallel service and the hoshanot processions, we wave the arba minim in celebration of God’s goodness.
But it does look a little strange. Growing up in a suburb with very few Jews, I always wondered what the neighbours thought we were doing schlepping tree branches and citrus fruit across town.
Yom Kippur stirs my strongest Jewish food memory - it’s strange, but true. Since I was in the single digits I can remember walking to Ne’ila services with my mother and father, carrying a bag filled with two essential components of our holiday inside. One was a three-pound sack of apples, the then ubiquitous McIntosh variety. The other was six or so tiny butter sandwiches on my mother’s anise bread.
The bread was a high, oblong loaf shining from egg glaze and redolent of liquorice, which I despised as a child. On our walk, I would watch the plastic sack of break-fast food thumping against my father’s trousered leg, a reminder that holy space of Yom Kippur was about to close over us and leave us to our good intentions and the rest of the year. I couldn’t understand why they liked it so much, that sweet, seeded bread. (Now, of course, I know better.)
Sustainable foodies love to throw around the statistic that the “average meal travels 1500 miles from farm to table.” I know I’m guilty of quoting this stat in talks and articles - and so are countless other bloggers, food writers, local food chefs, and policy makers. In fact, if you Google the phrase “1500 miles,” the first website that pops up is “localharvest.org“ It’s such a nice, round number that succinctly expresses the notion that our eating habits are divorced from where we live. How could we resist?
Well, according to Jane Black at Slate, we should think twice before sharing the 1500 number so confidently.
You’ve heard about an orange on the seder plate, but what about a floating orange God head that teaches you about Rosh Hashanah? My Jewish Learning has taken the custom of “eating a new fruit on Rosh Hashanah” to the next level, with this wacky video. Enjoy!
You won’t notice it on the supermarket shelves or the tables of Jewish America this autumn, but both apples and honey are embattled, and by the same mysterious foe. I’m talking Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), and if you think that name sounds like it’s describing a symptom more than a disease, you’re right. CCD, like the similarly vague Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or Restless Leg Syndrome in humans, are all named for their symptoms because we don’t know their cause. All we know is that bees are disappearing, abandoning their hives and scattering to the winds, not making honey, not pollinating the flowers and trees, and those minute defectors could cost us far out of proportion with their size.
Rosh Hashana is all about prayer for the New Year; we sing it, we say it, we blow it and of course we eat it. The apples and honey aren’t just seasonal and don’t just taste good, they embody our hopes and wishes for the New Year. The blessing recited over this tasty combo gives focuses our attention towards a sweet new year “May it be Your will, our God and God of our ancestors, that we be renewed for a good and sweet year.” This approach to eating is what I like to think of as culinary prayer, a form of you pray what you eat whereby imbibing sweet foods will help fill you body and soul with that same quality.
In my menu plan for Rosh Hashana there is a carrot salad with pomegranate seeds and pomegranate molasses, a honey nut cake (somewhat controversial but you have to read on to find out why), stuffed dates, pumpkin pastries and a bean salad. Not merely culinary fancy – though I’m hoping it will taste good - my menu is based on an ancient series of food omens that women have cooked through the ages. It’s true, long before your grandmother was making brisket, the rabbis of the Talmud were already making menu suggestions.
Thanks to Aaron Kagan for this guest post. Aaron is a freelance writer in the Boston area and maintains the blog Tea and Food.
The apple might seem too obvious a choice for a Rosh Hashanah post, but how much do you really know about this omnipresent fruit? For starters, why do we eat it on Rosh Hashanah?
True, apples are eaten with honey to ensure a sweet year, but more importantly they are eaten for the simple reason that they are in season this time of year in places that Jews have historically lived. Why we ate it growing up in Boca Raton is partly for tradition and partly because of the strange, industrialized relationship we have to seasonality. Thanks, California.
Another basic but commonly unknown fact about the apple is where it comes from. In other words, where did we Jews first encounter apples? Like people, all evidence points towards the apple making its first appearance in the Fertile Crescent, with the earliest evidence of cultivation occurring in what is now southern Russia. From there the fruit eventually spread in both directions, across Europe and Asia and ultimately to every continent besides Antarctica.
New York Times book critic Janet Maslin recently picked Adam Gollner’s new book, The Fruit Hunters (Scribner: 2008), as a top summer read—and it’s easy to see why. Gollner writes mellifluously about his extraordinary (writ extraterrestrial) experiences traveling the world in search of fruits and the wacky people who devote their lives to this quest.
In the Seychelles, Gollner—or perhaps Adam is his best suited moniker—manages to get his hands on the uncannily female-looking coco-de-mer, or ‘lady fruit,’ whose “innards are translucent, almost like a silicon gel implant but with a softer, shaky-pudding texture” with “a mild citruslike quality, refreshing and sweet with earthy, spunky notes…like coconut flesh, only sexier.”
He then visits the jungles of Borneo to taste the intensely odoriferous “nutty, almondlike,” and “fully constructed dessert” of fresh durians, where the “juicy white cubes of flesh fuse a custard’s richness with a cakelike powderiness… topped with “vanilla-spruce frosting”—a far cry from the false gas leak alarm-spawning durians he got in Manhattan’s Chinatown, where they tasted of “undercooked peanut butter-mint omelets in body-odor sauce.” In Hawaii he tempts us with his description of the dusky brown chicos tasting of “maple syrup pudding,” and a host of other Neverland varietals such as bignays, gourkas, sapotes, mombins, langsats.
Over fruit smoothies one recent morning in Montreal, I met with Adam to discuss his new book and the sweet allure of the infinite world of fertilized flowers.
Below the jump: Win a copy of Adam Gollner’s The Fruit Hunters!
Last week, walking down my very urban street in Brooklyn, I was stopped short by some bright purple-black splotches that covered a small portion of the sidewalk. They were totally grody (and a little bit scary) - but oddly familiar. I looked up and there was the culprit of the mess - a mulberry bush! An overgrown, concrete-surrounded version of the mulberry bushes that I used to frequent in my backyard in suburban Chicago.
I’d walked past this bush countless times over the last year, but never noticed the bonafide fruit-bearing plant in my neighborhood. I was psyched. I picked off a couple of the dark berries, ignoring the odd looks from passersby and relished in my moment of urban gleaning.
What if my experience could be duplicated many times over, in cities across the country? According toFallen Fruit a collaborative art project in California, it can and should.
Hazon and The Jew & The Carrot may be the homes of the new Jewish food movement, but in a way the general food movement, even without the ‘Jewish’ modifier, is still very Jewish. I am not referring to the fact that, much like many progressive movements, a disproportionate number of the food movement’s major protagonists, like Michael Pollen, Peter Singer, or Mollie Katzen, are Jewish. Rather, that the questions and challenges posed by the food movement are the types of questions and challenges the Jewish tradition has been raising for millennia.
Remember… the first conflict we see in the Bible is over, of all things, forbidden fruit!
Dessert, Dinner parties, Fresh Frum the Kitchen, Fruit, Holidays, Kosher, Personal Story, Recipes, Sustainability, Vegan, Vegetarian
Hunters
