April 9, 2011 · 10:53 pm

Sharope: white spoon sweet (Q & A)

Hello, Janet, Have you ever heard the word “sharope”? When I was a child, my grandmother who was Turkish would make a sweet, white paste which she kneaded on the tile floor. We would then snip off pieces and eat them. They tasted of vanilla, and the texture was like a paste, softer than caramel, and not formed. Can you help? – Yael

Yep!  Sharope (shah-ROH-peh)  is a spoon sweet.  It’s  a kind of meringue – a marshmallow creme, really – in which hot sugar syrup, rather than dry granulated sugar, is beaten into egg whites for a long, long time with a wooden dowel. Dry sugar separates quickly from beaten egg whites, but the cooked syrup is more stable and doesn’t separate (this, by the way, is also the process for making Italian meringue), so this is a sweet you can make and store in a jar.  Sharope might be flavored with lemon or almonds or, as in your grandmother’s case, vanilla, which would be delicious.  I’ve never heard of anyone kneading sharope on the floor!  It’s not usually so dense to even allow for that kind of handling, although the longer you beat the meringue, the more  taffy-like it becomes.  I’m guessing your grandmother either beat the meringue for a VERY long time or that she added mastic, which is what gives Turkish ice cream its taffy-like texture (For further explanation, take a look at my post about Dondurma).

If you’re familiar with Marshmallow Fluff, it’s pretty close to sharope – but it ain’t the same.

Thanks for your question, Yael.  A good one!

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February 28, 2011 · 1:33 pm

Some scenes from the road

Of course, if I were a better blogger I would have posted these while I actually was on the road.

 My sincere thanks go to the many wonderful organizers, hosts and students in Greenwich (CT), Birmingham (AL), Riverdale (NY), Great Neck (NY) and Philadelphia for your enthusiasm, support and participation in this round of workshops.

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November 26, 2010 · 10:13 am

Sephardic food is simply exotic

Years ago my brother-in-law, who is a tall, blue-eyed, blond-haired WASP from Ohio, told my sister, who is a tall, brown-eyed, olive-skinned Jew from New York, that when he first laid eyes on her he was struck by her exotic looks.  “Exotic!!?” she cried, “Where I come from, Meg Ryan is exotic.”   Exoticism, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder and has everything to do with your frame of reference. Continue reading →

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August 24, 2010 · 7:51 am

How to love a melon every time (even a lousy one)

Growing up with my mother’s Rhodes-oriented cooking, meals always began with a fruit course and the salad was served last, just before dessert.  This order, by the way, has been in practice for centuries and is documented in medieval cookbooks.  The fruit starter is a simple affair, generally no more than a piece of chilled melon or half a grapefruit, but an absolute essential.  Melon especially gives a gentle wakeup call to the stomach, and the different fruits provide some much-needed seasonal nutrients – potassium in summer, vitamin C in winter.  The Italians top melon with sliced prosciutto – delicious, though clearly not something you’d be doing in a kosher home ( I have a friend from Buenos Aires, which is heavily Italian, whose mother compensates by serving melon with a slice of pastrami).  In Sephardic tradition, though, our fruit course is strictly vegetarian. If you want a touch of saltiness with your melon, add a few grains of salt.

When a melon is delicious it needs no embellishment, but that’s a rare treat. You never know what you’re going to get with melons, and more often than not they need a little kick to coax out some flavor. Fresh mint leaves or a squeeze of citrus are the traditional quick fixes, but they can’t do anything for texture and as much as I love a good melon, munching on big hunks of tough, underripe fruit is not a pleasure, it is a chore – especially in the heat of deep summer, when the tiniest bit of over-exertion is too much and I’d just as soon be absorbing my nutrients by floating in the sea. 

Enter the cold soup, something I assure you we never, ever ate in our house, where the Sephardic cooking was very, very traditional.  That said, lest we forget, Jewish cooking may have deeply rooted traditions but one of those is adaptability – to climate, geography and, in this case, the disappointing reality of industrialized agriculture. 

So, a few guilt-free riffs on the first course melon tradition.  Three chilled melon soups, very simple affairs in keeping with Ottoman-Sephardic culinary style:  a single, simple technique applied to a handful of ingredients, to yield a remarkable variety of flavors.  If Grandma had had an immersion blender (and less than exciting melons), no doubt she would have done the same.

recipe

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