It’s great to be still celebrating Chanukah in December as well as November. Chanukah is a very special time for Jewish foods.
We eat latkes in the U.S., and sufganiot, or filled jelly doughnuts, in Israel. We know that potato pancakes and doughnuts are not exclusively Jewish, but the reasons for eating them on Chanukah are.
We eat latkes and doughnuts because both are fried or prepared in oil. The oily food represents what the Babylonian Talmud says was the miracle of the small amount of undefiled oil found in the Second Temple after Judah Maccabee and his followers recaptured it from the Seleuicid Empire. The oil burned for eight days instead of just one day.
So while almost every other people has its oily foods, whether potato pancakes, or some form of doughnut, we know that though most of us really love those fragrant smelling pancakes crackling in oil, or licking jelly from our fingers, we really are doing this to commemorate an important historical victory in Jewish history. What a great way to remember.
We also all know the question “Ma nishtanah” (“what makes this different”) from the Passover seder. Now we want to know, is some food that’s known as Jewish really been created by the Jewish people.
Some are adaptations of foods eaten by people in many of the countries in Eastern Europe that our ancestors have come from, like borscht, herring, kishke (stuffed derma) and stuffed cabbage.
Many Jewish foods are not just eaten because they are tasty (though they are), but because they have a religious or special commemorative historical significance for us.
Some foods are definitely of Jewish origin. Despite the many kinds of flat unleavened breads, we do know that matzah historically was a Jewish creation.
According to tradition, when the Hebrews were fleeing Egypt they had no time to let the dough rise to become bread, as we know it today. Voila, matzah was created.
From the famous matzah, of course, comes matzah balls, matzah brei and matzh ball soup. For the non-cognoscenti, matzah brei is a combination of eggs and broken matzah and fried ….delicious!
Fish for Shabbat
The Sabbath meals have been the most important meals in the week in Judaism.
For the two main Sabbath meals (there is also the third meal, the seudah shlishit), Friday night and Saturday lunch, several dishes have been developed by Jews.
Fish has been an important ingredient of these meals since Talmudic times. There’s even a fish recipe given in the Talmud by the scholar Rabbi Pappa (Tractate Shabbat 118b).
The Hebrew word for fish, dag, also adds up numerically to the number seven, or the day of the Sabbath,
Since bones are also not allowed to be separated out of flesh then gefuellte (German for stuffed) fish evolved. Originally this fish was actually stuffed back into the fish skin, but gradually just the fish loaves or became the norm. The Polish gefilte fish tends to be sweeter than the Lithuanian derivation.
Kugel is another Sabbath treat. Kugel means ball in German and originally kugels were made of potatoes, which were a cheap staple in Europe, or noodles. Kugels now come in a multitude of versions, like broccoli, Yerushalmi, and even spinach.
The piece d’resistance, and often main course of the Sabbath lunch, cholent (potential derivation from old French for hot and slow). This might have descended from an earlier concoction.
Because cooking on the Sabbath was forbidden, an all-inclusive dish called Chamin, was created. Chamin, which means hot in Hebrew, is still called this in Israel, and was mentioned in the Talmud, but not what the ingredients were.
Of course it did not have potatoes as they were grown then only in the Americas. Today’s cholents are primarily potatoes, beans, onions and barley.
Who could envision the Sabbath without its star feature, the challah bread, definitely a Jewish creation. Two challahs are served to represent the double portion of manna, the food that came down from the sky to the Hebrews in the desert weekdays, with two portions on the Sabbath.
The word challah was first mentioned in Numbers 15.18-21. “When you eat of the bread of the land you shall set aside a portion of the first dough for G-d.” The ancient Hebrews gave challah, a portion of their dough, to the priests of the Temple.
Sometimes challahs are made in certain shapes to designate different holiday themes. Traditionally, however, the ordinary Sabbath challahs have been made in a braid form, usually with three or six braid or even more.
According to Milwaukee Talmud scholar and my husband, Rabbi Avi Zarmi, three and six are both deep Cabalistic numbers. Three represents the three dimensions of the world and six the days of the week twined together on the Sabbath.
The website Chabad.org concurs with these explanations and added that the braiding represents unity. The three Hebrew letter root of the word for challah is chet-yud-lamad which means to be curved or twisted among other things, thus braiding is a form of twisting.
Another explanation is that the braids can stand for the 12 Tribes of Israel, and so some households make two six-braided challahs for Shabbat. Others will make 12 small loaves to represent the tribes.
Through the year
Purim is another holiday for special treats. This time it’s Hamantaschen, or Haman pockets, a triangle-shaped pastry eaten with a special zest, to remember our ancestors’ enemy Haman, who, in the end was killed instead of killing all the Jews in Persia.
After Purim is Passover with all its attendant foods. One special food that is part of the seder, to commemorate the bricks that our ancestors were forced to make for the Egyptians, is charoses, generally made with nuts, wine, apples, and cinnamon.
Shavuot, the next major Jewish holiday is the great cheese cake and blintz bonanza. Again cheese cake, pie etc. are eaten everywhere, and so are blintzes (originally Ukranian) but here they have special significance.
The general explanation is that at Sinai when the Jewish people realized that they couldn’t eat dairy and meat together, they thought that since their dishes were no longer kosher the easiest thing to do was to eat dairy.
Cheese cake is probably the most delicious form of dairy and has become a Jewish American tradition.
After Shavuot, the next major eating holiday is Rosh HaShannah and we come round circle with our round challahs and our symbols of a sweet year with both raisins in the challahs and the dipping of apples and challah in honey.
Arlene Becker Zarmi is a freelance writer whose work has been published in more than 40 publications nationwide. She was also the producer and host of a travel TV show for Viacom, and is a Jewish genre and portrait artist.
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