by Gil Marks
Sephardim developed an array of stuffed vegetables which they called medias (halves), as cooks typically cut their vegetables in half to be stuffed. Consequently, indigenous Syrian Jews derisively referred to the Sephardic exiles settling in Syria as medias, a reference to their way of preparing stuffed vegetables instead of using the Middle Eastern technique of hollowing out whole vegetables. A distinctive Sephardic practice was to dip the tops of the stuffed vegetables in eggs and flour, then fry them, open side down, before simmering them in a sauce.
Many communities hollow out beets, carrots, onions, and turnips. Eggplant is a longstanding favorite. Mediterranean Jews also stuff artichokes and artichoke hearts, which come into season in early spring in time for Passover. Even celery and chard stems are stuffed in some places. Following their arrival from America, tomatoes, summer squash, pumpkins, and potatoes emerged as popular items to stuff as well; peppers became especially popular, partially because they do not require any tedious hollowing. Persians developed a particular fondness for stuffed fruit, notably quinces, apples, and melons. Romanians and Hungarians, due to their prolonged contact with Sephardim and the Turks, adopted several types of stuffed vegetables, including tomatoes and mushrooms, but particularly favor peppers.
As with other well-traveled dishes, stuffed vegetables developed numerous variations. Stuffings can include primarily meat or eschew it entirely. All-meat fillings are called sheikh mahshi. Turks refer to vegetarian dolmas as zeytinyagli dolma (olive oil dolma) and yalanci dolma (the former word meaning "false/liar"). Turks tend to use more meat, while Persians generally favor more rice and also add yellow split peas. Sephardim in the Balkans tend to use raw meat in the filling and mix in some egg as a binder. Middle Easterners typically sauté the ground meat with onions and omit any egg. Many Middle Eastern fillings contain pine nuts and currants or raisins. Indians use chopped chicken instead of meat, or use all rice. Bulgur is sometimes substituted in the Levant.
Meat or cheese dolmas are customarily served hot, while vegetarian rice ones are appropriate hot or at room temperature. Served together on a platter with other vegetables, dolmas are a colorful part of a mezze (appetizer assortment). Vegetarian versions were es- pecially popular among Jews for dairy meals, which in many households were served every day except the Sabbath and holidays.
The sauce for most Middle Eastern stuffed vegetables tends to be on the tart side. In the nineteenth century, tomatoes became a common addition. Jews from Hungary, Italy, Romania, and northern Poland prefer a savory sauce; Sephardim prefer a sauce made tart with lemon juice; and those from Galicia and Ukraine favor a sweet-and-sour sauce.
Stuffed vegetables became an important dish in nearly every Jewish community. Sephardim and Mizrachim do not limit themselves to a few types, but stuff any number of vegetables including artichokes, beets, carrots, celery, onions, potatoes, radishes, and turnips. Sephardim, however, typically prepare one or more types of stuffed vegetables in separate vessels, preferring the taste of each one to stand alone. Middle Easterners favor a medley of stuffed vegetables in the same pot and each vegetable imparts some of its flavor to the filling and sauce. The vegetable assortment usually consists of a trio of American imports—bell peppers, zucchini, and tomatoes—and sometimes eggplant. For large crowds, the vegetables are stacked in the pot, firm ones below and more delicate items on top. A cook's culinary skill and degree of hospitality were once measured by her dolmas. Since preparing a variety of stuffed vegetables was somewhat time-consuming, they were typically reserved for holidays and other special occasions, especially bar mitzvahs and weddings. Stuffed foods, symbolizing the harvest and abundance, are particularly prominent during the holidays of Sukkot and Purim. Kurds bake various stuffed vegetables, including peppers, eggplants, and zucchini, in their version of Sabbath stew (matphoni). The women of the household traditionally gathered with relatives and friends to prepare the vegetables, chatting and joking as they turned a tedious chore into good-spirited fun and a social event. Such gatherings have grown rare of late, as caterers and store-bought versions became commonplace.
(See also Cabbage, Stuffed ; Grape Leaves, Stuffed )
Middle Eastern Stuffed Vegetable Medley (Dolmas/Mahasha)
12 stuffed pieces
[MEAT]
3 medium bell peppers
3 large yellow onions, peeled
3 large, firm tomatoes
3 medium zucchini
Stuffing:
2 tablespoons olive or vegetable oil
1½ pounds ground beef or lamb
½ cup raw rice, soaked in cold water for 30 minutes and drained, or ½ to 1 cup matza meal or dry bread crumbs
¼ cup chopped fresh parsley
About 1 teaspoon salt
About ¼ teaspoon ground black pepper
Sauce:
3 tablespoons olive or vegetable oil
2 cups tomato juice, chicken broth, or water (or 1 cup tomato sauce and 1 cup water, or 1½ cups water and 6 ounces tomato paste)
2 to 4 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 to 8 tablespoons sugar or honey
Salt and ground black pepper to taste
1. Slice the tops from the bell peppers. Remove and discard the seeds and the core. Slice the tops from the onions, tomatoes, and zucchini. Remove or scoop out the inside parts, leaving a ¼-inch-thick shell. Set aside the vegetable shells.
2. Chop the inside part of the onion and reserve for the stuffing and sauce. Chop the inside parts of the tomato and zucchini and reserve for the sauce.
3. To make the stuffing: In a large skillet, heat the oil over medium heat. Add half of the onions and sauté until soft and translucent, 5 to 10 minutes. Add the meat and sauté until it loses its red color, about 5 minutes. Stir in the rice. Remove from the heat and stir in the parsley, salt, and pepper.
4. To make the sauce: In a large pot, heat the oil over medium heat. Add the remaining onions and sauté until soft and translucent, 5 to 10 minutes. Add the reserved chopped tomato and zucchini and sauté until slightly softened, about 5 minutes. Add the tomato juice, lemon juice, sugar, salt, and pepper.
5. Spoon the stuffing into the vegetable cavities, leaving room for expansion. Any extra stuffing can be shaped into balls and cooked with the vegetables. Arrange the stuffed vegetables upright on top of the sautéed vegetables in the pot.
6. Cover and simmer over low heat or bake in a 350°F oven until tender, about 1 hour. Serve warm. Store in the refrigerator for up to 1 week.
Doughnut
Doughnut is a deep-fried ball or ring of dough leavened with either yeast or chemicals.
Origin: The Netherlands or western Germany
Other names: Dutch: oliebollen, oliekoeken; German: krabbl, krapfen, krapffen, krapfl, fettkrapfen, pfannkuchen; Hebrew: sufganit; Hungarian: fank; Ladino: bimuelo: Turkish: lokma; Ukrainian: pampushky; Yiddish: krapfen, ponchik.
Fried doughs have several advantages over sophisticated pastries—they are rather easy to make, for even relatively inexperienced cooks, and they do not require an oven or much equipment, only a frying pot. Before the spread of the home oven in the late nineteenth century, fried doughs were the most common form of homemade pastry. The ancient Greeks and Romans fried strips of pastry dough in olive oil, afterwards coating them with honey or garum (pungent fish sauce). During the early medieval period, cooks in Arab lands began deep-frying blobs of loose plain yeast dough, dropping them from a hand or a spoon into hot oil. Yeast doughs cannot contain too much sugar—it impairs or even kills the yeast, and causes the fritter's surface to burn before the interior cooks through. Because these fritters were not inherently sweet, residents of the Muslim world began to drench their fritters with sugar syrup.
Medieval Moslem armies advancing into Spain, Sicily, and the Balkans introduced fried yeast dough to those areas. Among Mizrachim and Sephardim, these deep-fried yeast dough balls are prepared today much as they were more than a thousand years ago, served on festive occasions, especially Hanukkah.
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br /> Yeast fritters eventually spread north through Europe. The Harleian Manuscript 279 (c. 1430), from a collection in the British Museum, contains an early English recipe for "Cryspes," exemplifying the nature of fried yeast dough at the end of the Middle Ages. A thin batter of egg whites, milk, flour, sugar, salt, and barm (ale vat foam) was fried by placing one's hand in the batter and letting it run down the fingers into a pot of hot oil. The fritters were sprinkled with sugar.
The modern doughnut probably emerged in the early fifteenth century somewhere in northwestern Europe—the Dutch and Germans each claim credit. Rudimentary doughnuts had one major drawback— they did not contain egg yolks and therefore absorbed an unpleasant amount of grease. Only with the popularization of the chicken in Europe during the late medieval period and the ready supply of inexpensive eggs, did eggs become added to doughs. This meant less greasy fritters, greater versatility, and the widespread popularity of what would become the doughnut.
The use of egg yolks also led to firmer doughs, which were generally shaped in the hands rather than dropped from a spoon, resulting in firmer, larger, tastier fritters. But this created a new problem—relatively large doughnuts made from a firm dough may end up with a bit of raw dough at the center. Some cooks tried to solve this problem by placing a raisin or nut in the center, while others were content with frying small or thin doughnuts. It would be another several centuries before the center dilemma would be resolved with the American innovation of a hole (attributed by some to Captain Hanson Gregory in 1847).
As was common at that time, the dough was heavily spiced and usually contained raisins or dried currants. On occasion, cooks tied the dough into decorative knots (knoten in German and knopen in Dutch) or rolled it out and cut it into diamond shapes. In the fifteenth century, an inspired central European baker added filling and the jelly doughnut was born. However, not all early filled doughnuts were sweet, as sugar was then still a rarity in Germany, and many of the original ones were stuffed with savory mixtures, such as meat, fish, and mushroom. Subsequently, the doughnut's rise to prominence coincided with—the increasing popularity of coffee, which became a frequent accompaniment. Although Jews did not invent the doughnut, they played key roles in transmitting and transforming it.
The Dutch introduced doughnuts to the New World. The Pilgrims also brought the practice of doughnut making with them to America. Eventually, Americans began to reduce or eliminate the spices as well as braiding the dough and, in the mid-1800s, they introduced the hole in the center. It was only following World War I, however, that the doughnut gained mass popularity in the United States. During the war, Red Cross and Salvation Army workers treated soldiers to doughnuts, exposing many Americans to this treat for the first time. The servicemen returned home with a passion for doughnuts and many bakeries responded. At that time, most doughtnut makers offered only the few basic varieties.
It was automation that would transform the doughnut from an exotic inconsistent treat into standardized everyday fare. Adolph Levitt of New York, a Jewish refugee from the pogroms of czarist Russia, sold handmade doughnuts that he fried up in a large pot in his store in Harlem. In 1920, working with engineers, he developed the first automated doughnut machine and founded Display Doughnut Machine Corp, which later became the Doughnut Corporation of America. Five years later, he released a standardized mix to use in his machines, creating a near monopoly through the 1940s. At the 1934 World's Fair in Chicago, machine-produced doughnuts were billed as "the food hit of the Century of Progress." In 1931, making use of his machines and mixes, Levitt launched the first doughnut shop chain, Mayflower Donuts. The chain eventually had eighteen locations nationwide, before disappearing in the 1970s. Within fifteen years, Levitt was annually selling more than twenty-five million dollars' worth of machines. Around that time, the appearance of doughnuts in assorted diners and cafeterias, as well as the spread of doughnut chains, led to the doughnut becoming America's favorite cake.
Emerging local fire safety laws in the United States in the middle of the twentieth century severely restricted the ability of most bakeries to continue making doughnuts, as they were unable to purchase and maintain the special equipment and environment for frying. Therefore, today most American bakeries offering doughnuts do not make them in-house, but contract for them from a wholesaler. In place of part-time doughnut makers, there emerged stores specializing in them, a few spawning large franchises.
William Rosenberg (1916—2002), the son of immigrant Jewish parents, was operating an industrial catering business in which he sold snacks in converted secondhand trucks near factories around his native Dorchester, Massachusetts. He noticed that doughnuts and coffee accounted for 40 percent of his sales and in 1948 launched a doughnut shop called the Open Kettle in Quincy, Massachusetts, the heart of America's original doughnut country, aiming for a blue-collar clientele. Among Rosenberg's innovations was offering fifty-two varieties of doughnuts, one for every week of the year. This unassuming store would eventually become, in Rosenberg's words, "the world's largest coffee and baked goods chain."
Two years after opening, Rosenberg changed the store's name to Dunkin' Donuts and five years after that, arranged the first franchise in nearby Worcester. When his skeptical business partner and brother- in-law, Harry Winokur, protested this move, Rosenberg bought him out. By 1963, there were 100 Dunkin' Donuts shops, and by 1979, there were 1,000. In 1988, England's Allied-Lyons, in a friendly takeover, purchased Dunkin' Donuts, then consisting of 1,850 locations.
In 1956, Harry Winokur started a competing franchise chain, Mister Donut. The upstart went national and soon became Dunkin' Donuts' major competitor. Mister Donut was also the first doughnut chain to receive kosher supervision for some of the franchises.
By the time of Rosenberg's death, there were more than 5,000 Dunkin' Donut shops, including about 40 outlets under kosher supervision, in nearly 40 countries, and serving nearly 2 million customers per day.
(See also Bimuelo, Fritter, Lokma, Pampushka, Sfenj, Sufganiyah, Yoyo, Zalabia, and Zvingous)
Duck
Ducks, smaller relatives of geese, are mostly aquatic birds found wild as well as domesticated throughout much of the world. All contemporary domesticated ducks, except the Muscovy, are descended from the wild mallard. There are seven subspecies of the mallard, the most prominent today being the Pekin. The other common domesticated duck is the Muscovy, a South American species. Most of the domesticated ducks in North America today are mixed breeds between the Pekin and Muscovy, sometimes called a Moulard. Because of the American Muscovy's ability to breed with Old World ducks, the Israeli chief rabbinate pronounced them kosher.
Duck is particularly prized in China, France, Poland, and central Europe but is generally overlooked farther south toward the Mediterranean and in much of the Middle East. Unlike geese and chicken, ducks were rarely raised by Jews. It is uncommon among Sephardim and most Mizrachim and in some Middle Eastern communities duck is considered unkosher.
On the other hand, in parts of central and eastern Europe, duck was considered festive fare. In this vein, the standard Yiddish word for female duck, katshke, derives from the Slavic word, reflecting the principal area of its popularity among Ashkenazim.
Duck meat is darker and richer than that of the chicken and turkey and possesses less flesh in proportion to bone than most other birds. The favorite dish of duck cooked with sauerkraut be found from Germany to Bulgaria. All commercially available kosher duck is domesticated and usually comes frozen. The majority of the world's contemporary foie gras comes from Moulards.
(See also Bird)
Dukkah
Dukkah is a spice and nut mixture.
Origin: Egypt
Dukkah (from the Arabic meaning "to pound"), a staple among Egyptians, is a spice blend containing toasted nuts, seeds, and sometimes pepper, mint, za'atar, or thyme. Most Egyptian Jews would not purchase dukkah from street vendors, for reasons of kashrut, but would prepare their own at home. The most popular
and traditional way to consume this is to dip bread into olive oil, then into the dukkah. It is also used as a coating for pan-fried fish and poultry, in lamb stews, and over salads and pasta.
Egyptian Nut and Spice Mixture (Dukkah)
about ¾ cup
[PAREVE]
½ cup hazelnuts, pine nuts, pistachios, or peanuts
¼ cup sesame seeds
3 tablespoons coriander seeds
2 tablespoons cumin seeds
About ¾ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon dried mint or thyme (optional)
In a dry medium skillet, stir the nuts over medium- high heat until golden brown, about 5 minutes. If using hazelnuts, place on a towel and rub to remove the skins. Let cool. Add the sesame seeds to the skillet and stir over medium-high heat until lightly browned, 2 to 3 minutes. Let cool. Add the coriander and cumin to the skillet and and stir over medium-high heat until lightly browned, 1 to 3 minutes. Let cool. In a mortar and pestle or food processor, coarsely grind the nuts and seeds. Stir in the salt and, if using, mint. Store in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to 1 month.
Dulce
Dulce refers to an array of sugar confections, candied fruits, jellied candies, and preserves.
Origin: Spain
Other names: Arabic: helou; Greek: glyko; Hebrew: matok.
After the Arabs conquered Persia in the seventh century, they began introducing sugar cane throughout the Arab world and cooks began to experiment with it. By the tenth century, they had created rudimentary confections—called halwa (literally "sweet" in Arabic)—based on sugar syrup. By the thirteenth century, recipes for pulled sugar and marzipan (called faludhaj) appeared in Baghdad. Building on these advances, Sephardim developed an array of confections, especially candied fruits and jellied candies, called dulces or dulses. Sephardim enjoy these fruit confections on special occasions, especially Rosh Hashanah and Passover.
Fruit cooked in sugar syrup until soft, dulce de fruta, has been popular among Sephardim since well before the expulsion from Spain. Sugar contributes additional sweetness and also intensifies the flavors; it contributes body so that the paste can be cut into shapes. Many early Sephardic dulces were based on ground nuts and oranges and featured the profusion of spices typical of fourteenth-century European cookery. More recently, the spices have been toned down or eliminated, focusing instead on the fruit flavors. Almost any fruit can be used in this process, but hard ones require cooking and dried ones soaking. Favorite dulces are made from high-pectin fruits that gel, notably bimbriyo (quince) and mansana (apple). Sephardim in India use mangoes. Conversos in Central America and the Caribbean inspired New World versions, such as dulce de guayaba (from guava paste). In the sixteenth century, dulces appeared in England, where the Iberian quince paste (marmelo in Spanish) eventually became the English marmalade.
