1,000 Foods To Eat Before You Die: A Food Lover's Life List (114 page)

The Sephardic seder, a meal rich in ritual.

So fragrant and tantalizingly exotic are the dishes of the Sephardic seder that they, too, are hardly recognizable as related to their Ashkenazic counterparts, comforting dishes beloved more for their coziness than for the boldness of their
flavors.
Sephard
is the Hebrew name for Spain, and the term came to identify the Jews who settled in countries all around the Mediterranean after being expelled from Spain in 1492. As with all other Jews of the Diaspora, their food took on the characteristics of those countries into which they dispersed, the recipes altered to satisfy kosher laws.

Delicious cases in point are the seder dishes that reflect the influences of Greece and Turkey, starting with the conservelike
charoset
spread, which combines ingredients such as hazelnuts, almonds, and walnuts, raisins, dates, apples, orange juice, and pomegranate seeds, sparked with a little wine vinegar and cinnamon, and at times wine or brandy (see
listing
). There is the fish course, either a delicately beautiful coral-and-ruby combination of fresh, supple spring salmon and an astringently tart sauce of spring rhubarb and tomatoes or perhaps a version of sweet and sour salmon (see
listing
).
Frittata de espinaca
is a savory spinach pudding bound with eggs and crushed, soaked matzos, equally delightful hot or cold. If the pudding is to be served at a dairy meal, it may benefit from the added creaminess of cottage cheese, which is stirred into the mix before it is baked.

Keftes de prasa
, golden, crisp croquettes of matzo meal, eggs, and chopped leeks, provide crunch and another reminder of verdant springtime.
Megina
is an ingenious and diverting riff on lasagna, with moistened sheets of matzo substituting for pasta: A fluffy beef sauce seasoned with onion, parsley, Passover-approved dried thyme, and oregano or cinnamon is layered between the matzos and baked for a soothingly soft yet sustaining result.

Finally, a dessert confection very close to the Ashkenazic nut and honey bon-bons called
noant
(see
listing
) is
ahashoo
, a dentistry-defying brittle of walnuts, honey, cinnamon, and ginger.

Further information and recipes:
The Book of Jewish Food
by Claudia Roden (1996);
The Sephardic Kitchen
by Rabbi Robert Sternberg (1996);
The New York Times Passover Cookbook
edited by Linda Amster (2010);
nytimes.com
(search special food of the sephardim).

A fragrant, light, and satisfying cake created out of matzo-based cake meal? Difficult to believe, but true. The eight days of Passover, when both leavening and ordinary wheat flour are prohibited and only the carefully grown and
“watched” flour used for matzos is permitted, have in this case fostered an excellent innovation. That matzo-based cake meal, almost as fine as flour, joins potato starch to become the enabler in a puffy, sunny cake. Redolent of orange and lemon zests and flecked with ground walnuts, it uses beaten egg whites as its sole leavening.

Believed to have come from the English tea-and-cake tradition, sponge cakes were popularized in the eighteenth century. (Jane Austen referred to one in a letter she wrote in 1808.) Today, Jewish bakers pride themselves on making theirs light as air and tall as can be, and on achieving a thinly layered and feathery soufflé-like texture—but so popular and beloved has this sponge cake become that it is made by home bakers the year round. Sliced horizontally into two layers, it becomes a shortcake of sorts, a delicious vehicle for whipped cream and berries or bananas.

Makes 8 to 10 servings

12 extra-large eggs, separated

1½ cups sugar

Grated zest of 1 large lemon

Grated zest of 1 large orange

¼ cup orange juice

Pinch of salt

1 cup cake meal (see
Note
)

¼ cup potato starch

½ cup finely ground walnuts

1.
Preheat the oven to 325°F.

2.
Using a large, clean piece of brown wrapping paper or parchment, cut a circle to fit the bottom of an 11-or 12-inch springform pan. Then cut a band to fit around the sides. This can be about ½ inch deeper than the pan. Run both pieces of cut paper under cold water very quickly, slightly dampening both sides. Place the circle on the bottom, then fit the band around the inner sides. Set aside.

3.
Beat the egg yolks with 1 cup sugar in a medium bowl until they are thick, almost white, and form a ribbon when a little of the mixture is allowed to drip from a spoon, about 7 to 8 minutes. Stir in the grated zests and orange juice.

4.
Beat the egg whites with a pinch of salt in a large bowl. As the whites begin to thicken, gradually beat in the remaining ½ cup sugar. The whites should stand in stiff, glossy peaks.

5.
Sprinkle the cake meal, potato starch, and ground nuts over the whites. Add the yolk mixture and fold all together gently but thoroughly with a rubber spatula. No egg whites should be showing. Turn the mixture into the pan.

6.
Bake until a tester inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean, and the top of the cake, when pressed with your fingertip, springs back to shape, 1 to 1¼ hours.

7.
Let the cake cool in the pan. After about 2 hours, or just before serving, remove the sides of the springform and peel off the paper. If you are using only part of the cake, remove the paper only from the section to be cut, as the rest of the cake will keep better with the paper on it. Wrapped in wax paper or parchment and stored in the refrigerator, leftover sponge cake can be kept in good condition for 7 to 10 days, and can even be wrapped in foil and frozen for up to 3 months.

Note:
Cake meal should not be confused with matzo meal. Both are made of crushed matzos; however, cake meal is fine and floury, while matzo meal is coarser and more like fine cracker crumbs. They are not interchangeable.

Retail and mail order:
All of the following sell sponge cake only at Passover:
In New York
, Eli Zabar, tel 866-354-3547,
elizabar.com
;
in Chicago
, Manny’s, tel 312-939-2855,
mannysdeli.com
;
in Ann Arbor, MI
, Zingerman’s Bakehouse, tel 888-636-8162,
zingermansbakehouse.com
.
Mail order:
For springform pan,
surlatable.com
(search platinum professional springform pan); amazon.com (search cuisinart nonstick spring-form pan).
Further information and additional recipes:
From My Mother’s Kitchen
by Mimi Sheraton (1979);
Inside the Jewish Bakery
by Stanley Ginsberg and Norman Berg (2011);
Cooking Jewish
by Judy Bart Kancigor (2007);
cookstr.com
(search passover sponge cake);
epicurious.com
(search passover spongecake).

Juicy pastrami piled high on seeded rye bread.

The twin meats of the classic New York Jewish deli, corned beef and pastrami are lushly moist, pungently pickled treats that begin their lives as similar cuts of meat—first-cut brisket being ideal for corned beef while beef “plate” is better for pastrami. Both are pickled in brine with spices like bay leaves, coriander, hot chile flakes, black pepper, and garlic. After the pickling, pastrami is coated with crushed peppercorns and smoked—a technique said to have been brought over by Jews from Romania—becoming a drier, deep red meat. Both are steam cooked and served hot.

The meats are available throughout the U.S., but they rarely achieve authentic flavor and texture outside New York City. Good corned beef and pastrami will be firm but laced with enough fat for juiciness (lean pastrami and corned beef are oxymorons), and graced with the right amount of smoke, salt, pepper, and pickling spices.

Although the method is virtually extinct, the best process for making these seductive slabs of meat is a dry cure in which they are layered with salt and spices until the pickling causes juices to run out. Because time is money, the modern method has been sped up with variations like soaking or injecting the beef with brine.

For the best sandwiches, the meat should be hot, richly etched with fat, and thinly hand sliced before it is heaped in mountainous folds between caraway-flecked slices of Jewish sour rye bread. Cheap yellow deli mustard is the condiment of choice, along with kosher-style pickles, pickled green tomatoes, and cold, uncooked sauerkraut—hold the coleslaw, please. While the meats are usually served as sandwiches, both are also delicious in pancake omelets.

Quaff it all down with beer, celery tonic, or hot tea with sugar and lemon. In New York, the highest-quality pastrami and corned beef can still be found at Pastrami Queen, where they will hand slice (but only if you ask). At Katz’s, on the Lower East Side, and at Langer’s, in downtown Los Angeles, hand slicing happens by default.

Where:
In New York
, Pastrami Queen, tel 212-734-1500,
pastramiqueen.com
; Carnegie Deli, tel 212-757-2245,
carnegiedeli.com
; Katz’s Delicatessen, tel 212-254-2246,
katzsdelicatessen.com
;
in Atlanta
, The General Muir, tel 678-927-9131,
thegeneralmuir.com
;
in Miami
, Goldstein’s Prime, tel 305-865-4981,
goldsteinsprime.com
;
in Chicago
, Manny’s, tel 312-939-2855,
mannysdeli.com
;
in Los Angeles
, Art’s Delicatessen, tel 818-762-1221,
artsdeli.com
; Langer’s, tel 213-483-8050,
langersdeli.com
;
in San Francisco
, Wise Sons Deli, tel 415-787-3354,
wisesonsdeli.com
;
in Houston
, Kenny & Ziggy’s, tel 713-871-8883,
kennyandziggys.com
.
Further information and recipe:
From My Mother’s Kitchen
by Mimi Sheraton (1979).

How can a humble, inexpensive, ubiquitous, and bland green bell pepper (
Capsicum annuum
) attain gastronomic glory? Judging by the enduring popularity of this pungent, head-clearing, garlicky pickle, an icon of the Jewish delicatessen menu, it doesn’t take much at all.

The flavor injection begins with either grilling the whole green peppers over an open flame or oven-roasting them until they blister. For best flavor, they should not be peeled (although they often are). Split open and seeded, they are packed in jars and doused with astringent white vinegar and a flock of unpeeled, crushed cloves of garlic. The pickling makes the most of the green pepper’s naturally sweet and grassy flavor, creating a refreshing and incredibly garlicky garnish that complements steak in particular, but also any grilled meat or fowl, or simply a slice of Jewish rye bread.