March 2, 2012

Q&A: Sodra, a Micro-regional Passover Dish Sub-par Excellence (but not without its dignity)

Sodra is broken-up matza soaked in chicken broth, with eggs and lemon added to the mix in typical Sephardic fashion, maybe dressed with some cheese or a little garlic. It’s an obscure dish, even among Sephardim, included in a couple of Sephardic cookbooks but ignored by most, and not without reason. Don’t be offended, sodra lovers; read on.

Because it’s a traditional dish I see a reason to honor it as a piece of Sephardic heritage, but to be blunt, sodra is just mush. Pablum. Pap. A holiday dish made by people who were either desperately poor, or desperately lacking in culinary skill and imagination, which is the far less likely of the two possibilities.

While there’s no shame in poverty, I see no reason to glorify it or its byproducts, either. Poverty stinks. Going hungry seriously stinks. And certain habits are better left behind when they’ve outlived their necessity. Like prison food. Or Ramen noodles. Continue reading →

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February 20, 2012

Q & A: Medieval Catalan Jewish Food (more familiar than you might imagine)

I just discovered, through DNA testing, that my ancestors lived in Girona. They left when the Alhambra Decree was issued. Do you have any recipes of Jewish specialties from Girona?  Thank you.  Ronit

Sure, Ronit! It may well be you know one or two already, as Catalonia’s medieval Jewish recipes were its first culinary exports.

If you’re familiar with spinach with pine nuts and raisins, you probably think of it as an Italian or Italian Jewish dish.  You’d be right. But there, too, in its endless regional variations (adding lemon and garlic in Rome, chive and anchovy in Genoa, sweet onion and vinegar in Venice, etc.), the basic recipe is attributed to the arrival of Sephardim at the time of the expulsion from Spain.

This classic dish is still eaten all over Catalonia, and you’ll be just as likely to find it made with chard as with spinach. Dressed simply with salt, pepper, raisins, pine nuts and olive oil, today’s typical traditional Catalan recipe is far tamer than European food was in the spice-crazy Middle Ages.  In that era spices were wildly expensive and people who could afford them made a big show of using them. Recipes were Continue reading →

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January 27, 2012

Q & A: Reshikas

Hi, Janet,
Have you ever heard of rechikas?  My grandmother (and later, my mother) made these little dry cookies, not very sweet at all, crunchy and absolutely DELICIOUS, especially when dunked in some Turkish coffee!  OMG, I’m drooling.  Please say you know what I’m talking about.
Yael Eylat-Tanaka
Of course, Yael! Reshikas, or reshas, are exactly as you describe them. My first taste was a mesmerizing experience.  I was very, very young – four, at most – and my mother brought home a bagful after a visit to my great grandma.  My eyes popped, and I couldn’t stop eating them.  Great grandma was already in her nineties, but she still made one mean cookie.
Reshikas are merely biscochos – shortbread cookies -  that are twisted before shaping them into rings. Orange juice (not rind) blended into the dough is most likely the source of the subtle flavor you remember, and the crumbly texture comes from oil.  Growing up in New York our oil of choice was Mazola corn oil – in the 1960′s we weren’t exactly spoiled for choice – but your grandmother surely used a mild-flavored olive oil.   To jog your memory a little, here’s an old post with a photo.

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December 18, 2011

Agrestada v.1: Cooked lemon mayonnaise

Contrasts of flavor, color and texture are an integral part of Sephardic gastronomic tradition – of others, too, of course, though by no means all (where I live, the food is mostly mushy, bland and tending toward weirdness), and to varying degrees among them. One of our signatures is a sour sauce, agrestada, or agristada (from the Spanish root word agrio: sour).

Agrestada is an egg and lemon mixture that’s either blended right into a hot dish as a finishing touch, exactly as the Greeks do avgolemono (which means egg-lemon), or cooked separately to yield a luscious lemon mayonnaise. The light note – and that’s all it is supposed to be – of sourness, of piquancy, wakes up the taste buds with a pleasant, lemony tingle, not a shock.  It’s intended for specific dishes, to bring out the flavors it accompanies, not to compete with them, to create a ‘whole’ experience; a gastronomic yin and yang. Which means the lemon flavor should be easy to discern, but it shouldn’t twist up the mouth like a fistful of Sweet Tarts, or whack you – or the food it’s eaten with – senseless. Continue reading →

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December 15, 2011

Perfect fried potatoes. Really. (Hanukah fish & chips, part 2)

Ours wasn’t much of a potato household.  We were – are –  Ottoman Sephardim, into lots of rice and a little bit of pasta, and potatoes were a New World discovery that took hold more in northern Europe than in the northern Mediterranean.  As far as we were concerned, potatoes were mostly good for filling ojaldres and not much else.  My mother’s potato repertoire was limited to baked, mashed, or the very rare purchase of demon frozen French fries, which she insisted on baking because it was ‘healthier.’  Although why she would then fry up a huge platter of breaded fish and think nothing of it is beyond me.

As a potato-challenged people, our forays into latke territory (our Ashkenazi-centric religious school made me feel I wasn’t Jewish if I didn’t eat latkes) were always tentative Continue reading →

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December 12, 2011

Some overly pedantic instructions for frying fish (Hanukah fish & chips, part 1)

Anyone who’s read anything about Sephardic food must surely know by now that fish and chips made their way to England via the Portuguese Jews (who, by the way, were for the most part of Spanish descent). Fish has always been an abundant staple throughout Iberia, and just as likely to be fried as not. In a place and time when it mattered, it was the Sephardim who fried their fish exclusively in olive oil, so it was indeed exotic and novel to the English, until then accustomed only to cooking with animal fats, to be introduced to this element of the Mediterranean diet – and in the sixteenth century, no less. The crisp batter was the real seducer here, of course, but for me it’s always a let-down, something they’ve amazingly not gotten the hang of in England despite four centuries of practice. With one – one! – exception, I’ve never had fried fish in England that wasn’t Continue reading →

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October 7, 2011

Sephardic sashimi, with a twist

“My father would eat an appetizer which was raw fish with lemon squeezed onto it. I think it is called LAKADA, made from mackerel. He would eat it with greek olives and bread.
I am a Sephardic Jew who grew up in Brooklyn and now live in Kansas City and would like to know how my mother prepared this dish for my dad.” – Joseph

The recipe name you’re trying to remember is lâkerda,  the Turkish name for an appetizer of marinated raw tuna or of bonito, which is indeed a kind of mackerel (When made with bonito, it is  called palamida, which is the Greek name for that fish).  Both are oily, blue fishes.  I’m not partial to mackerel, but I love raw tuna marinated in lime juice and this is essentially the same thing.

The technique is very straightforward; probably the most difficult part of making lakerda is cleaning and boning the fish.  How you approach that will depend upon the kind of fish you’ve got, and what’s available at the fish market depends upon where you live.  If you don’t know your way around fish, Continue reading →

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