February 20, 2012 · 4:03 pm

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 · 11:30 am

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 · 3:02 pm

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 · 6:49 pm

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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