Some like it hot

Nearly every year, the Jewish New Year spread in newspapers and national magazines is more of the same. The photos show steaming bowls of matzo ball soup, juicy slices of brisket, pans of tzimmes glazed with fruity syrup.


My question is also always the same: Where do these people live? The Arctic Circle?

They obviously don’t live in the South where early September, when Rosh Hashana begins this year, is as sticky and hot as July and August. After sitting in a crowded synagogue and walking half a mile in the heat to either your lunch destination or, in non-Orthodox areas, to your car, heavy food is the last thing you want.

It reminds me of going to the Atlanta Merchandise Mart with my parents to buy for the fall season at our clothing store. As the salesman would haul out wool slacks and sweaters for the back-to-school crowd, my mother would repeat her mantra, “Dark cottons. Dark cottons.”

(Strangely enough, these were the same manufacturers who, for Easter, would create sleeveless slips of dresses. That would send Mom in an often fruitless search for “little” cotton sweaters because, inevitably , a cold snap occurred just in time for the holiday. I can’t even imagine what storeowners in the Northeast and Midwest did. Sell matching pastel down jackets?}

As warm as Atlanta will be for this year’s holiday, it will not hold a melting candle to the Rosh Hashanas of my childhood. Then, we trudged through the streets of Savannah, our dark cotton sleeves rolled up as high as they would go, hoping to get to synagogue before our clothes were soaked through with perspiration.

The downtown synagogue we attended when I was very young was hot and stuffy. The thick, dusty velvet draperies didn’t help. Of course, it could have been worse for me. My father was wearing a wool suit and a tallis (a prayer shawl) over his shoulders.

The “new building,” which opened when I was slightly older but now is close to 50 years old, was like a meat locker every time we walked in on Rosh Hashana. The custodians had cranked the air conditioning up, the temperatures down, for the sweltering men. For someone in a slightly-damp cotton dress, it was …. Well, let’s just say a bowl of steaming matzo ball soup would have been very welcome.

I understood no Hebrew and knew little about what was going on in the synagogue. The services seemed interminable, and I would constantly cast my eyes over to the men’s section where, eventually, my father would give me a nod. We’d meet in the foyer and then cross the street to a restaurant underneath a giant globe.

By that point, I was a very hungry little girl. We’d have a sandwich and a Coke then, reluctantly for both of us, return to the service. I don’t know if ducking out of the synagogue service would be considered good parenting these days, but it is one of my favorite memories of my father.

I now pass the Big Globe, still standing, on the way from the expressway to the cemetery where my parents are buried. Seeing it recalls my joy at being with my father and out of a situation that was so uncomfortable for me.

Because we were “country Jews” and from out-of-town, my mother’s family didn’t cook elaborate Rosh Hashana meals. Instead, we ate in empty restaurants at 2 or 3 in the afternoon when we finally got out of synagogue and rounded everyone up.

Sometimes It’s hard to know what memories are real and what are just imagination, but, to me, we always seemed to be dining in a dark below-ground room, even though it was mid afternoon outside. Everyone seemed to have filet mignon without the bacon and lots of yeast rolls.

Because, during the year, we were unable to go to synagogue as often as my mother would have liked, we tried to make up for it by attending every service during the High Holidays. We were in the sanctuary early and often.

It must have been kind of religion by osmosis because, somehow, I opted to return to traditional Judaism in my early 30s.

The service that once seemed to go on forever is now, in some ways, like listening to my favorite greatest hits album. All of the prayers and songs touch me deeply and uplift me spiritually. To go home and share a meal with your closest friends just adds to the religious experience.

The first few years I celebrated the Jewish New Year with my own home-cooked meal, I filled the table with the heavy, rib-sticking favorites. Everyone was as stuffed and overheated as cabbage rolls by the time they went to Tashlich. I’m sure it was all they could do to not throw themselves in the cool stream with the symbolic bread crumbs.

I’ve gained some wisdom in my later years and now mix it up a bit. The first day of Rosh Hashana, when we have friends who are more like family, I serve a menu of both hot and cold foods.

This year, we’ll start with gefilte fish with spicy tomato sauce (cold) and then follow it with matzo ball soup (very hot.) The entrees are honey-balsamic chicken (served warm) and homemade corned beef (served cold in slices with mustard.) The only heated side dishes will be sweet potato/cranberry casserole and green beans. Homemade pickles, a red cabbage-apple coleslaw and a green salad will also be served. For dessert, we’ll have honey cake, fruit and sorbet.

If the holiday had fallen on Shabbat, when the rules of warming food are even more strict and everyone seems to have their own minhag (tradition), I probably would have prepared a brisket in the crockpot and served everything else cold, including gazpacho as the soup.

Because of our home’s proximity to the synagogue, three houses away, I probably can get away with serving more warm food than others who live farther away. The combination of weather and location also means that I might get a few drop-ins on their way from their lunches. In this heat, I’m sure they’ll appreciate the non-dairy sorbet and icy fruit.

I love to cook traditionally fall dishes but, this year, will have to save them for either the nighttime meals of Sukkot at the end of September or even to haul to my sister’s house in upstate South Carolina for Thanksgiving.

Of course, growing up in the lower reaches of Georgia, the weather at Thanksgiving was often warm. One of my mother’s elusive dreams was that one cold Thanksgiving where she could light a fire and serve spiced apple cider. I honestly don’t think it ever happened.

It would be like getting to wear a woolen suit to services on Rosh Hashana and actually craving the bowl of hot soup. That might be the case for some people, but not down here where some like it hot and some, like me, just put up with the heat because I don’t want to get out of the kitchen.

Currying favor with great chicken dishes

The first time I tasted Indian food was in the late 1970s at newly-opened restaurant in a strip shopping center near Emory University, where I went to college.


It was a revelation. The spices were unbelievably delicious -- and familiar.

Familiar? To a Jewish girl who grew up in south Georgia in the 1950s and 60s?

Here’s the rub. I didn’t just grow up in south Georgia. I grew up 30 miles from the coast and 60 miles from Savannah, GA.

My favorite entrée in the world, my mother’s barbecued chicken, had curry as a key ingredient. The entire house was fragrant with spices whenever she made that dish. It may seem exotic for the place and time but it really was not.

Savannah is a port and its cuisine was highly influenced by the spices that were brought in by ships from all over the world. Those ships carried rum, molasses, fruit and, tragically, slaves. The African slaves added their own cooking heritage to the cuisine.

One of the most famous dishes from the area is called Country Captain. There are many versions of its history, but the New York Times recently recited this version: “…it was the favorite recipe of an English skipper who served in Bengal and introduced the dish to friends in Savannah.”

Country Captain is a braised chicken dish with curry, almonds and raisins or currants. It is quite different from my mother’s barbecued chicken but shared some ingredients and possibly some provenance.

(As long as you braise the chicken in something more acceptable than bacon fat, Country Captain also can be a useful entrée in kosher cooking. The longer it warms, the better it tastes. It works extremely well for Yom Tov or even Shabbos, for those who hold by warming.)

Growing up, we spent a lot of time on the coast, and I became very familiar with the food. We traveled the hour to Savannah not only to attend synagogue but also for specialist doctor’s appointments, entertainment and shopping for items that were not available in my small town. We headed 40 miles the other direction, to Brunswick, GA, to dine on fresh fish or to go to the beach at Saint Simons or Jekyll Island. We learned to love the coastal cuisine, spices and all.

Our housekeeper, Potty, had grown up in the area and knew how to make many of the dishes we loved. She was an amazingly talented cook and figured out how to make many traditional Southern foods appropriate for a Jewish family.

Of course, there was her basic philosophy: If a little pepper is good, a lot most be better. My husband Marc still complains that I have a tendency to use too much pepper in mashed potatoes and vegetables.

My mother, meanwhile, loved to collect recipes and pulled many of her favorites from local cookbooks as well as national magazines.

I don’t know where she found the barbecued chicken recipe, which isn’t barbecued at all but is cooked in the oven. Here it is with some of my slight variations:

Brush two cut-up chickens with oil and sprinkle with salt, unless you are using already-salted kosher chicken. Sprinkle on two cloves of garlic thinly sliced.

Bake for one-half hour at 350 degrees.

Meanwhile, sauté a large onion (Vidalias work extremely well) in canola oil in a large pot. When the onion is cooked as you like it (slightly charred works for me), begin to add the liquids and spices.

Start with 2 and one-half cups of tomato juice. (Tomato juice sometimes can be difficult to find with a reliable hechsher or kosher symbol. Your best bet is grocery store brands such as Publix.)

Stir in two tablespoons of white vinegar and one-half teaspoon of salt.

Then begin to add the spices. The amounts are from my mother’s original recipe although I tend to go heavier on them:

¼ teaspoon dry mustard

¼ teaspoon curry power

1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1/8 teaspoon hot sauce such as Tabasco

1/8 teaspoon black pepper

1 bay leaf

Let all of this simmer together for 15 minutes. If you house smells less than fabulous and you’re not drooling, you must have left something out.

Pour the sauce over the chicken and let it cook for another hour to hour and a half, basting the chicken frequently.

If some of the skin or onions get too brown, that makes it even better.

The sauce is especially delicious on mashed potatoes or couscous.

Like Country Captain, the barbecued chicken is wonderful rewarmed.

Below is a Country Captain Chicken recipe from Diana Rattray, who has a great southern food site on about.com. I’ve altered it slightly to get rid of the bacon, suggesting a touch of smoked paprika to replace the smokiness.

Ingredients:

• 1 broiler chicken, about 3 pounds, cut in parts

• Canola oil or chicken fat

• 1/2 teaspoon salt

• 1/2 teaspoon pepper

• 3/4 cup chopped celery

• 1/2 cup chopped onion

• 1 green bell pepper, chopped

• 2 cloves garlic, minced

• 2 cups fresh tomatoes, chopped

• 2 teaspoons Madras curry powder

• 1 teaspoon smoked paprika

• 1/2 teaspoon thyme leaves

• 1 cup chicken broth, hot

• 1/2 cup currants or raisins

• 1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley

• 1/2 cup slivered toasted almonds

Preparation:

Add chicken parts and fat to the pan; cook for about 15 minutes, turning, or until browned. Sprinkle with 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon of pepper; transfer to an ovenproof dish and keep warm.

To pan drippings, add celery, onion, bell pepper, and garlic; cook, stirring, until onion is transparent, about 5 minutes. Add tomatoes, smoked paprika, curry powder, thyme and 1/2 teaspoon of salt. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, cover and simmer for about 10 minutes.

Place currants in a small bowl, pour hot chicken broth over them; let stand for 20 minutes or until plump.

Return chicken to the pan; cover and cook for 20 minutes. Add currants and broth; cover and cook for another 10 minutes or until chicken is done. Sprinkle with parsley, and toasted almonds. Serve on rice.

Serves 4.

Just a bit more of Country Captain lore; President Franklin Roosevelt became a fan of the dish when he spent time in Warm Springs, GA, where he took spa treatments for his polio-induced paralysis. Gen. George S. Patton supposedly visited him there and also fell in love with Country Captain.

Believe it or not, in honor of Gen. Patton, the Pentagon in 2000 made Country Captain one of the packaged M.R.E.’s, or Meals Ready to Eat, for soldiers in the field.

I’m not sure if they created a kosher version of it, but that is quite easy to do.

Everything's chicken, including the fat

Clipping recipes from old magazines recently, I was amused to see a recipe for chicken fat puff pastry in Bon Appétit.


Chicken fat is the oleaginous gold that makes an ideal replacement for lard in southern Jewish cooking. I was surprised to see it mentioned in a trendy cooking magazine. In an age when pork fat graces the menus of fabled “farm-to-table” restaurants across the country, chicken fat remains a relic of the last century. When unsaturated fat became the healthy cooking standard – was it the 1960s or 1970s? – chicken fat became passé.

Growing up Jewish in south Georgia, chicken fat was a refrigerator staple. We kept it in an old Kraft mayonnaise jar. Normally, the golden color of the fat distinguished it from the creamy white mayo. If you were in a hurry, however, there always was the danger of grabbing the wrong receptacle and spreading chicken fat on your tomato sandwich or dropping a dollop into your tuna salad.

The job of rendering the chicken fat fell to our housekeeper, whom we called Potty.

(Before you start entertaining visions of old retainers and stereotypical mammies, let me set you straight. In later years, this remarkable woman served on the local school board and was instrumental in bringing a vocational-technical school to our rural county. I knew her for more than 50 years. She was truly my second mother; we consider her family to be our family. We were connected for life, talking by telephone several times a month until her death earlier this summer. )

Every time she cooked chicken, which was quite often at our house, Potty would set aside the fat and excess skin and put it in the refrigerator. When she had enough, she would chop it up and place it in a heavy duty pot with chopped onions. She then would boil until the fat was rendered, turning to a golden liquid. The deep fried pieces of skin and onion created a delectable snack called gribenes , kind of the Yiddish version of pork rinds. The gribenes didn’t last the afternoon.

The liquid would be poured into the ubiquitous Kraft jar and would reside in the refrigerator until ready for refilling. The chicken fat replaced butter in mashed potatoes, was used to brown vegetables for stuffing and added flavor and texture to chopped liver. With butter for dairy meals and Crisco for baking and deep frying, it was the third of the trio of commonly used cooking oils in my childhood home.

Liquid Wesson oil was primarily used for my mother’s addictive salad, but that’s another blog post.

I assumed the method of rendering chicken fat had come down from my great-grandmother and grandmother. Bubbie kept her own chickens and probably had the freshest chicken fat in town – or in Vidalia, GA, perhaps the only chicken fat in town.

Of course, my memories of chicken fat in the 1950s and 1960s are fairly modern. The uses of chicken fat in our house were fairly limited compared to earlier times.

Some of my older Jewish friends wax elegiac about chicken fat and garlic spread on matzo as a Passover snack. And, similar to older Southern cooks who use lard in almost everything, chicken fat was their gold standard shortening.

If you breathed deep in their kitchens, you could experiencel generations of eastern European Jewish cuisine in the chicken and onion smells. The dishes may have been filled with saturated fat and salt – probably not a bad thing if you had to work to exhaustion and have enough weight to get through the winter – but they were delicious.

True confession time. I don’t have a jar of chicken fat in my refrigerator. I also don’t buy the suspicious blocks of frozen chicken fat in the freezer cases of kosher markets. In fact, I’ve never cooked with it. My husband Marc and I use olive and canola oils almost exclusively with an occasionally pat of butter for a dairy meal. That makes it much more difficult to recreate the depth of flavor transmitted by chicken fat.

Maybe that will change. New research suggests that chicken fat is more than 70 percent unsaturated, and, honestly, I can’t say that my ancestors had higher rates of cancer and heart disease than we do now.

Lard came back into fashion. Maybe chicken fat isn’t far behind. Chicken fat puff pastry could be just the beginning.

The mystery of my mother's honey cake

My mother was an outstanding baker. Each Thanksgiving, she would create dozens of from-scratch cakes for her 40 or so guests. It always was cake – coconut layer, spice, nut, pound, bourbon, chocolate and so many more – because Mom disdained pies. She thought they were way too much work to feed so few people.


The cakes were legendary in my hometown. At the Halloween carnival, the cake walk suddenly became the most popular attraction when my mother’s cakes were the prize. Any kindness to my family, no matter how small, was swiftly rewarded with a cake. Everyone from the nurses at the hospitals to the teachers at the schools looked forward to them.

In later years, Mom would bake to help out my sisters and me. I once served her cheesecake to a post-bar mitzvah brunch filled with New Yorkers. Several of them told me it was the best cheesecake they ever had tasted. When I took her baked goods to my office – my colleague Glen affectionately dubbed them “Mom cake” – the contest for the last piece almost would result in fisticuffs.

With all of the delicious cakes my mother would bake, each one a work of art, one was arguably more special than all the others. That was the honey cake which made its appearance each fall, near Rosh Hashana.

Once we were grown, my sisters and I would each receive a boot box full of loaf cakes, tenderly wrapped in foil and labeled in Magic Marker on masking tape. (My parents had owned a clothing store, so they seemed to have an endless supply of boxes of every size.) Some would be placed in the bread box for the first of the high holidays and the others would go into the freezer to be retrieved for the Yom Kippur break-the-fast or Succot. If hoarded carefully, there might be, in the very back of the freezer, a slightly misshapen foil rectangle left over for Thanksgiving.

That probably seems surprising to many of my fellow Jews who grew up with honey cakes so dry they could be employed in cleaning up the Gulf Coast oil spill. I’ve tasted that kind of honey cake, thrown together from a recipe in a Sisterhood cookbook somewhere. You have to take a swallow of tea after every bite to keep from choking.

Needless to say, my mother’s honey cake was nothing like that. It was dark and rich and sweet and moist, like the best brownie you ever had but made with honey instead of chocolate. No one really could understand how it could be so good when other honey cakes were so bad. Maybe it was the ultra fresh honey provided by our friends the Yorks from their bee company. Maybe it was the precision with which my mother baked, exactingly smoothing out each cup or measuring spoon. Or maybe it was more spiritual – the cake was the embodiment of my mother’s essential sweet nature.

In 2002, Mom died shortly before Rosh Hashanah. In fact, her shiva, the eight days of mourning, was cut short by the holiday. I had to “get up” from sitting shiva to have time to prepare the festive meals.

My niece Faith and her then fiancé, now husband, Jeff stayed with Marc and me over Rosh Hashana that year. Miraculously, I had found, buried in my freezer, an unused honey cake from the year before. We alternately ate cake and cried during the entire holiday.

When the next year came around, my sisters and I realized that if we wanted Mom’s honey cake, we would have to recreate it ourselves. We looked at every honey cake recipe we had, trying to remember which was the correct one. We searched our memories for every detail -- it had pineapple juice, for example – as we dug through every recipe file she had left us.

Finally, my niece Shayne found my mother’s handwritten recipe among her memorabilia and typed it into an email to send out to everyone. She alerted us to a critical problem, however.

There was a place in the recipe where it was almost impossible to determine whether my mother had written “beat” or “heat.” It was not clear if the problem was her handwriting or an inconveniently placed oil stain, but there was definite confusion on how to achieve the “very thick” state called for in her recipe.

I asked for a fax of the original and studied it like an ancient scroll. I decided that the word was “heat” and proceeded to cook the mixture before then boiling the juice. The result was disastrous. It was more like a lumpy honey pudding than cake. I gave up and found another recipe on the Internet – passable but definitely not my mother’s.

Over the last seven years, one of my sisters found another version of the recipe and determined that beating not heating was the correct way to go. Both of them and Faith have made reasonable facsimiles of the cake.

So, I thought I would try again this year. I’m going to get the freshest honey possible from the farmer who supplies us with eggs so fresh that the yolks are the color of Forsythia in bloom. I’m going to take my time and measure everything with extra care. I’m going to stand over the stove to make sure the cakes don’t overcook and dry to dust. I hope it turns out well.

Yet, I know that it will not be as good my mother’s honey cake. Sometimes a cake, no matter how tasty, is just a lot more than a cake.

Believe it or not, black-eyed peas for the New Year is a Jewish custom

In a tradition that is becoming quite common among Orthodox and Traditional Jews, many families have a seder-like ceremony on the first night of Rosh Hashanah. The food traditions go far beyond dipping a Granny Smith in honey or eating round challah. Favorable blessings are tied to the Hebrew names of certain food. So, if you eat black-eyed peas, sans the hog jowls of course, the blessing would be: May it be Your will that our merits increase. The word for legumes, rubia, .resembles the word for increase, yirbu.
The blessings also give you a good excuse for making squash casserole, that ubiquitous Southern side.
My husband and I keep kosher, so we can't very well do the old-fashioned cheddar cheese/sour cream version with a meal that will include balsamic vinegar/honey chicken. The challenge is to make a non-dairy version that tastes as good as the old favorite.
Over the years, I've come with a method that works very well. Here it is without exact portions:
Put 4-5 cups of yellow squash, cut into rounds, with a large Vidalia onion and some pareve (neither meat nor dairy) powdered chicken stock, available in most kosher sections of supermarkets, into a largish stock pot. (I rarely use my own homemade chicken stock which is more valuable than rubies.) Fill with water to just cover the squash and onions and simmer until the squash is cooked through but not too mushy.
Drain the vegetables and mash with a potato masher. Add one cup of ground Toastettes Rounds Crouton, parmesan cheese and garllic. (Believe or not, these are pareve and usually available in your supermarket near the salad dressings. Kroger often sells them.) Add one-half cup of light, canola-oil mayonnaise and a slightly beaten egg, or two if they are really small. Season with Lawry's seasoned salt -- use a light touch because you cooked the squash in broth -- and ground black pepper. Bake in a 350 degree oven for about one-half hour. This should make around 8-10 servings, unless you are having teenaged boys as guests -- which I am.
The blessing for gourds, k'ra, is: May it be Your will to tear away all evil decrees against us, as our merits are proclaimed before you. (K'ra resembles the words for "tear" and "proclaimed.")
Other traditional foods with accompanying blessings are pomegranates, beets, leeks and dates. All of them fit well into the Southern Jewish menu I'm planning.