This new year, go beyond apples and honey
COOKBOOK AUTHORS OFFER FRESH TAKES ON TRADITIONAL FOODS FOR ROSH HASHANA
On a recent Wednesday morning, in the sunlit kitchen of her San Jose home, food blogger Beth Lee of OMG! Yummy pulls an aromatic Russian honey cake from the oven. Studded with walnuts and raisins, the bundt cake fills the kitchen with the scents of ginger and cinnamon, and the feeling that Rosh Hashana is near.
It is certainly early this year. The Jewish new year, which usually falls in mid-to-late September, arrives on Labor Day. And while most of us don’t typically veer from tradition for the big meal — like apples dipped in honey for a sweet new year, and there is always brisket — 2021 is not a typical year. It is the second Rosh Hashana in the pandemic and its concurrence with a summer barbecue holiday means things may look a bit different.
“Maybe you make brisket sandwiches on challah rolls, or cook early in the morning before it gets too hot,” says Lee, who has been blogging about Jewish food since 2010 and plans to host immediate extended family in the backyard this year. In non-pandemic years, her living room is packed with 40 guests and tables brimming with platters of kugels and 20 pounds of brisket.
That honey cake could make an appearance. The recipe, featured in Lee’s new cookbook, “The Essential Jewish Baking Cookbook: 50 Traditional Recipes for Every Occasion” (Rockridge Press, $17), includes strong black tea and tastes even better a week after you bake it, she says. And get this — it can be stored for up to a month. Lee procured the recipe from her friend Vera, who grew up eating the cake made by her Ukrainian Jewish grandmother.
“The tea, honey and baking soda almost act as (a type of) preservation,” she says. “Vera remembers her (grandma) pulling the cake from an ancient chest, tightly wrapped in linen cloth.”
The book, which made its debut Aug. 10, is filled with similar stories of diasporic baking recipes revived from stained notecards or orally handed down, like dairy-free orange-olive oil hamantaschen and Bubbe’s challah, the eggy loaf Lee’s grandmother baked every Shabbat into her early 90s. Lee will make it round, the traditional shape for Rosh Hashana, symbolizing the circle of life, and place an oven-safe ramekin in the center, a tip from prolific New York City baker Uri Scheft.
“You braid your challah around it and then you have a receptacle for the honey,” she says. “It makes a stunning centerpiece.”
But brisket is the true centerpiece. Like turkey on Thanksgiving, brisket is expected and its omission could spur an uprising in Lee’s household. She has a few versions of the braised meat dish served with tzimmes, or sweet and sour root vegetables, including an Instant Pot take made with pomegranate molasses, which adds punch to the braising liquid and won’t heat up the house on what could be a 90-degree-plus day.
After an hour in the pressure cooker, where seared pieces of brisket cook in a mixture of the molasses, red wine, honey, tomatoes and thyme, she allows the pressure to release, removes the almost-tender brisket, slices it across the grain and puts it back in the pot with carrots for an additional two minutes.
“It really soaks up the braising liquid this way, and it won’t shred when you serve it,” says Lee, who suggests preparing your brisket ahead of time, at least a day or more, so the flavors have a chance to meld.
That’s when Jake Cohen carves his brisket, after a night in the refrigerator and a good skimming of fat. The New York cookbook author’s “zhuzhedup” version of his aunt Susi’s brisket in tomato sauce is synonymous with Cohen’s upbringing and Rosh Hashana dinners.
But the self-proclaimed TikTok NJB (Nice Jewish Boy) has another recipe in his repertoire — orange-zesty crispy chicken thighs with tzimmes and fresh, carrot-top relish — that still offers tradition, but in an on-the-table-in-anhour way that works well for a double holiday weekend.
“It’s one of the easiest things and you can’t mess it up,” says Cohen, who features the recipe in his cookbook, “Jewish: A Cookbook: Reinvented Recipes from a Modern Mensch” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30).
Even his showstopper dessert — an apples and honey upside-down cake — comes together quickly. Cohen came up with the recipe when he had seasonal honey crisp apples at his disposal, didn’t have time to make a layered cake and needed a dessert to serve at Rosh Hashana.
Covered in brown butter and caramel and topped with a rich honey cake batter, the dessert takes 20 minutes to prep and will flip anything you knew about honey cake upside down, he says.
After you’ve savored its sweetness, share your intention for creating sweetness in the new year.
“It’s really important to take Rosh Hashana past the meal,” Cohen says. “It is a beautiful opportunity to put meaning and intention behind these rituals.”
It’s really important to take Rosh Hashana past the meal. It is a beautiful opportunity to put meaning and intention behind these rituals.
—Jake Cohen, author of “Jew-ish: A
Reinvente “Cookbook: d Recipes from a Modern Mensch”