If Pesach signals the emergence of spring, then with Shavuot, the season bursts forth in a riot of colour and luscious flavours.
“The midrash tells us that although Mount Sinai is in the desert,” writes Susie Fishbein, author of the popular Kosher by Design cookbooks, “it suddenly bloomed with fragrant flowers and grasses on the morning that the Torah was given to the Jewish people. The custom of decorating our homes and synagogues with leafy branches and flowers is based on this miracle.”
By now, every kosher cook possesses at least one of Fishbein’s five cookbooks, but did you know that the concept for the first in the series, Kosher by Design (Artscroll), began with a Shavuot idea?
To celebrate the holiday, Fishbein visualized a cascading flowerpot salad bar and began interviewing party planners to help create this setting.
“There was a glimmer in one woman’s eye as she started to rattle off ideas to make the salad bar even more spectacular,” Fishbein told me by phone from her home in New Jersey, “and I cancelled all my other appointments. I knew she was the one.”
“The one” turned out to be Renee Erreich, and the luscious table settings and presentation ideas she and Fishbein created – and photographer John Uher shot – fairly leap off the page.
The Flowerpot Salad Bar for Shavuot, while elaborate, is not that hard to duplicate. To create the garden effect, clay flowerpots are lined with purple cabbage and filled with colourful salad ingredients, then displayed at varying heights.
“Food is so much a part of the Jewish holidays that it enriches the experience to tie the food into the holiday traditions,” Fishbein said. “That’s what this book does, without being overly biblical. It’s not like we thought, ‘We need a soup, let’s put one here.’ I picked recipes for specific holidays if they fit in a fun or interesting way.”
When we think Shavuot, we think dairy, and Fishbein’s Savoury Goat Cheese Strudel makes an elegant holiday dish. “People want things that are different, but they don’t have the time or the ability to spend seven hours in the kitchen,” she said. “The one or two times that I put something more labour intensive in the book was because it’s really worth it, like this outrageous recipe for Shavuot. It has a lot of steps, but it’s laid out very carefully.”
Traditionalists are frying blintzes for the holiday, and radio personality Arthur Schwartz includes his grandmother Elsie’s recipe for this quintessential dish in his new cookbook Jewish Home Cooking: Yiddish Recipes Revisited (Ten Speed Press). Elsie would make them in huge quantities, but only for Shavuot because of her manicure. “Her nails were so long that they could make holes in the translucently thin pancakes,” Schwartz writes, “and she was only willing to take her manicure down once a year.”
Unlike the sweet blintzes we may be used to, Elsie’s cheese blintzes contain a savoury salt-and-pepper seasoned pot cheese and sour cream filling.
But why cheese for Shavuot? I asked James Beard award winner Gil Marks, author of Olive Trees and Honey: A Treasury of Vegetarian Recipes from Jewish Communities Around the World (Wiley Publishing).
“The use of dairy to celebrate this holiday is not a biblical injunction, nor is it mentioned in the Talmud,” Marks told me. “Shavuot falls when the animals are beginning to be weaned away from the mother, so you have a surplus of milk and therefore cheese, yogurt and dairy products. Once you have a tradition, you will find biblical reasons for it.”
Herdsmen of almost 6,000 years ago stored milk in the waterproof stomachs of animals – “the first bottles,” he said. These ancient people discovered that when the milk separated, it coagulated into curds – the first fresh cheese – which not only tasted good, but lasted longer than milk. (Blintzes would come much later!)
More importantly, Shavuot commemorates the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. “No Jews existed before the giving of the Torah,” Marks said. “Technically speaking, Israelites before then were not Jews. One of the new laws concerned keeping kosher, and since their utensils and any meat products they had produced before were no longer kosher, for the first Shavuot, they had to eat dairy products.
“In addition, the tradition exists that while they were at Sinai receiving the Torah, when they came back to camp, their milk had curdled into cheese, so you have a variety of mystical and somewhat biblical reasons that developed for the association with dairy.”
Sephardic Cheese-Stuffed Eggplant makes a luscious side dish or light entrée for the holiday.
Judy Bart Kancigor is the author of Cooking Jewish: 532 Great Recipes from the Rabinowitz Family (Workman) and can be found on the web at www.cookingjewish.com.
Source: Kosher by Design by Susie Fishbein
12 thin asparagus spears (only the top 3 to 4 in.)
2 portobello mushroom caps, cleaned with gills scooped out
olive oil
salt
freshly ground black pepper
1 tbsp. olive oil
1 large Vidalia or Spanish onion, sliced into thin rings
1 sprig fresh thyme, stem removed
4 tbsp. sugar
1 cup white wine vinegar or red wine vinegar
14 oz. goat cheese
2 sticks unsalted butter, melted
1 package phyllo dough sheets, defrosted
2 cups Merlot or other dry red wine
1 tsp. cornstarch
Preheat over to 425. Place asparagus and mushrooms on a baking sheet. Brush with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper. Roast for 12-15 minutes. Remove from oven. Slice mushrooms into very thin slices; set aside.
Heat the 1 tbsp. olive oil in a medium pot over medium heat. Add sliced onion and cook for 6-8 minutes, until translucent. Add leaves from sprig of thyme and sugar. Cook for 6-7 minutes; onions should be caramelized. Add vinegar. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer; cook about 12-15 minutes or until the vinegar is almost all gone. Make sure not to burn onions, and stir occasionally. You should have a soft nest of golden sweet onions. Season with salt and pepper.
While onions are still hot, place them in the bowl of a food processor fitted with a metal blade. Add goat cheese and pulse until thoroughly combined. Remove and reserve at room temperature.
The dish can be made in advance up until this point and brought back to room temperature, assembled and cooked before serving.
Preheat oven to 425. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Unfold sheets of phyllo dough so you have a large horizontal rectangle in front of you. Using a sharp, not serrated knife, make a vertical cut down the middle so you are left with two stacks of vertical rectangles.
Take one sheet of phyllo, brush with melted butter, and top with another sheet of phyllo. Do this again so you have a stack of four buttered sheets. Form an even, log-shaped mound of the cheese mixture along the bottom shorter edge of the pastry.
Top with 3 asparagus spears and a few slices of Portobello. Roll once to cover filling. Fold the right and left sides over the centre and roll, jelly-roll style, until completely closed. (Like a blintz.)
Brush with melted butter. Place on prepared baking sheet. Repeat 3 more times. Bake uncovered for 6-8 minutes or until golden brown.
Place the Merlot in a small saucepan. Dissolve the cornstarch in 1 teaspoon water. Whisk into Merlot. Bring to a boil; sauce will thicken. Drizzle over the strudels, or place in a squeeze bottle and decorate the plate with the syrup. Makes 4 servings
Source: Jewish Home Cooking: Yiddish Recipes Revisited by Arthur Schwartz
Crêpes
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup milk
1/2 cup cold water
1/4 tsp. salt
2 large eggs
2 tbsp. butter, melted
Cheese filling
8 oz. farmer cheese (low-moisture fresh cheese that usually comes in 8-oz. vacuum packages)
1/4 cup sour cream
salt and freshly ground black or white pepper to taste or 2 tbsp. confectioners’ sugar
4 tbsp. butter, for frying
sour cream for garnish
Prepare by setting out clean dish towels or a tablecloth on your kitchen work surface.
To make the crêpes, combine the flour, milk, water, salt, eggs and butter in the jar of a blender. Whirl for a few seconds to mix well. Stop the blender, scrape down the sides with a rubber spatula, then whirl again for about 30 seconds. The batter should be very smooth and the consistency of very heavy cream. You’ll know whether it is right when you make the first crêpes. For a thinner crêpe, add 1 to 2 tbsp. more water.
To cook the crêpes, heat a 6- to 7-in. nonstick skillet over medium heat until quite hot. Holding the pan off the heat with one hand, pour in about 3 tbsp. of batter with the other (I use a 1/4-cup measure – 4 tbsp. – to judge the amount, which will vary slightly depending on the diameter of your pan).
Immediately begin rotating the pan to spread the batter into a pancake. This requires only a thin film of batter. Place the pan back on medium heat and cook for about 1 minute. The bottom will be lightly coloured.
Using your fingers and with the aid of a spatula, fork or the tip of a table knife, carefully lift the crêpe and flip it over. Cook another 15 seconds. Turn out onto a clean kitchen towel. The second side should not colour – a spot or two is fine.
If preparing the crêpes ahead, once they are fully cooked, you can stack them, but put wax paper between each to ensure they do not stick together. Leave at room temperature and fill within the day, or refrigerate tightly wrapped in plastic until ready to fill, or for up to 4 days. Freeze them for no longer than 3 months, at which time it is possible you will have to trim off the dried and brittle edges.
To make the cheese filling, in a small bowl, with a fork, blend the farmer cheese and sour cream together with salt and pepper to taste. If desired, instead of making the filling savoury, make it sweet by blending in confectioners’ sugar.
To assemble the blintzes, place a few spoonfuls of filling just below the centre of 1 crêpe. Fold the bottom of the crêpe upward to enclose the filling. Fold in the sides over the end. Roll up the crêpe to completely enclose. Place seam-side down on a platter. Repeat with the remaining crêpes and fillings.
To fry the blintzes, in a skillet large enough to hold at least half the blintzes, heat 2 tbsp. of the butter over medium heat. (If you want to fry all the blintzes together, use a 12-in. skillet and all the butter at once.) When sizzling, arrange the crêpes in the pan seam-side down. Fry until nicely browned. Carefully turn the blintzes over and fry on the second side. Transfer to a platter. Repeat with the remaining blintzes and butter.
Serve immediately with a dollop of sour cream on each.
Formed, but not fried, blintzes can be kept in the refrigerator, tightly covered, for up to 2 days. To freeze, place them on a parchment-lined baking sheet until they are frozen solid, then pack into plastic bags or containers. They should keep well enough for 3 months. Makes 10 blintzes, serving 2 to 4.
Source: Olive Trees and Honey by Gil Marks
2 eggplants (about 1 lb. each), halved lengthwise
4 tbsp. olive oil or vegetable oil
1 onion, chopped
2 to 3 cloves garlic, minced
2 tbsp. chopped fresh parsley
1 cup fine fresh bread crumbs
1 tbsp. chopped fresh chives or 1 tsp. dried oregano and 1/2 tsp.dried basil
about 1/2 tsp. table salt or 1 tsp. kosher salt
ground black pepper to taste
1 cup (5 oz.) crumbled feta, 1 cup (4 oz.) shredded Cheddar or Muenster cheese, or 1 cup (8 oz.) ricotta cheese
1 large egg, lightly beaten
1/4 cup toasted pine nuts, 1/4 cup coarsely chopped capers, 1/2 cup chopped pitted black olives, or any combination (optional)
1 to 2 tbsp. olive oil for drizzling
Scoop out the cores of the eggplants (a melon baller or grapefruit knife works well) leaving a 1/2-in.-thick shell and reserving the pulp. In a large pot of salted boiling water, cook the shells until tender but not soft, about 3 minutes. Drain.
Coarsely chop the reserved eggplant pulp. (It might appear like a lot, but it will cook down.) In a large skillet, heat 2 tbsp. of the oil over medium heat. Add the onion and garlic and sauté until soft and translucent, about 5 minutes. Add the remaining 2 tbsp. oil, then the eggplant pulp and parsley and sauté until softened, about 10 minutes. Remove from the heat and stir in the bread crumbs, chives, salt and pepper. Add the cheese, egg and, if using, the pine nuts.
Preheat the oven to 350. Oil a large baking pan.
Lightly salt the insides of the eggplant shells and stuff with the pulp mixture. Arrange in the baking pan and drizzle with a little oil. Cover with the lid or aluminum foil and bake for 20 minutes. Uncover and bake until golden, about 10 minutes. Serve warm. Makes 4 servings.
