Encyclopedia of Jewish Food

by Gil Marks

  (See also Kipfel, Makosh/Mákos Beigli, and Rugelach)

  Hungarian Filled Yeast Pastries (Kindli)

  about 18 small pastries

  [DAIRY or PAREVE]

  Dough:

  1 package (2¼ teaspoons) active dry yeast or 1 (0.6-ounce) cake fresh yeast

  ¼ cup warm water or milk (105°F to 115°F for dry yeast; 80°F to 85°F for fresh yeast)

  ¼ cup granulated sugar or ½ cup confectioners' sugar

  ½ cup semidry white wine, orange juice, or water or 1 cup sour cream; or 1 cup warm mashed potatoes and 2 tablespoons white wine

  ¾ cup (1½ sticks) unsalted butter or margarine, softened

  3 large egg yolks

  ½ teaspoon table salt or 1 teaspoon kosher salt

  About 4 cups (20 ounces) bread or unbleached all-purpose flour

  Nut Filling (Diós):

  2 cups (8 ounces) ground walnuts

  1 cup sugar or honey

  1 tablespoon butter or margarine, melted

  1 teaspoon grated lemon zest or ground cinnamon

  ½ cup golden raisins, coarsely chopped (optional)

  Egg wash (1 large egg beaten with 1 teaspoon water)

  1. To make the dough: Dissolve the yeast in the water. Stir in 1 teaspoon sugar and let stand until foamy, 5 to 10 minutes. In a large bowl, combine the yeast mixture, wine, remaining sugar, butter, egg yolks, and salt. Blend in 1½ cups flour. Gradually add enough of the remaining flour to make a mixture that holds together.

  2. On a lightly floured surface, knead the dough until smooth and springy, about 10 minutes. Place in an oiled bowl and turn to coat. Cover loosely with plastic wrap or a kitchen towel and let rise in a warm, draft-free place until doubled in bulk, about 1½ hours, or in the refrigerator overnight.

  3. To make the filling: In a medium bowl, combine all the filling ingredients.

  4. Punch down the dough. Fold over and press together several times. Divide into eighteen 1-inch balls and let stand for 10 minutes. On a lightly floured surface, roll out each ball into a thin 3-inch round. Spoon a heaping tablespoon of the filling into the center of each round. Bring the right side of the dough over the filling and tuck it under the filling on the left side, then pull the left side of the dough over the filling and tuck it in the right side. Tuck the bottom of the dough underneath. Pinch together the dough on the top.

  5. Place, several inches apart, on baking sheets lined with parchment paper or lightly greased. Cover loosely with plastic wrap or a kitchen towel and let rise until puffy, about 30 minutes.

  6. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Brush the kindli with the egg wash. Bake until golden brown, about 30 minutes. Transfer the kindli to a wire rack and let cool. Wrap and store at room temperature for up to 2 days or in the freezer for up to 2 months.

  Kipfel

  Kipfel are flaky, crescent-shaped rolls as well as crescent cookies.

  Origin: Austria

  Other names: America: butterhorns; southern Austria: kipferl; Czech Republic: kifli; Hungary: kifli; Germany: kipferln; Romania and Serbia: kifla.

  Sigmund Freud, in an 1885 letter from Paris back to his native Vienna, noted: "I did at last manage to say 'croissants,' since I always get Kipfel with my coffee."

  The idea of small crescent-shaped breads appears to have emerged in Austria during the late seventeenth century, then spread to France. Many believe that after Marie Antoinette married Louis XVI of France in 1770, she so missed kipfel that she arranged for a Viennese baker to travel to Paris to instruct his French counterparts on how to make it, and the roll soon become the croissant. By this point, the kipfel was about a century old and indelibly implanted in central European gastronomy. In addition to savory kipfels, central Europeans enjoyed a variety of crescent-shaped sweet treats as well.

  Cookies. The introduction of sugar to Persia led to the emergence there in the seventh century of numerous small pastries and eventually throughout the Arabic world. Then as sugar became more commonplace in Europe, every country adopted cookies. 1 Iran—hadgi badah, klaitcha, naan-e berenji, naan-e nokhodchi; 2 Iraq and Middle East—ghraybeh, kourabie, ma'amoul, travados; 3 Turkey—marunchinos, mustachudos, biscochos de raki, masas de vino, foulares; 4 Syria—ras-ib-adjway; 5 Tunisia—makroud; 6 Morocco—kaab el gh'zal, debla, raricha; 7 Greece—biscochos, reshicas; 8 Italy—amaretti, biscotti, impade, sfratti; 9 Hungary—pogácsa, kindli, kranzli; 10 Poland—kichel, hamantaschen, reshinke; 11 Russia—kaletzin; 12 Austria—kipfel, nusskipferln, polster zipfel; 13 Germany—geback, lebkuchen, mahltaschen, mandelbrot, plaetzcehn, pfefferneusse, zimstern; 14 Netherlands—boterkoeke; 15 Denmark—jodekager

  According to legend, the origins of these crescent- shaped baked goods date back to 1683, when the three hundred thousand—strong Ottoman army laid siege to the walled city of Vienna, Austria. The Turks undertook to secretly dig a tunnel under the barricades in the darkness of night. City bakers, at work in the wee hours of the morning in their underground chambers, heard the noise of the construction, alerted the authorities, and foiled the underground attack. Finally, with the timely military intervention of the Poles, Bavarians, and others, the Turks were repelled. Purportedly, local Viennese bakers fashioned special small breads and cakes in the shape of a crescent, the symbol displayed on the Turkish flag, to honor the end of the Ottoman siege, in which they had played a role. These pastries proved perfect to serve in a second prominent Austrian institution engendered by the Ottoman invasion, the coffeehouse, which emerged as a result of chests of coffee beans left behind by the Turks. Others suggest that the bakers had actually concluded that the situation was so dire that they baked crescent-shaped breads to curry favor with the Turks, then sold them to a grateful populace afterward. A third group dismisses any connection between the bread and the siege, maintaining that it was a venerable local baked good shaped to represent animal horns, and that the Turkish connection was merely a myth conjured up later.

  In any case, Austrian bakers originally called the little pointed loaves of white bread zipfel (German meaning "corner/tip"), also spelled ciphel. Zipfel is still used, in conjunction with polster (cushion/padding); polsterzipfel refers to a jam-filled Austrian cookie, also known as Vienna kipfel and in Germany as hasenörchen (little rabbit ears). Meanwhile, the Viennese took to mispronouncing the pointed breads as kipfel, and the word soon becoming a synonym for the German hörnchen (crescent). Variations of the Austrian pronunciation spread throughout central and eastern Europe.

  A crescent-shaped variation of this yeast pastry called Pressburger kipplach is named after Pressburg, the German name for Bratislava, one of the oldest and most important European Jewish communities and commonly considered the dividing line between eastern and western Ashkenazim. Today, Bratislava is the capital of Slovakia. To complicate matters further, this pastry is also called Pozsonyi kifli after the Hungarian named for Pressburg/Bratislava.

  To further confuse the situation, the term kipfel was also applied to small crescent cookies (zuckerkipfel), including those made from various unleavened doughs and yeast kuchen dough, and one similar to kugelhopf but enriched with topfen, a cheese that the Germans call quark. The topfen type of kipfel is traditional on Shavuot and other special dairy meals. In the nineteenth century, Hungarian housewives sometimes substituted mashed potatoes for the butter in the dough.

  In Yiddish, the word kipfel came to specify crescent cookies, both leavened and unleavened, and not the croissant bread. One form of the cookies, nusskipferlin (nut crescents), still ranks among the favorite Ashkenazic cookies. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Jewish immigrants brought the kipfel to America. The American cookbook Aunt Babette's (Cincinnati, 1889), includes one of the earliest records in English of the word in a recipe for "Wiener Kipfel," which consists of yeast dough triangles filled with "beaten whites of eggs, raisins, almonds and citron," and with the edges pinched together. The first edition of The Settlement Cookbook (Milwaukee, 1901) contains several recipes for kipfel, some with yeast and others with
out, but all made with butter. In the twentieth century, vegetable shortening and margarine were sometimes substituted for the topfen and butter in kipfel, expanding its usage in kosher households. In Procter & Gamble's 1933 booklet Crisco Recipes for the Jewish Housewife, written in Yiddish and English, a kipfel is made, of course, with vegetable shortening. In late twentieth century America, kipfel, particularly with an unleavened cream cheese dough, became better known as rugelach.

  (See also Rugelach)

  Kirsch

  Kirsch, short for kirschwasser (German for "cherry water"), is a colorless liqueur distilled from crushed cherries, common to Alsace and Germany. As kirsch does not contain any grape products, it is suitable for kosher kitchens without special supervision. Kirsh is an element in Jewish cuisine in Alsace and western Germany, as an aperitif or in baked goods and fruit dishes.

  Kishke

  Kishke is stuffed derma.

  Origin: Eastern Europe

  Other names: kishka.

  " 'There is a place for stuffed miltz,' Meyer Lansky says, 'but here I advise kishke.' " (From Read All About It by Sidney Zion, a 1982 collection of some of his work as a reporter.)

  Kishke is a classic example of Jewish soul food, in which kosher odds and ends are scraped together and, by sheer ingenuity, transformed into a luscious treat—in this case, the otherwise useless (and hopefully well-cleaned) beef intestines, flour or matza meal, and a few inexpensive flavorings. Like many now-standard Jewish dishes, kishke was adapted from local non-Jewish fare, in particular, a Slavic blood sausage (very unkosher) made with barley or buckwheat, called kiszka by Poles and kyshka by Ukrainians. This sausage was the inspiration for the 1950s American tune "Who Stole the Keeshka?" by Walt Solek, "the Clown Prince of Polka." Eastern European Jews omitted the unacceptable blood, substituted flour or matza meal for the grains, and added their ubiquitous onion and sometimes garlic, resulting in kishke.

  Most dictionaries and cookbooks state that the word kishke means "intestines," which has led to the common misconception that the dish received its name from the lower part of the alimentary canal. However, the dish is actually named after the stuffing, not the body part. Derived from the Middle High German darm (intestines), the original Yiddish word for intestines was gederem. The word darm was also the source of the English derma. Kishke is frequently called stuffed derma, a less unsettlingly term for Westerners than intestines or bowels. The Slavic term was itself adopted from the Persian kashk.

  In eastern Yiddish, the dish of stuffed intestines is the singular kishke, while the body part intestines is usually the plural kishkes. The term kishkes has not only the literal connotation of guts, but also the figurative implication of profound emotion. Thus, when you know something "in di kishkes," you have a "gut feeling." Kishke gelt refers to funds obtained by denying oneself food in order to save money, or denotes self-sacrifice, both of which are felt in the gut.

  Much of the kishke's flavor comes from cooking it for an extended period in another dish. A favorite way is to simmer it for hours in a tzimmes for Friday dinner or overnight in a cholent (Sabbath stew) for lunch, all the while allowing it to absorb flavor from the cooking liquid. Additional flavor, as well as moistness, comes from a little goose or chicken schmaltz and the predominant (and frequently the only) Ashkenazic seasoning, onion. Some cooks add garlic for extra savor as well as paprika for color; without paprika, the insides can turn out gray.

  Middle Easterners devised their own forms of stuffed casings—including the Syrian gheh, Moroccan osbana, Tunisian merguez, and Yemenite nakahoris— commonly utilizing sheep innards and, unlike the makers of kishke, using plenty of meat and seasonings in the stuffing. However, in the impoverished communities of eastern Europe, meat was particulary expensive and chopped meat, before the advent of the mechanical meat grinder in the 1860s, was extremely labor-intensive and thus even more costly; accordingly, most puddings/sausages consisted primarily or entirely of economical cereals. In families where even flour was costly, mashed potatoes where substituted for some of the grain. When the stuffing was used in the neck skin of a goose or chicken, the dish was called helzel.

  In the late nineteenth century, eastern European immigrants brought the dish to America. The first edition of The Settlement Cook Book (Milwaukee, 1901) included a recipe for "Kischtke, Russian Style." In the twentieth century, intestines grew increasingly difficult to obtain over the counter and, as a result, commercial brands of kishke switched to inedible plastic for the casings. Beginning in the 1950s, American housewives, looking for easier dishes, began preparing falsa kishke (mock derma). In the most popular version, cooks used Manischewitz's Tam Tam crackers, substituted margarine or oil for the schmaltz, and replaced the casings with aluminum foil. Intestines do impart a distinctive flavor note to the stuffing, which is lacking in versions made with artificial casings.

  This former peasant fare, besides being a beloved Sabbath food, was once a common sight at special Ashkenazic celebrations, such as bar mitzvahs and weddings. Kishke was still popular enough even in America to be included in subsequent editions of The Settlement Cook Book, appearing as late as 1965. However, deemed fatty, heavy, and old-fashioned, kishke soon went out of style in many circles. This venerable sausage was getting the kishkes kicked out of it. Of late, though, kishke has been making something of a comeback. Some cooks view it nostalgically as a flavorful traditional dish and are returning it to its proper place in the Sabbath cholent. Kishke remains a standard in Jewish delis. Frozen prepared kishke is sold in American kosher markets and in Israel in most supermarkets. It has even occasionally reappeared as respectable wedding fare.

  (See also Kashk/Kutach and Sausage)

  Ashkenazic Stuffed Derma (Kishke)

  about 8 servings

  [MEAT]

  1 foot large beef casing or 3 feet narrow beef casing

  1½ cups all-purpose or whole-wheat flour, or 1 cup flour and ½ cup matza meal, bread crumbs, or fine semolina

  1 large onion, grated or finely minced

  1 large carrot or 1 stalk celery, grated or finely minced (optional)

  1 clove garlic, mashed, or 1/8 teaspoon garlic powder (optional)

  ½ cup schmaltz or vegetable oil

  1 teaspoon sweet paprika or ½ teaspoon hot paprika

  About 1 teaspoon salt

  About ¼ teaspoon ground black pepper

  1. Turn the casing inside out and, using a dull knife, carefully scrape off any fat. If using a narrow casing, cut into 1-foot lengths for easier handling. Wash well, then pat dry. Sew or tie up one end of the casing with sewing thread.

  2. In a large bowl, combine all the remaining ingredients.

  3. Loosely stuff the flour mixture into the inside out casing, gradually pushing the casing over the stuffing, returning the shiny outer side to the outside. Fill no more then two-thirds full, allowing room for expansion. Sew or tie up the open end.

  4. Bring a pot of lightly salted water to a boil, add the kishke, and simmer for 10 minutes to shrink the casing. Drain. Prick the kishke in several places to allow the excess fat to seep out.

  5. Cook the kishke in a cholent or tzimmes or alongside a chicken or beef roast for at least 1½ hours. Or place it on a bed of onions in a shallow roasting pan, add 1 cup boiling water or chicken soup, and bake in a 350°F oven, basting or turning occasionally, until golden, about 1½ hours. Cut into slices and serve warm.

  Variation

  To Make Kishke without Casing:

  Place the kishke mixture on a large piece of greased aluminum foil, shape into a 2-inch-thick roll, roll up tightly in the foil, prick in several places, and cook as directed in Step 5.

  Kissel

  Kissel is a tart fruit puree that is often thickened and served as a pudding, but can also be a soup or sauce.

  Origin: Eastern Europe

  Other names: Polish: kisiel; Scandinavia: rodgrod.

  Sour is an essential flavor component in northeastern Europe; the flavor appears in foods such as rye bre
ads, sour cream, pickles, and sauerkraut. Kissel is the Slavic word meaning "sour," and it is used in particular to refer to an array of tart fruit puree—based puddings, sauces, soups, and beverages, with varying thicknesses. Among Ukrainian, Byelorussian, and Polish Jews, the favorite types of kissel were made from berries, which were typically picked wild in the summer through early autumn. A sour prune kissel was made during the fall and winter when fresh berries were out of season. Red currants, rhubarb, sour cherries, and cranberries were also common fruits used in the dish.

  The consistency of the pudding runs from that of a thick soup to that of a molded custard. The kissel was originally thickened with grains, particularly oat flour after its introduction to northeastern Europe in the seventh century. The emergence in the nineteenth century of potato starch and cornstarch led to a more delicate dish. The pudding is traditionally served with whipped cream or sweetened quark and slivered almonds. Kissel sauce is drizzled over pancakes, ice cream, cookies, and grain puddings. The even-thinner soup is drunk either hot or chilled.

  Northeastern European Berry Pudding (Kissel)

  6 to 8 servings

  [PAREVE]

  24 ounces (4 cups) fresh or 20 ounces frozen raspberries, strawberries, blackberries, or blueberries, or any combination

  2 cups water, or 1 cup water and 1 cup dry red wine or orange juice

  About ½ cup sugar

  1/8 teaspoon table salt or ¼ teaspoon kosher salt

  ¼ cup potato starch or cornstarch dissolved in ½ cup cold water

  1 to 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice or berry liqueur

  1. Puree and strain the berries. There should be about 2 1/3 cups puree. Transfer to a medium saucepan, place over medium-high heat, and bring to a boil. Add the water, sugar, and salt and stir until the sugar dissolves, about 3 minutes.