Encyclopedia of Jewish Food

by Gil Marks

  1¼ cups warm water (105 to 115°F for dry yeast; 80 to 85°F for fresh yeast)

  1 teaspoon sugar

  1 teaspoon table salt or 2 teaspoons kosher salt

  About 3 cups (15 ounces) bread or unbleached all-purpose flour

  Vegetable oil

  Filling:

  1 cup (3 ounces) grated Parmesan, Romano, or hard cheese

  ½ cup all-purpose flour

  Additional grated cheese for sprinkling (optional)

  About 3 cups Gomo (Sephardic Pastry Fillings), such as cheese, potato, eggplant, leek, onion, or spinach

  Additional grated cheese and/or sesame seeds for sprinkling

  1. To make the pastry: Dissolve the yeast in ¼ cup water. Add the sugar and let stand until foamy, 5 to 10 minutes. In a large bowl, combine the yeast mixture, remaining water, salt, and 1 cup flour. Gradually stir in enough of the remaining flour to make a soft dough. Knead until smooth and elastic, 10 to 15 minutes. Place in an oiled bowl, cover, and let rest for about 30 minutes.

  2. Place about ½ inch oil in a shallow medium pan. Divide the dough into thirds and knead each third until smooth. Form into balls, place in the pan, and turn to coat in the oil. Let stand for about 20 minutes.

  3. Preheat the oven to 400°F. Grease a large baking sheet.

  4. On a lightly oiled surface, roll out each dough third into a thin square about 12 inches in diameter. Rub the dough with oil.

  5. To make the filling: Combine the cheese and flour. Sprinkle one-third of the cheese mixture over each dough square. Roll up jelly-roll style. Cut the rolls into four 2½-inch lengths. Place the pieces, uncut side down, on the lightly oiled surface, flatten, and roll into thin 5-inch squares. (This step creates a flakier pastry.)

  6. Rub each square with oil and, if desired, sprinkle with additional cheese. Spoon 1 tablespoon Sephardic pastry filling in the center. Using oiled hands, bring the four corners together in the center, slightly overlapping, and press the edges together to seal in the filling.

  7. Place the boyos, folded side down, on the prepared baking sheet. Brush the tops with oil and sprinkle with cheese and/or sesame seeds.

  8. Bake until golden brown, about 25 minutes. Serve warm or at room temperature.

  Brain

  Brains—moach in Hebrew, n'khaat or mokh in Arabic, meyoyo or meollo in Ladino, cervello in Italian, and moi'ech or gehrin in Yiddish—were once a popular treat, but are now rarely eaten. Lamb and veal are the most common type. Brains must be very fresh to have the appropriate texture. A sign that the brains are not fresh is that the outer membrane will be difficult to remove. Before cooking, they must be washed and cleaned of the membranes and veins. In most recipes, they are first poached until firm, cooled, and then sliced. The slices are pan-fried, deep-fried, or cooked with scrambled eggs or soufflés, resulting in a creamy texture, similar to sweetbreads, which people either love or hate. Brains in tomato sauce are found in both Sephardic and Ashkenazic communities. Brains should not be partnered with strong ingredients that would overwhelm their delicate flavor. Brains are a traditional appetizer for Rosh Hashanah, reflecting the biblical directive that one should "be like the head and not the tail."

  Bread

  In ancient Israel, bread was part of every meal, constituting at least 50 percent and frequently up to 70 percent of the diet. The generic Hebrew term for bread, lechem, also used as a synecdoche for food in general, is found seventy-five times in the Pentateuch alone. (Contrast this to the comparable Arabic lahum, which possesses the specific denotation of meat.) Reflecting the importance of lechem, it is related to the word milchamah (war), as the cultivation of grain led to both trade and war. Barley bread was the predominant form in biblical Israel, while wheat assumed that position during the Second Temple period.

  By applying the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which states that the importance of an item to a society is reflected in the number of variations developed in the language, we can see the special place held by bread in ancient Jewish life. The Bible contains about a dozen names for various shapes and types of bread, including lechem, matza, paht (a piece of bread), kikkar ("circuit/round shape," hence a large round loaf akin to pita), oogah (round), rakik (thin wafers), challah ("perforated" thick loaves), revuchah (a dough made with hot water and oil), levivah (pancake bread), nikkudim ("spotted/pierced," generally translated as "biscuits"), and tzelil (from "circle/rotate"). The Talmud records even more types of bread.

  Consequently, it is hardly surprising that bread found its way into Jewish ritual. The Bible mandates the various Temple flour offerings baked as bread, lechem ha'panim (the showbread of the Temple, a fresh set of twelve changed every Sabbath), shtei ha'lechem (two leavened wheat loaves waved in the Temple on Shavuot), and the Passover matza. Following the destruction of the Temple, the home table symbolically replaced the altar and the Sabbath loaves the showbread. Thus every Sabbath and festival meal commences with bread. Most communities used their regular loaves for the Sabbath, but Ashkenazim developed special ones known as challah. Bread is served with a sprinkling of salt, an allusion to the altar, where salt was a mandatory component of the offerings. In addition, the Talmud directed serving salt and relishes with bread, as throughout most of history, loaves were frequently coarse and dry, and required condiments to make them palatable.

  The Daily Grind

  Among the personal effects the Israelites took with them from Egypt were the three necessities of bread making: wooden kneading troughs, mortars, and the two-piece heavy grindstones; the latter were certainly transported on wagons. In order to make its daily bread, every home in the ancient Middle East had to have some form of grinding device, its indispensability recognized in the biblical law forbidding the use of either the top or bottom part as collateral for a loan. Without access to a quern, a family would literally starve to death.

  For millennia, every household ground its own flour fresh daily from stored grains. Ingenuity led to a more efficient way of milling the kernels: the saddle quern, which is called raichayim in the Bible, from the root rachah (to rub), the plural form denoting a pair of stones. The larger lower part of this duo is the quern/metate. This large stone, either rectangular or oval in shape, has a shallow depression chiseled out in the center (hence it looks like a saddle). It generally weighed at least twenty pounds and up to one hundred pounds.

  The second part of this device is the handstone/mano. It is a smaller cylindrical stone (akin to a stone rolling pin). The upper stone, sufficiently heavy to crush the grains, but not too cumbersome to move, typically weighed about four and a half pounds, but could weigh as much as twenty-seven pounds. The heaviness of a handstone is vividly illustrated in the Prophets: "And a certain woman threw a handstone on Abimelech's head, and broke his skull."

  Until the advent of commercial mills, the daily grinding of grain, a task relegated to women (threshing and winnowing were men's work), was the most labor-intensive activity of every household; the work began many hours before breakfast. Thus the line in Proverbs: "She gets up while still night and provides food to her household." The Mishnah, in listing the seven minimum domestic responsibilities of a housewife, counts flour preparation first and baking second: "She grinds, bakes, launders, cooks, nurses her children, makes the bed [literally "stuffing mattresses"], and makes [spins] wool."

  The heavy quern was positioned on the floor, requiring the woman operating the device to kneel. A small amount of grain was placed in the center of the quern and, using both hands, the grinder pushed the handstone forward to the end of the quern, her shoulders and nose nearly parallel to the ground, then sharply drew back to her original position. This movement was repeated for hours on end, until enough flour was produced for the family's daily needs, inflicting great pressures and frequently pains on the knees, toes, hips, and lower back. An hour of grinding would typically produce about one and three-quarters pounds (about six cups) of flour, less than enough for two people, if each one consumed the typical eighteen ounces a day. Thus a famil
y of five required at least three hours of grinding every morning.

  A major innovation in milling occurred about three thousand years ago with the development of the rotary millstone. Large versions, generally turned by cattle, donkeys, or slaves—such as the millstone that the Philistines forced Samson to push—consisted of a pair of flat, circular stones, the bottom one remaining stationary while the top one turned. The use of animal power and later water resulted in greater speed and efficiency, producing a sudden abundance of flour and leading to large-scale commercial milling. Smaller versions for the home, called the rotary quern or beehive quern, also appeared, but were not widespread in the Middle East until some six hundred to eight hundred years thereafter, during the early Persian period.

  After grinding, the baker placed the flour, usually coarse, in a large wooden kneading trough and mixed it with water and, for wheat dough, a reserved starter (seor). After a lengthy, strenuous kneading, often by foot, the dough was left to rise (occasionally it failed to live up to expectations) for hours or overnight. Barley dough, lacking gluten, did not require rising.

  Into the Oven

  Initially, bread dough was baked directly on the coals of a campfire, a method some Bedouin in the Middle East still use during their roaming. Later, cooks discovered the effectiveness of a heated stone and then primitive clay ovens. In the time of the First Temple, there were two types of rudimentary ovens in Israel employed for bread baking: the jar-oven and pit-oven. The jar-oven consists of a large, thick-walled earthenware vessel, narrowing into an opening toward the top. It was heated from the inside by burning wood and dung; the dough was then pressed against the outside to cook. The pit-oven was a clay-lined excavation in the ground. When sufficiently hot, the fuel was swept off and the loaves were baked directly on the heated surface. At some point, people also began placing a convex dome (thirteen to twenty inches in diameter and about three inches high), initially earthenware and later metal, over the pit-oven and cooking the flatbreads on the dome instead of on the ash-covered surface; this type of oven was known as a sajj/sag and is probably what was meant by the biblical machabat, one of the methods of baking in the Temple frequently translated as "griddle." The only types of bread able to be cooked on all these devices were rather thin loaves.

  Later, the Persians introduced a newfangled clay tanur (the same as the contemporary Indian tandoor), in which the bread was baked on the inner wall of the upper chamber, allowing for slightly thicker loaves. Akin to the tanur was the tabun, a terra-cotta beehive-shaped oven heated by placing the fuel underneath. Many families had their own tanur or tabun.

  A major advance in bread and pastry baking, possibly introduced by the Romans, came when a bottom was added to the oven, resulting in the furn. It is a large stationary stone-lined oven in which the wood is burned inside; the ashes are then raked out or to the side, and the dough or baking sheet is set directly on the floor of the oven or against the walls. The furn allowed for much thicker loaves. Few homes possessed their own furn, so housewives prepared the loaves at home, then carried them to the community furn for baking.

  Black and White

  The medieval European masses primarily subsisted on gruels, stews, occasional fish, and simple, coarse rye or black breads of varying quality. During a medieval European meal, meat and broth were commonly poured onto a large piece of bread, called a sop (from the Old English sopp). Hence the origin of the various European words for soup. The British took it a step further: Since the combination of bread and broth often served as the mainstay of the evening meal, one was said to sup, thus supper.

  Wheat was the predominant grain in the Muslim world. In much of northern Europe, wild rye commonly made its way into wheat fields, blown by the wind, resulting in the two grains being harvested, planted, and milled together. This combination flour, known as maslin, remained the primary form of flour in northern Europe well into the seventeenth century. White bread was usually reserved for the Sabbath and festivals. Only in the mid-nineteenth century did white flour become predictably and widely accessible in most of Europe. In eastern Europe, various types of black bread remained the norm well into the twentieth century.

  In modern Israel, there are two predominant breads: the Middle Eastern pita and the European loaf known as lechem achid (standard bread) subsidized by the government. The latter emerged with the founding of the state, the government setting the price and compensating the large bakeries, which also produce a variety of nonsubsidized loaves. This is a basic unbleached white bread with a rather firm texture and wheaty flavor. However, every ethnic group arriving in the Promised Land eventually opened and patronized bakeries offering traditional breads. As a result, Israeli bakeries and groceries now offer a vast array of breads in every shape and size.

  (See also Bagaleh, Bagel, Barley, Bialy, Birkhat Hamazon (Grace after Meals), Bollo, Challah, Fatoot/Ftut, Injera, Khachapuri, Khobz, Kimochdun, Kubaneh, Laffa, Lahuh, Lángos, Lavash, Malai, Matza, Melawah, Naan, Nan, Non, Pandericas, Pita, Pletzl, Potatonik, Puri, Rye, Sabbath/Shabbat, Seor (Starter Dough), Semolina, Wheat, Yeast, and Zemmel)

  Brik

  Brik is a turnover made from a flaky, crisp dough with a variety of fillings, and often a whole egg.

  Origin: Tunisia

  Other names: Algeria: bourak, burak; Libya: bureka; Morocco: biouat, briate, briwat; Tunisia: breek.

  When the Turkish börek reached the Maghreb, the residents readily adapted it. Since home ovens were rare, they deep-fried the filled packages. Brik emerged as the Tunisian national snack food, commonly sold by stands at the souk (marketplace) and street vendors throughout the country. Tunisians pack briks with a wide array of fillings, including minced lamb, beef, or tuna, but Jewish versions tend to favor mashed potatoes. There is even a distinctly Jewish dessert variation with almond paste, briks au meil. Some Tunisian Jews earned a meager living vending briks in a town market. Brik has become a popular snack food in modern Israel as well.

  In Tunisia, briks are made with a dough called malsuqa/malsouka ("to adhere" in Arabic), also called feuilles de brick in French and warka (leaf) in Morocco; it is the Tunisian semolina-based form of phyllo dough. Many Israelis, however, substitute standard phyllo or, more recently, Chinese egg roll wrappers or, preferably since they are thinner, Filipino spring roll wrappers called lumpia. However, since the substitutes are all made from bread flour rather than semolina, there will be a little difference. Square sheets of dough are folded into rectangular packages or triangles, while rounds become a half moon. In any case, the pastry must be thin to ensure an appropriately crisp and delicate brik.

  In Tunisia, brik makers customarily break an uncooked egg into the filling, the egg becoming soft-boiled, but still runny, during frying. These are called brik bil adma in Arabic or brik à l'oeuf in French. The light, crisp pastry contrasts with the soft, somewhat viscous egg. People customarily eat a brik with their fingers, aiming to capture the egg yolk in the middle with the first bite and avoid having it run down their chin.

  Tunisian Potato-Filled Pastry (Brik Bil Batata)

  6 pastries

  [PAREVE]

  Filling:

  3 tablespoons olive or vegetable oil

  1 large onion, chopped

  2 to 3 cloves garlic, minced, or ½ cup chopped scallions

  1/3 cup chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley

  1½ cups mashed potatoes

  1 large egg, lightly beaten

  About ¼ teaspoon table salt or ½ teaspoon kosher salt

  Ground black pepper to taste

  6 (6- to 8-inch) square or round brik (warka) sheets, lumpia (Filipino spring roll wrappers), or large thin Chinese egg roll wrappers

  6 very fresh small eggs (optional)

  2 tablespoons harissa (Northwest African Chili Paste (Harissa)) or 6 pinches of tabil (Tunisian Spice Mixture (Tabil)

  1 large egg white, lightly beaten

  Vegetable oil for deep-frying

  Lemon wedges (optional)

  1. To ma
ke the filling: In a large skillet or wok, heat the oil over medium heat. Add the onion and sauté until golden, about 20 minutes. Add the garlic and sauté for 1 minute. Add the parsley and sauté for 1 minute. Let cool. Stir in the potatoes, egg, salt, and pepper.

  2. To assemble the brik packages, place each dough sheet on a flat surface and spoon a heaping tablespoon of the potato filling in the center. If using the eggs, press an indentation into the filling on each dough sheet and break an egg into the indentation. Top each brik with 1 teaspoon harissa or a pinch of tabil. Fold the two sides over the filling, slightly overlapping, then fold over the top and bottom. Brush the inside edges with a little egg white and press to seal. The rolls can be prepared up to 2 hours ahead to this point before frying.

  3. In a large skillet, heat at least 1 inch oil to 375°F.

  4. In batches, add the briks and fry, spooning some of the oil over the top of the pastry, until the bottom is golden brown, about 1 minute. Using a large metal spatula, turn and fry until the other side is golden brown, about 1 minute. Be careful of spattering the hot oil. Remove with a slotted spoon, drain on a wire rack for 1 minute, then serve immediately. If using, serve the lemon wedges on the side. Squirt a little lemon juice over the filling before each bite.

  Brinza

  Brinza is a brined, white, semisoft, curd cheese made from sheep's or goat's milk.

  Origin: Romania

  Other names: Bulgaria: sirene; Hungary: brynza; Israel: bulgarit; Romania: brânza telemea; Slovakia: bryndza.

  "One drinks wine everywhere, one eats with kashkaval. Oy vey, I am meshige [crazy]! I love only brinza mamaliga." (From "Romania, Romania," a famous Yiddish folk song by Aaron Lebedeff.)

  Mamaliga (cornmeal mush) is the national dish of Romania, and one of the favorite ways of enjoying it is with slices of cheese, either hard kashkaval or soft brinza. Brinza is made from sheep's or goat's milk, but the latter is more of a delicacy. It is similar to but milder, creamier, and less salty than the Greek feta. When young, it is soft and creamy; as it matures in the brine, it becomes semidry, slightly grainy, and crumbly, with an appealing earthy flavor.