Christmas Cookies 2: Lebkuchen

December 15, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Soon after I started this blog in June, a reader asked about Lebkuchen, a traditional German Christmas cookie.

Nuremburg is Ground Zero for Lebkuchen (in deference to German style, I’m capitalizing it wherever it is used in the sentence–and note that the word can be singular or plural.)

We were in Nuremberg for a short visit in May of 2012, and even so far removed from Christmas, Lebkuchen were all over the place, from stalls in the market to bakeries and gift stores in the town.

First made in 1296

According to Wikipedia, the first record of Lebkuchen comes from the city of Ulm in 1296. Nuremberg lore tells that Emperor Friedrich II held a Reichstag there in 1487 and invited the city’s children to a special event where he gave out almost 4,000 Lebkuchen imprinted with his portrait.

No one really knows what the word means, though “kuchen” is “cake” in German. Says Wikipedia, “Derivations from the Latin libum (flat bread) and from the Germanic word Laib (loaf) have been proposed. Another likely possibility is that comes from the old term Leb-Honig, the rather solid crystallized honey taken from the hive that cannot be used for much beside baking. Folk etymology often associates the name with Leben (life), Leib (body), or Leibspeise (favorite food).”

Large cookies (or cakes)

“Cake” may be a more descriptive word for this confection than “cookie,” because they are usually quite large – in Germany, they’re usually at least five inches in diameter if round and even larger if rectangular, though minis are also available.

Lebkuchen are often packed in decorative tins, chests and boxes, some of which become collectors’ items. Some are shaped like hearts, or horses, or other special shapes.

Lots of varieties

Recipes differ, but Lebkuchen usually include honey, nuts or candied fruit, and a variety of spices such as ginger, aniseed, coriander, cloves, cardamom and allspice.

Historically, and due to differences in the ingredients, Lebkuchen is also known as honey cake (Honigkuchen) or pepper cake (Pfefferkuchen).

Most Lebkuchen are soft, but there are harder varieties as well, including the type used to make gingerbread houses and gingerbread men.

Here are some of the various types of Lebkuchen, as described by the German Food Guide.

Oblaten Lebkuchen
“Oblaten” are thin wafers. Oblaten Lebkuchen are cookies in which the dough is baked on a thin wafer. Historically, this was done to prevent the cookie from sticking to the cookie sheet.

Elisen Lebkuchen
These are the highest quality Oblaten Lebkuchen available. They must have at least 25 percent almonds, hazelnuts, and/or walnuts (no other kinds of nuts are allowed). Likewise, they must contain no more than 10 percent flour.

Nürnberger Lebkuchen
These are Lebkuchen that are baked in the city of Nürnberg, and are worldwide the most well-known. They are often baked on Oblaten (thin wafers), and they are known for their light, soft texture. Marzipan is often an ingredient of these cookies.

Kaiserlein
These are Lebkuchen onto which a picture is drawn or imprinted.

Brown (Braune) Lebkuchen
These cookies are made from a honey or syrup dough. The dough is either molded, cut, or formed and it is baked without Oblaten (thin wafers—see “Oblaten Lebkuchen” above). The baked cookies are often covered with a sugar glaze or chocolate.

White (Weisse) Lebkuchen 
These cookies get their name from their very light color. They get this color from a high amount of whole eggs and/or egg whites in the dough. They are usually decorated with almonds and/or candied lemon and orange peels.

Trader Joe is selling chocolate covered Oblaten, but if you want some, get ‘em now—they’re a seasonal treat and when they’re gone, that’s it till next year.

Here is a recipe I got from a blog called Brown-Eyed Baker. I chose it because it looked relatively easy to make. It has no fat and lots of spice flavor. You can easily add chopped nuts or dried or candied fruit if you like.

Some people commenting on the blog said these cookies came out hard, so try not to work in too much extra flour when you knead and roll out the dough. Also do not overbake them. Most of mine were fairly soft. I overbaked a few—by only a few minutes—and they were indeed very hard though still tasty. If you like very crunchy cookies, you won’t have to worry. If your baked cookies are too hard for your taste, put them in a storage container with a few slices of apple and they should soften up in a few days.

Memories of Christmas Cookies Past

December 9, 2013 by 1 Comment

(Please note: We have updated the caption on a photo in last week’s story, Working for Food to correct an error. The photo shows author Jean Alicia Elster’s grandmother, ‘May’ Ford, with her oldest grandchild in her grandfather’s wood yard.)

As a Jewish girl, I never celebrated Christmas, but when I was around 11, my best friend Carol and I started a new Christmas ritual. Every year on the day after Christmas I would go over to Carol’s house to look at her gifts and eat her mother’s Christmas cookies.

I always asked her mother how she got her money that year. Carol’s father had a Christmas tradition of giving his wife a couple hundred dollars every year for Christmas, but he would do it in a different creative way each year. One year he rolled up $10 or $20 bills into tubes and used them to spell “I love you” on a piece of cardboard, which he then framed. Another year, he bought a child’s top and plastered the bottom with bills; he gave them to his wife with a note that read, “You’re tops with me!”

My own mother sniffed at this. She didn’t think much of men who gave their wives spending money. Maybe this was because, although my dad was the sole breadwinner in the family, my mother was the one who managed the family finances. In fact, it was she who gave him an allowance!

Scrumptious cookies

But I was charmed by Carol’s dad’s money gifts, almost as much as I was by her mom’s Christmas cookies, which were truly scrumptious. There were pecan-studded butterballs; little green Christmas trees with colored sprinkles; Rice Krispies wreaths, also tinted green, with little red cinnamon berries; jam thumbprints; red-and-white striped candy cane cookies; meringues with chocolate chips; and more. I think I envied Carol’s Christmas cookies more than the gifts.

As a child I thought there was something inherently wonderful about these “Christmas” cookies. That notion was dispelled many years later when the people I worked with decided to have a Christmas cookie exchange. Each participant would bake one kind of cookie and create packages containing a half-dozen cookies each. They’d all be laid out on a table, and then everyone would go around and collect one package of each cookie.

I was excited to be part of the exchange, but if I was expecting to be transported back to Carol’s mom’s kitchen, I was sorely disappointed. Most of the cookies were terrible!

A circle of friends who bake

In an effort to help you avoid that fate, I wanted to offer a good recipe for Christmas cookies.

But while the recipe below is terrific, I can’t say it’s for Christmas cookies, because it was developed by a little Russian Jewish lady named Klara who is a member of my synagogue, Congregation Beth Shalom in Oak Park, Michigan.

Klara belongs to a synagogue group of refugees from the former Soviet Union called Circle of Friends. The group was started in 1998 to help the newcomers acculturate to life in America and learn about Judaism, which they had been unable to practice in the USSR.

Fifteen years later, the group still meets weekly. We usually call the Circle of Friends members “Russian” just because it’s easier. Klara, 84, actually comes from Moldova, which was part of the Soviet Union but is now independent. She arrived in Michigan in 1991.

Circle of Friends members have become famous in our congregation for their baking skills. A few years ago, several of the women got together and baked a tray of rugelach, cookies similar to today’s recipe in taste if not in shape, for a silent auction. It sold for more than $100.

Intergenerational baking

Recently, some of the younger women said they wanted to learn to bake from the older women.

So a few weeks ago, on a chilly Sunday morning, Klara and some of her Circle of Friends buddies gathered in the synagogue kitchen with a half-dozen women in their 30s and 40s. They rolled up their sleeves and churned out a few hundred of these Russian Rose Cookies.

While there’s nothing “Christmas” about them, they will work well as a holiday dessert, as part of a cookie tray or cookie exchange or even as a gift. I think Carol’s mom would love them.

Jean Alicia Elster: Memories & flavors from ‘The Colored Car’

December 2, 2013 by 1 Comment

(A note from your FeedTheSpirit host Bobbie Lewis) This week’s blog is by guest writer Jean Alicia Elster, whose work as a writer is recommended by our ReadTheSpirit magazine. Our latest coverage of her children’s book The Colored Car was published in Debra Darvick’s column in September.  She is the granddaughter of Douglas and Maber (May) Jackson Ford, whose family story forms the basis of The Colored Car. Her other books include Who’s Jim Hines?—which was selected as a Michigan Notable Book—as well as I’ll Do the Right Thing and I Have a Dream, Too!

 

By JEAN ALICIA ELSTER

I offer this paraphrase of a commonly quoted Biblical passage from 2 Thessalonians 3:10: If you do not work, then you will not eat.

This phrase is often quoted as an admonition against idleness and laziness. I dare say it is the reason that people standing at the corners of well-traveled intersections of our urban centers or even at freeway exits hold up signs saying, “Will work for food.” It is ingrained within our Judeo-Christian notion of ethics that expecting a meal or other form of sustenance without doing something in return to warrant the receipt of that meal is, well, sinful.

That said, while writing my most recently published book, The Colored Car, which takes place in the city of Detroit in 1937, I came to appreciate another take on the 2Thessalonians verse. This second paraphrase embodies the food ethos of that particular era in our American history that is too often lost in our 21st century world of carryout meals and processed food: If you do not work in the preparation of your food or your meal, then you will not eat.

‘The Colored Car’: A novel based on family history

The Colored Car is based upon actual events in my family’s history. And, in the summer of 1937, my grandmother, “May” Ford, put up (canned) fresh fruits and vegetables in the family’s summer kitchen adjacent to the wood yard that was the core of my grandfather’s business. Times were tough, and my grandmother often helped neighborhood families by sharing the food that she preserved.

In Chapter One, I describe my grandmother chopping, grinding, grating, boiling and, not to forget, sweating to make that pungent mixture of cabbage, onions, celery, hot peppers, green tomatoes, vinegar and pickling spices known as piccalilli or cha-cha. That substantial concoction could stand on its own as a side dish or be heaped on a sandwich. The not-even-close approximation we have to that today is the unnaturally green-colored relish found in the condiment section of the grocery store.

Homemade grape jelly

Chapter Six tells how May Ford made jars of grape jelly. She washed and boiled bushels of grapes and then strained them – twice – through a muslin bag. Her hands were, at that point, purple, and she was only half way through the jelly-making process.

No, we will never return to the days when work and food were that closely related. We are firmly in the 21st  century and there is no turning back. But that Biblical admonition at the very least mandates  that we, even occasionally, seek a more direct relationship between work and food. That we feel the satisfaction of making — that is, causing to come into being — what we eat.

Having written those chapters and internalized those processes, I am now ready to more fully embrace the connection between work and food. Piccalilli and grape jelly provide a very good start!

Get ready for “Thanksgivukkah”

November 18, 2013 by 1 Comment

The Jewish holiday of Chanukah usually falls in December, often close to Christmas. This leads to what some Jews call “the December dilemma” – how to celebrate our holiday in a meaningful and fun way without making it seem like “the Jewish Christmas,” because the two celebrations have absolutely nothing in common.

This year, due to a quirk of the calendar, the first day of Chanukah coincides with Thanksgiving. It’s not much of a problem to celebrate the two in tandem, because Thanksgiving, though it has spiritual overtones, is not a religious holiday and there’s nothing about it that makes Jews uneasy about celebrating it. Writers who think they’re clever have taken to adopting the term “Thanksgivukkah.”

A rare congruence

I think everyone is going so crazy about it because it is so exceedingly rare. Data crunchers have discovered that the first time the two holidays would have coincided was 1861–but there was no all-American Thanksgiving then; President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the first Thanksgiving in 1863. Until 1942, Thanksgiving was the last Thursday in November; now it’s the fourth Thursday in November (sometimes there are five). In 1888, Chanukah started on Thanksgiving Day because it was the last Thursday of November, November 29. The next time the start of Chanukah and Thanksgiving will coincide will be–well, maybe never! From now on, due to the way the Jewish calendar is organized, the earliest Chanukah can start will be November 29, which is too late to ever be Thanksgiving.

But wait, there’s more! The Jewish calendar is slowly getting out of sync with the Gregorian calendar, by a few days per thousand years. This calendar drift means the Jewish calendar will slowly loop through the Gregorian calendar until it’s back where it is now. But that won’t happen until the year 79811 – and the most prestigious rabbis will probably get together before then to correct it so that the fall holidays will remain in the fall and the spring holidays will remain in the spring.

Then again, Jewish holidays always start at sundown, so even though the first day of Chanukah is on Thanksgiving this year, we’ll begin lighting Chanukah candles the night before Thanksgiving.  In 2070 and 2165, the first day of Chanukah will fall on the day after Thanksgiving; in those years, the first candle will be lit on Thanksgiving Day after sundown. Maybe that will count as another “Thanksgivukkah,” maybe it won’t.

For some interesting charts comparing the Jewish and Gregorian calendars, see this blog by Jonathan Mizrahi (where I got a lot of this information).

Newspapers, magazines and websites are having a heyday with articles about how to combine the celebration of Thanksgiving and Chanukah. One enterprising retailer is even selling a turkey-shaped Chanukah menorah called a Menurkey.

Some clergy are looking for ways to combine the Thanksgiving message of gratitude with the Chanukah message of dedication (the literal meaning of the word, for the rededication of the Temple after the Jewish victory over the Assyrians). One who does it well is Rabbi Yael Levy in this table blessing.

A Thanksgivukkah grinch

Grinches are usually associated with Christmas. If there’s a Thanksgivukkah version, it’s probably Rabbi David Brenner who wrote “Why I Will Not Be Celebrating ‘Thanksgivukkah’”  for the Huffington Post. He says mash-ups dilute the message of both holidays. Thanksgiving helps all Americans overcome the divisions that separate us, he says.

In the rituals celebrating this fall harvest festival, we Americans are united in connecting to our land and the good things it produces. Chanukah is the opposite. Rather than celebrating the coming together of disparate parties, like the Native Americans and the Pilgrims, it commemorates a military victory in second century BCE Judea. The Maccabees were not a tolerant lot, but they triumphed over a much larger force. Rabbi Brenner says Chanukah could better be compared with Independence Day.

(See a cute anti-Thanksgivukkah video by Rabbi Brenner on the Heeb Magazine website.)

Cook New World foods in oil!

Most of the “whee-it’s Thanksgivukkah” articles are food-related, because that seems to be the easiest way to combine the traditions of Thanksgiving and Chanukah. As I pointed out last week, traditional Chanukah foods are fried or baked in oil, to symbolize the Chanukah miracle: when the Maccabees overcame the Assyrians and reclaimed the Temple in Jerusalem, they could find only one tiny cruse of pure oil for the Eternal Light, enough for one day. They lit the lamp, and the oil lasted for eight days, until more oil could be procured.

So for “Thanksgivukkah,” just combine a harvest-y and New World food (e.g. cranberries, sweet potatoes, pumpkin) with an oily preparation and you’re all set: potato latkes (pancakes) with cranberry sauce, or latkes made from sweet potatoes or squash, or pumpkin doughnuts.  Or if you’re adventurous, deep fry your turkey! There are some good recipes on the MyJewishDetroit website.

Personally, I’m very much looking forward to celebrating the two holidays together. Thanksgiving is a big deal in my family, the one time of year when my siblings and I all get together. My brother in New Jersey and my sister outside Washington, DC take turns hosting. When our children were little we would deliver Chanukah gifts at Thanksgiving because it was easier than shipping them later, but we were never able to celebrate Chanukah together. This year will be a first.

In the spirit of Chanukah, with a bit of a fall-harvest-Thanksgiving flavor, I offer this recipe for Cinnamon-Apple Latkes. They can be served as a side dish or a dessert. Whenever I’ve made them I’ve gotten rave reviews and requests for the recipe. This recipe makes about 16 latkes. Happy holidays, everyone! 

Celebrating the Season of Gratitude

November 11, 2013 by 1 Comment

As Thanksgiving approaches, many of us start thinking about what we’re grateful for. I asked my Facebook friends and got some interesting answers:

  • I’m grateful that you and I are still breathing, still know each other and still have our wits about us!
  • I am grateful for so many births and young people in the family for filling a small part of the space lost from loved ones departed. I am grateful those departed are forever woven into the fabric of our lives and not so gone after all.
  • I’m grateful more than anything for lessons in human awareness. Learning how to be kinder, more compassionate, whatever the circumstance, for speaking up for what is true to me instead of suppressing emotions. Those close to me would say this is a very good thing.
  • I’m thankful for my mom. Even though she’s been gone for almost 10 years, she’s still my best friend and my rock. Every day, I still feel like she’s right by my side. I’m so thankful for all the days I was able to laugh, hug, and hear her voice.
  • I am most grateful for all those I know who are more about “us” than “me,” who have a social conscience.
  • I am most grateful for the full, rich life I have, which has nothing to do with “stuff” and everything to do with having an awesome son, amazing and loving family and friends, and a deep spiritual connection to my religion.
  • Having worked in hospice for the last 10 years, I have learned to be grateful for the things that we take for granted. I find myself, daily, being grateful for my wonderful parents, who nurtured me, gave me a strong Jewish identity including moral guidelines and a strong sense of awe for the miracles that are daily with us. Due to this safe, nurturing home, all of the other blessings in my life have followed.

One thing I am grateful for is being a board member of WISDOM, Women’s Interfaith Solutions for Dialogue in Metro Detroit, an amazing and diverse group of women committed to fostering interfaith connections through friendship.

In fact, a book by WISDOM members, Friendship & Faith, was one of the first books published by Read the Spirit!

In about 10 days, WISDOM will host one of its periodic potluck dinners, where participants are encouraged to bring dishes that represent their religious or ethnic heritage.

This is a good month for a WISDOM potluck, because it perfectly defines the type of Season of Gratitude event envisioned by the  Interfaith Leadership Council of Metropolitan Detroit (IFLC).

We associate Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims, and churches and villages in the colonial and early American periods often held annual harvest dinners similar to the first Thanksgiving.

But Thanksgiving didn’t truly become an American holiday until 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln’s issued a Thanksgiving Proclamation, inviting “my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.”

You’ll find lots of fascinating historical materials about Lincoln and Thanksgiving at our Lincoln Resource Page. In addition, the IFLC has prepared a guide, available online, to help congregations and organizations plan a Season of Gratitude event—a “salon” (discussion group), or meal, or a combination—that is open to people of all faiths. “The event should celebrate and demonstrate gratitude for all of the diverse contributions people make to our civic community,” notes the IFLC’s guide.

Here is the recipe for the dish I plan to bring to the WISDOM potluck: Jerusalem kugel. A kugel is a pudding, It’s most often made of noodles, but can also be made of potatoes, corn, rice, zucchini or just about any grain or vegetable bound with eggs and baked. Most people pronounce it with a “u” like in “sugar,” but others say “koogle” or even “kiggle.”

A Jerusalem kugel is a sweet-and-spicy noodle pudding, with lots of caramelized sugar and black pepper.

I’m also planning to bring it to my sister’s house for Thanksgiving dinner, because Thanksgiving this year coincides with Chanukah. That’s a subject for another blog. Suffice it to say that traditional Chanukah foods use a lot of oil, usually to fry the food in. This dish is not fried, but it does use a lot of oil so it qualifies.

Most recipes direct you to cook the noodles, then caramelize the sugar in the oil and add it to the noodles with the eggs. I adapted this recipe from one that appeared in the New York Times in 2005. You caramelize the sugar first, then add water to it for cooking the noodles. I found this to be an easier method that results in a smoother consistency, without little hard bits of caramelized sugar in the kugel. It’s somewhat time-consuming but well worth the effort.

You have to be careful when caramelizing the sugar. If you let it go even 30 seconds too long, it will burn. And if you’ve never done it, you may not know what to expect. This is what happens when you mix the sugar with the oil and heat it: First the sugar will seem to dissolve, but much of the oil will remain separate. As the mixture continues to cook, it will seem to solidify as the oil is absorbed, and you’ll have clumps of moistened sugar. Keep stirring. Finally the sugar will start to melt and turn brown. Stir it constantly and watch it like a hawk. As soon as the color is golden brown, almost as dark as you want, pull it off the flame–I say “almost” because the hot syrup will continue to cook for short while.

This makes a very large kugel, enough to feed 12 or more. To make a smaller kugel, use 8 ounces of noodles, ⅓ cup oil, 1¼ tsp. salt, ½ tsp. black pepper, 1 cup sugar and 3 eggs, and bake it in an 8-inch square pan.

The Foods of Jerusalem

October 30, 2013 by 5 Comments

Before we left on our trip to Israel in October, I got my hands on a gorgeous cookbook, called, appropriately enough, Jerusalem: A Cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi (published by Ten Speed Press).

The authors have an intriguing story. They were born in Jerusalem in the same year. Yotam, the son of Italian Jewish immigrants, lived on the west side of the city and Sami on the Muslim east side. More than 30 years later, both chefs in London, they met, became friends and then business partners in the Ottolenghi chain of restaurants.

“The flavors and smells of this city are our mother tongue,” says Yotam in the introduction. He goes on to describe the rich tapestry of Jerusalem food, which incorporates the cuisines of many countries of Europe and the Middle East.

As Yotam and Sami discovered in their discussions about food, it’s futile to talk about which culture invented a particular delicacy and which one brought a dish to Jerusalem with them. In many ways, the Jerusalem food scene gives credence to those medieval maps that showed the world with Jerusalem at its center.

Complex recipes

The photos in Jerusalem: A Cookbook  are absolutely gorgeous and will make you want to break out your pots and chopping knives. The problem comes when you start to read the recipes. Not only are they complex, but many include obscure ingredients that could be difficult to procure.

In order to make shakshuka, this week’s recipe, I needed to order harissa (hot pepper paste) online because I couldn’t find it in my local market, even though it has a large section for Middle Eastern goods. Several other recipes look interesting, but so far I’ve been unable to find pomegranate molasses anywhere, even in Israel (I’ll probably make some myself, eventually, by boiling down pomegranate juice). And preserved lemons? Dried barberries? To their credit, the authors give instructions on how to make some of the spice mixtures and condiments.

Shakshuka originated in Tunisia but is very popular in Jerusalem. Sometimes you’ll see several varieties on a menu. I confess the photo with this week’s recipe is from the cookbook. My version wasn’t as pretty, but it was very tasty – and spicy! If you don’t like heat, use less harissa or leave it out altogether. I also used just the whole eggs, without the additional egg yolks.

Street food can’t be beat

My favorite Jerusalem food is actually street food, especially falafel and shawarma. Falafel, for the uninitiated, are deep-fried balls of ground chickpeas and spices. When I was first introduced to falafel more than 40 years ago, the balls were stuffed into a pita with chopped tomatoes and cucumbers and tahini (sesame) sauce. These days the balls are topped with a variety of salads, pickles and spreads and then with a handful of French fries, making it a complete meal.

A shawarma is similar, but instead of the falafel balls, the pita’s main filling is shreds of lamb or turkey sliced from a huge hunk of meat turning on a vertical rotisserie. With a falafal or shawarma, you can enjoy a satisfying lunch for less than $6.

Instead of a pita, and for a few shekels more, you can get the sandwich in a “laffa”  – a larger, flatter, more rubbery bread that’s folded around the filling. If you’re really brave, you can go for a “mixed grill,” a combo of shredded chicken and meat with grilled onions and mushrooms. It’s extremely yummy but it can be really messy.

There’s a real skill to eating a pita or laffa that’s fairly bursting with its fillings. I think the main trick is to lean out, so wayward bits and drops will land on the table or ground and not on you. By our second week in Jerusalem, we were able to finish one without having to change our shirts because of the sauce or grease we dripped all over ourselves.

Jerusalem: A Cookbook has a recipe for lamb shawarma, but with 16 different herbs and spices, it’s not for the faint of heart. There’s also a recipe for falafal, but by far the easiest way to make it at home is to buy a box of falafel mix!

From Israel to your table: Salad, salad day and night

October 28, 2013 by Leave a Comment

My husband and I recently returned from three weeks in Israel. This was not our first trip. I first went for a junior year abroad program at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and Joe went for a “gap year” living on a kibbutz near Nazareth before college. Years later, our children went on long-term programs in Israel during high school and college and so we had a good excuse to visit. Our eldest even planned to make Israel her home, but during her second year as an Israeli immigrant she met her future husband–who grew up around the corner from us in Michigan, but that’s another story. Though they lived in Washington, D.C. at the time they married, they wanted their wedding seven years ago to be in Israel, so that was our last trip before this one. We felt this year it was time to go back.

One thing I always appreciate about Israel is the plethora of fresh fruits and vegetables, many grown locally on kibbutzim  and moshavim. But it wasn’t love at first sight.

On my first visit to Israel, in 1969, I was in a group of about 100 students, from colleges all over the U.S., who would be part of a much larger group studying at Hebrew University’s School for Overseas Students (now the Rothberg International School) for the year. Because our knowledge of Hebrew was minimal at best, our group would spend seven weeks in the summer doing an ulpan–an immersive language course–at a teachers’ college  in the Negev desert.

Salad for breakfast?

Talk about culture shock! The program organizers had prepared us for lots of things: Don’t do drugs or you’ll be deported, know that you’ll have your bags searched at building entrances, remember that you need to buy special tokens to use a pay phone. But they didn’t tell us that Israelis eat salad for breakfast.

If you’ve ever been to an Israeli hotel, you know that breakfast is a sumptuous buffet of gorgeous salads, fruits, cheeses, fish and pastries. That’s not what we got at the teachers’ college. I kept a journal that year. Here is my description of breakfast at the ulpan:

The dining hall is one huge rectangular room filled with long tables. I am with Joan and another roommate. A fat Israeli woman in a grease-stained white apron motions us to a table. There are only two places. Joan and I sit there and our friend goes to the next table. To do otherwise would be to bring a stream of angry Hebrew down on our heads from the chick in the greasy apron.

The table is piled high with tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, hard-boiled eggs, bread and muddy coffee. Midway through the meal, the fat Israeli comes around with a big bowl filled with an Israeli concoction similar to yogurt. “Leben please?” she asks, and slops out a ladle-full to all who so desire. Every morning it is the same.

Our tablemates unfortunately include several of the sorority types [I was a pseudo-hippie snob in those days], still wearing gobs of makeup even out here in the middle of the desert.

“God,” one of them whines. “Salad again! I think I’m going to turn into a tomato!” She giggles at her joke. Another fingers the bread. “Stale!” she says in disgust, replacing the slice. “That’s not all,” answers the first. “Yesterday I found an ant in the bread basket!”

We eventually got used to it. At the end of our stay in the desert, we had a goodbye party where every ulpan class did a skit. My class set our skit in the dining hall. We sang a song, to the tune of, “Put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon…” More than 40 years later, I still remember it:

“Salad, salad, day and night, vegetables from green to white, make your stomach die of fright, that salad, salad, salad.”

At the end, the class clown came in dressed like the leben lady, in a greasy apron and black wig. One of the other students took the bowl of yogurt and dumped the contents on his head. It brought the house down.

Salad anytime!

Now I have a much healthier opinion of fresh vegetables for breakfast, or any time of day for that matter.

We often make “Israeli salad,” a very simple mixture of chopped tomatoes, cucumbers and onions. Here’s how you make it:

Take a couple of small, firm, ripe tomatoes and a small, edible-skinned cucumber (e.g., Persian or Armenian), and dice them all into small pieces; you want an equal amount of tomato and cuke. Dice half a small onion and mix all the vegetables together. Season with salt and pepper and drizzle with olive oil. Optional: add chopped red or green pepper, chopped hard-boiled egg, kalamata olives, chopped white cheese (e.g. white cheddar or Muenster) or crumbled feta cheese.

Because that one is so simple–more a method than a recipe–I thought I’d give you another Israeli recipe as well, the kind of dish you might find at an Israeli hotel buffet. Once you peel the carrots, separate the parsley leaves from the stems and separate the pomegranate seeds from the pith, making this salad is a snap!

(Helpful hint: quarter the pomegranate—carefully, because the juice will stain everything it touches—and then put the pieces into a large bowl of water before breaking them apart. The seeds will sink to the bottom of the bowl and the pith will float to the top. Skim off the pith, and then drain the seeds in a strainer or colander.)