by Gil Marks
The first Jewish cookbook in English, The Jewish Manual (London, 1846), provides three recipes incorporating "cocoa nut": "Cocoa Nut Pudding," "Cocoa Nut Doce," and "Chejados," the latter a sort of coconut tart. The first American Jewish cookbook, Jewish Cookery (1871) also offers three coconut recipes: "Cocoanut Cheesecakes," Cocoanut Tarts," and, for the first time, "Cocoanut Macaroons." Another early American Jewish cookbook, Aunt Babette's (1889), contains several recipes with this still-exotic ingredient: "Loaf Cocoanut Cake," "Cocoanut Cake," "Cocoanut Icing," "Cocoanut Caramels," "Cocoanut Cones," "Cocoanut Drops," and "Cocoanut Pie."
In 1895, when a Cuban merchant lacked the cash to pay Franklin Baker, a Philadelphia miller, for a shipment of flour, Baker accepted a load of coconuts instead. Unable to sell enough of the fresh coconuts, Baker developed a method of uniformly shredding the meat. This innovation proved so popular that within two years Baker sold his flour mill to concentrate solely on shredded coconut. With Baker's innovation, cooks were no longer required to peel and grate their own coconut, and coconut soon became a standard in American baked goods and other desserts.
In the Pacific, coconuts are utilized in an incredible number of ways. They are essential in cooking and are also made into an oil and used for utensils and fibers. Many Indians have a special grater to prepare fresh coconut. Westerners primarily use coconut in grated or shredded form in desserts, such as macaroons, cakes, pastries, cookies, and candy. In central Europe in the nineteenth century, hydrogenated coconut fat (kokosfett), called Palmin in Germany, replaced schmaltz and butter for pareve dishes and baking. It was also around this point that coconut became associated with Passover macaroons, a cookie previously made from ground almonds; coconut was also sometimes added to mandelbrot, fluden, and other Ashkenazic baked goods.
Coconut water, also called coconut juice, is the liquid found inside fresh coconuts. More important to cooking is coconut milk, a thicker emulsion made by steeping grated coconut flesh in hot water to extract oils and aromatic compounds. When the mixture is left standing in the refrigerator, a thick, sweet coconut cream (with a strong coconut flavor) separates and rises to the top. The thinner liquid left on the bottom is coconut milk, the thicker part is coconut cream. It is not the same as canned sweetened coconut cream, a very thick, sugary liquid used in cocktails. Coconut milk, now available in cans but also homemade, is essential to many Far Eastern cuisines. For observant Jews, it provides an excellent dairy substitute.
(See also Macaroon)
Cod
Cod is the largest member (weighing up to one hundred pounds) of an extensive family that includes haddock, hake, pollack, and whiting. This native of the north Atlantic has firm, white flesh suited for grilling, poaching, and frying. Since it is so large, cod is generally available only in steaks or fillets. Cod and the other members of the family are interchangeable in recipes with flounder, halibut, and sea bass. Scrod is not a species of the fish, but rather a term for a young cod or other member of the cod family.
As a way to preserve vital resources, various countries of the eastern Mediterranean have long prepared cod and some other white fish by salting and drying, producing a firm, yellowish-colored fish with an assertive flavor. Beginning in the eleventh century, this abundant fish primarily in its salted form—called bacalao and bakala in Spanish, baccalà in Italian, and morue in French—became the staple of much of western Europe, including Sephardim. This was not so in Arabic countries, where people never developed a taste for it. In the fifteenth century, cod was discovered in the Grand Banks off of Newfoundland and salt cod became an important component of European commerce.
Salt cod is soaked in water to rehydrate the fish, as well as to remove the excess salt. Soaking time varies according to thickness. When rehydrated cod is ready to eat, it will swell and the white color will return. Salt cod differs in flavor and texture from fresh cod, so they should not be substituted for each other. Among Sephardim, salt cod is used to make stews, fish balls, fritters, purees, and fillings for empanadas.
Coffee
The coffee tree, an evergreen shrub bearing two- seeded fruit, is indigenous to Ethiopia, where the berries and leaves were chewed for their stimulating effects. Ethiopians may have brought coffee to Yemen during occasional forays across the narrow Gulf of Aden, and around 1000 CE in Yemen, coffee first emerged as a hot beverage, a Sufi Muslim substitute for the forbidden alcohol. In 1511, coffee made its initial appearance in Mecca; by this point the beans were roasted, ground, and infused in the manner of the modern beverage.
Although briefly forbidden by the Meccan authorities, by 1524 coffee was accepted and it subsequently became a prominent feature of hospitality in the Muslim world. The Ottomans captured Yemen in 1536 and took control of the coffee trade emanating from the port of Mocha. Because coffee tended to be rather bitter, not to mention strong, residents of the Ottoman Empire developed the practice of adding sugar, a custom that would forever after affect the world through international commerce and conquest.
It seems to have been in Istanbul, around 1550, where coffee was first consumed in a social setting, the coffeehouse. In these shops, which quickly spread throughout the Ottoman Empire, the beverage that would become known as Turkish coffee was consumed on a daily basis by both rich and poor, literati and illiterates, Moslem and Jew, although only men were then allowed in these establishments. Around 1553, David ibn Abi Zimra, a rabbi in Cairo, initially addressed the situation of Jews and coffeehouses, stating, "There is no problem with the beverage being prepared by a non-Jew." However, the rabbi was against Jews patronizing coffeehouses and urged that the beverage "be delivered home." In these shops, patrons conversed, played backgammon and chess, smoked (beginning in the early seventeenth century, coffee and tobacco commonly went hand in hand), and frequently listened to music, as well as drinking cup after cup of the relatively inexpensive intense black beverage. In the days before the modern modes of entertainment, the coffeehouse was a primary form of and forum for arts and entertainment, occupying a role these establishments would soon play in Europe as well.
Middle Easterners use green Arabica coffee beans and a generous amount of cardamom, sometimes including more spice than coffee. Arabs never add sugar to coffee, serving it murra (bitter) and generally accompanied with dates, but Middle Eastern Jews in Israel prefer it mazboota (medium) or hilwe (sweet).
Turkish coffee is variously served hilwe, mazboota, or murra, but always black. The coffee is poured, about halfway, into fincan/finjan, tiny porcelain cups with no handles. Refusing a cup is considered impolite. A host customarily refills the cup up to three times; more than three cups is considered greedy, while less than two impolite. The scalding-hot coffee is meant to be sipped slowly.
By the end of the sixteenth century, coffee had become and would remain an integral part of daily life throughout the Middle East. During this time, the Ottomans, particularly the merchants of Cairo, kept the Arabian coffee plant a carefully guarded monopoly, resulting in its extremely high price outside the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, coffee temporarily filled the trade vacuum created by the loss of the spice trade after Columbus and Vasco da Gama.
For nearly a century after its introduction to Europe, coffee was the exclusive province of the aristocrats and bourgeoisie; it was highly priced due to the Ottoman monopoly and accumulated import tariffs. Then in the mid-1600s, Dutch smugglers managed to sneak some fresh coffee beans out of the region. They were planted in Ceylon in 1658 and Java in 1699, and then in other Dutch colonies. For decades, the Dutch controlled the world coffee market. Coffee cultivation was brought by the French to Martinique in 1723, beginning with a single plant, and then surreptitiously by the Portuguese to Brazil four years later, further expanding the production and reducing the price.
Today, coffee is grown in temperate climates with sufficient rainfall across the globe, with Brazil producing nearly half of the world's output. Around the same time that coffee cultivation was spreading wider, the cost of sugar in much of
Europe plummeted due to the influx of Caribbean cane and subsequently European sugar beets. By the end of the eighteenth century, the masses of central Europe could also partake of kaffee with kuchen on a daily basis. Coffee replaced beer as the most widely consumed beverage, creating a much more alert population.
Coffee was first introduced to Europe by way of Venice in 1615; merchants and travelers had taken note of it during visits to the Ottoman Empire, and to England in 1630, several years before the arrival of tea there. As with many other new ventures (e.g., soap, sugar refining, and paper), Jews, excluded from guilds and frequently from owning farmland, were typically in the forefront of promoting coffee. In 1632 Jews in Livorno, Italy, a center of Tuscan trade, opened the first coffeehouses in Europe. In the Netherlands, Sephardim along with Armenians and Greeks established the early Dutch coffeehouses, before the Sephardim in the late seventeenth century turned more of their efforts to the chocolate business. Coffee reached France in 1646 and, after becoming fashionable in the court of Louis IV, cafés (named after the French word for coffee) began to spring up throughout Paris. Jews along with various Turks and Armenians were responsible for opening most of the French coffeehouses.
The first coffeehouse in England was opened at the Angel Inn in Oxford in 1650 by a Lebanese referred to as "Jacob the Jew." He later moved to London to open a similar establishment there. In 1654, a Jew named Cirques Jobson (who many believe was none other than the aforementioned Jacob) opened the Queen's Lane Coffee House in Oxford, the oldest extant coffeehouse in the world. By 1715, there were more than two thousand coffeehouses in the London area.
The kaffeehaus was introduced to Germany by the Dutch in the mid-1660s, and it was in central Europe that coffee and coffeehouses were most appreciated. These were male bastions and women were relegated to private forums called kaffeekränzchen (coffee clubs) and kaffeeklatsche (coffee chat). Coffeehouses emerged as a social milieu and center of intellectual discourse. By the nineteenth century, coffeehouses became a vehicle by which Jews and non-Jews could emulate and enter the emerging bourgeois society. Jews discovered and developed intellectual ideas and also refined the Jewish comic culture. In particular, Vienna, Prague, Berlin, and Budapest became renowned for these establishments, as well as the pastries sold in many of them.
Eating a piece of cake with a hot beverage provides textural and flavor differences that enhance each item, making for a more pleasurable experience. Throw in caffeine, and a nosh becomes downright uplifting. Thus during the early seventeenth century, coffee drinkers in central Europe commonly accompanied their morning and afternoon fixes with various sweet yeast pastries. Germans referred to these generic baked goods as kaffeekuchen (coffee cakes), small coffee cakes as kleina kaffeekuchen, those covered with a crumb topping as streuselkuchen and krum kuchen, and those baked in a tube pan or as a ring as gugelhopf (this pan was the forerunner of the modern Bundt pan).
Jewish emigrants would help spread central European coffee styles and cakes to much of the world. In America, by the end of the nineteenth century, the term coffee cake supplanted the British tea cake.
Edna Ferber (1885—1958), noted author of, among other works, Giant and Show Boat, underscored the Teutonic and Jewish heritage of coffee and cake in her novel Dawn O'Hara, the Girl Who Laughed (1911), in a chapter entitled "Kaffee and Kaffeekuchen.":
"I have visited Baumbach's. I have heard Milwaukee drinking its afternoon Kaffee."
"O Baumbach's, with your deliciously crumbling butter cookies and your kaffee kuchen, and your thick cream, and your thicker waitresses and your cockroaches, and your dinginess and your dowdy German ladies and your black, black Kaffee, where in this country is there another like you!"
As early as 1900, some American commercial manufacturers had taken note of the growing Jewish population and, for the first time, began to directly market to the Jewish community, using techniques such as targeted advertising. Among these pioneers was the Maxwell House Coffee Company, which from the early 1900s until the 1980s sold the most coffee in the United States. However, a particular problem emerged in regard to coffee. For following World War I, some Jewish consumers mistook the term "coffee bean" for some sort of legume rather than a berry, which led them to believe that it was in the prohibited Passover category of kitniyot. To clarify the situation, Maxwell House launched an unprecedented publicity campaign replete with, in 1931, the first Maxwell House Haggadah, which was an advertisement in the form of a religious book. Maxwell House was perhaps the first national brand to identify its products as being kosher for Passover and was certainly the first, of what is now a legion of institutions, to offer its own Haggadah. The approach worked and coffee remained a permitted and well-selling item for Passover, while Maxwell House went on over the decades to print millions of Haggadahs, which became a fixture in many American homes.
In the early twentieth century, central Europeans and Middle Eastern Jews brought their love of coffee to Israel, and coffeehouses became the favorite meeting places of German Jews there. After the British left the region and immigrants from other Western areas grew in influence, coffee soon overshadowed tea, becoming the top hot beverage in Israel.
Collard
Collard, also called collard greens or collards, and its close relative kale are both primitive nonheading cabbages native to the eastern Mediterranean or Asia Minor, and have been cultivated since prehistoric times. The English name collard is a corruption of the Old English coleworts (nonheading cabbage). It consists of a large stalk and broad, loose, oval leaves similar to those of the original wild cabbage. It is milder than the crinkled, bitter kale. In many early cultures, the collard stalk was the preferred part of the plant to eat. Both the Greeks and Romans consumed a good deal of collard (and kale; the two were rarely distinguished), as it was an extremely easy plant to grow. However, as milder varieties of headed cabbage emerged during the Middle Ages, the use of collard increasingly declined, and today it is best known as an African food or American soul food; in America, it is traditionally accompanied with hot sauce and vinegar. When Southern Jews cook collard greens, they usually do so without the regional staple ham; sometimes turkey or schmaltz is used. Collard greens (gomen) remain part of Jewish tradition in contemporary Ethiopian cuisine, following only cabbage (tikil gomen) and onions in importance among vegetables.
Unlike the western African style of slow-cooking greens "down to a low gravy," Ethiopians first boil the greens in salted water to remove excess bitterness; then, after draining the collards, they stew, cream, or puree them, cooking them in the same way that primitive cabbages were prepared in the ancient Middle East. The cooked collard greens have a slightly bitter, vaguely cabbage-like flavor. Ethiopians usually add plenty of spices, particularly chilies, or iab (curd cheese). The greens are commonly mixed with white beans or black-eyed peas. Ethiopians often serve collard greens warm or at room temperature with a wot (stew) and injera (pancake bread).
Compote
Compote is a dish of stewed fresh or dried fruit.
Origin: France
The name compote comes from the Old French composte and Latin compositum (mixture). During the early Middle Ages, the term compositum was used for various dishes containing a number of ingredients, including vegetables and even meat; frequently the ingredients were layered. Among the first records of this dish was an early fourteenth-century French manuscript containing a recipe for "Confectio Compositi," consisting of an unsweetened dish of layered parsley root, celery root, cabbage, vinegar, and meat baked in an earthenware vessel.
Shortly after the advent of sugar in the Islamic world, cooks developed simple and sophisticated dishes of cooked fruit in a sugar syrup. Middle Easterners generally did not serve these dishes during or after a meal, but rather in the afternoon or evening as a treat with coffee. In any case, these fruit dishes probably influenced later Europeans. The French, in accord with the medieval notion that cooked fruits help to rebalance the humors, developed a particular predilection for swe
etened fruit compotes. Following the Renaissance, compotes evolved to a form closer to the modern version; they were generally sweetened with sugar and increasingly offered for dessert at the end of a banquet. This idea spread throughout the continent, becoming particularly popular among Germans. A form of the word and of the dish is common to almost every European country. With the popularization of the sugar beet in the nineteenth century, compotes became a typical Ashkenazic dessert.
Compote differs from fruit soups, which are basically composed of the same ingredients, in that the latter contain a large amount of thin liquid, while compotes feature the fruit in a small amount of syrup. Historically, fresh fruit was commonplace in compotes in the summer and fall, making use of seasonal abundance, while dried fruit was used during the winter and early spring. A compote can be made from a single fruit, notably apples, berries, pears, or rhubarb, but the most common type lives up to its name and contains a mixture.
Romanians, Hungarians, and Alsatians commonly added some wine for extra flavor, but Poles, who rarely had access to wine, cooked the fruit in only sugar water. Although compote is primarily thought of as a dessert, it also serves as an accompaniment to grilled or roasted meat or poultry. Ashkenazim commonly serve compote on Passover, accompanied with macaroons or other cookies, as a light course at the end of the Seder meal, but in some homes it also makes an appearance on Rosh Hashanah (signifying a wish for a sweet and fruitful year), Sukkot (representing the harvest), and the Sabbath.
