Diwali—lights, fireworks and great snacks, too

October 19, 2014 by 3 Comments

 

Anjali Charankar-Vale, a GM engineer who lives in suburban Detroit, spends many hours in her kitchen getting ready for Diwali, a major festival in her Hindu faith as well as for Sikhs and Jains. A variety of narratives explain the meaning and significance of the Diwali practices; they differ by religious tradition as well as regionally.

Diwali is the happiest and most widely celebrated festival in India, with a message that so transcends religious boundaries that even some Buddhists and Christians celebrate: the triumph of good over evil, light over darkness, truth over falsehood, knowledge over ignorance, hope over despair.

In India many businesses close their books for the year and start the next year on Diwali, so it has the effect of a new year celebration.

In India, said Anjali, Diwali is traditionally a time to shop for new clothes and jewelry and to give gifts, especially gold. In America, where it’s easy to shop all the time, this tradition has become less important, but she agreed it’s always nice to have a good excuse to buy new duds!

A multi-day celebration

The festivities go on for four or five days starting before and continuing after the actual date of Diwali, which falls on the new moon of the Hindu month Kartik.

To celebrate the festival of light, houses, shops, temples and public spaces are decorated with earthenware oil lamps and bright electric lights.

Anjali and her husband Milind, an automotive consultant, come from Mumbai in Maharashra state; each state has unique Diwali traditions.

“Delicious food and firecrackers are the hallmarks of Diwali,” said Anjali. “We make a variety of sweet and spicy snack food items. Traditionally relatives and friends visit each other distributing sweets and wishing everyone best wishes for Diwali and the coming new year.”

In India, schools close for a week or more and most workplaces shut down for three or four days.

Deepak Sarma, writing for Huffington Post, says communal Diwali celebrations in America are fairly recent. When his parents came to the United States in 1968, he said, there were few Indian-Americans, and they celebrated Diwali quietly at home. Now, the population has grown enough, at least in major cities and on college campuses, that large, publicized communal gatherings are common.

Unique rituals for each day

Each day of Diwali has different rituals. On the second day, called Narak Chaturdashi, Anjali and her family get up early in the morning – around 4 or 5 a.m. –  to bathe with fragrant oil and a scented herbal powder. Children start setting off firecrackers and the adults go to the temple to pray.

The evening of the third day, the actual day of Diwali, is Laxmi Puja; the Vale family performs rituals at home honoring Laxmi, the goddess of wealth. In India, fireworks follow the home puja.

The final day of Diwali, Bhau-beej, celebrates sisters and brothers. Sisters make special foods for their brothers, who promise to care for and protect them. “It’s kind of a symbolic way to support each other and create a wonderful sibling relationship,” said Anjali.

Here is one of Anjali’s recipes for a Diwali snack, shankarpali.

Pavlova wars

October 6, 2014 by Leave a Comment

This week we salute the Pavlova, a delectable dessert, because the first documented recipe for it was published 79 years ago this month. Our Australian guest blogger, Andrea Cooper, writes about the battle between Australian and New Zealand to claim credit for it.

Australia and New Zealand are neighbor countries and allies. Yet their own rivalry, across the ditch (the Tasman Sea), is legendary and taken seriously by many. Examples of this friendly but deep rivalry abound, especially in sport.  A couple of years ago when New Zealand lost their America’s Cup (yachting) challenge to the US, New Zealand’s loss was played up in the Australian media as a local victory, because key positions in the U.S. team were held by Aussies. There are also the annual rugby matches of the Australian Wallabies vs the New Zealand All Blacks, cricket, netball and other sports. Additionally, many entertainers acclaimed international as Australians, including Russell Crowe and Keith Urban, are in fact New Zealand-born.

A down-under food war

Perhaps the most serious rivalry comes from a different field altogether. It is a food war over who invented the Pavlova dessert.

No one contests that it is named after the ballerina Anna Pavlova, who visited both countries in 1926 and Australia again in 1929. This confection, consisting of a meringue shell topped with whipped cream and fruit, can certainly be viewed as a reflection of a dancer’s fluffy white tutu. The dispute arose in the 1950s with the wide publication, in Australia, of Chef Herbert Sachse’s recipe for “Traditional Pavlova.” Sachse claimed to have invented this dish in 1935 whilst working at The Esplanade Hotel in Perth, naming it after Anna Pavlova, who had stayed at the hotel in 1929. New Zealanders were soon up in arms, claiming the dish as their own and accusing Australia of plagiarism.

The dispute has raged across the decades and continued even after Anna Pavlova’s own biographer stated that the dish was created by a chef at the Wellington hotel where she stayed in 1926. Today many Australians still refuse to acknowledge the Pavlova as a New Zealand creation, even after the 2008 publication of Helen Leach’s well documented book The Pavlova Story: A Slice of New Zealand’s Culinary History. 

Leach is a culinary anthropologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Her library of cookbooks includes 667 Pavlova recipes from more than 300 sources. Leach identifies a recipe for “Meringue with Fruit Filling” in a 1926 book, Home Cookery for NZ. In 1927, the name Pavlova first appears for a trifle-like dessert (not a fruit-filled meringue) released by the Davis Gelatine company in their Davis Dainty Dishes (sixth edition). Other recipes for meringues with fruit were printed in various New Zealand publications, including the Women’s Mirror magazine in April 1935. This is the recipe that Herbert Sachse most likely copied and “improved,” then first served as “The Pavlova” on October 3,1935.

The OED steps into the fray

A few years ago, the Oxford English Dictionary awarded the honor to New Zealand, saying the Davis Dainty Dishes publication was the first published Pavlova recipe–even though it was a different confection. Leach said she identified at least 21 Pavlova recipes in New Zealand cookbooks before 1940, the date of the first Australian publication.

Of course this doesn’t satisfy some Aussies.

“They can make all the claims they like, and the Oxford dictionary can go on like great academic know-it-alls, but I think Australians would agree with me that the true Pavlova belongs to Australia,” huffed Margaret Fulton, a 90-year-old Australian food guru, in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald after the OED announcement. Personally, in the end I don’t care who first created the Pavlova. Making a good one from scratch is a challenge, but well worth the effort and calories.

Now if Australia and New Zealand could only agree on who first invented the lamington (cubes of sponge cake coated with chocolate icing and coconut) and the ANZAC biscuit (an oatmeal and coconut cookie) – but those are topics for another time!

This Pavlova recipe comes from www.taste.com.au. I’ve adjusted the measurements and terms for U.S. norms. aIf you want to watch a YouTube demo, you can take your pick of many videos. 

Circus Peanut Jell-O: Sweet taste of post-WWII Midwest

May 26, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Today’s guest blogger is Jennifer Blackledge, who used to work with my husband in the professional recruiting section of Ford Motor Company. They’ve stayed in touch since leaving the company. Jen is also a poet.

I have always envied people who made interesting, taste-of-the-old-country dishes handed down from their great-great-grandma (like some of the incredible recipes on this blog!). While my grandmothers were cheerful cooks who produced voluminous amounts of food on a daily basis, the origin of that food could usually be traced to the side of a Jell-O package or a soup can label.

I confess: I am a Midwesterner, pale and freckled, with 99 percent of my genetic and cultural heritage traceable through England, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, central Illinois, the farmlands of northern Michigan, and the foothills of Appalachia. Yes, hotbeds of world-renowned culinary innovation all. Needless to say, I grew up happily consuming large quantities of bland, hearty food. Salt and pepper were the only spices on our shelf. In fact, I’m fairly sure I never tasted garlic until high school. We really prefer Stove Top Stuffing to homemade.

Living in the southern suburbs of metro Detroit, both as a child and now, most of my friends talk about their busia’s homemade pierogies and kielbasa, the closely guarded secret ingredients of the family pasta sauce, or getting together with all their cousins to make Hungarian kifli for the holidays. Other than my Great-aunt Margaret’s sloppy joe recipe made with Campbell’s Chicken Gumbo soup, I had very few special “family” recipes. But of those few, my favorite would have to be Circus Peanut Jell-O.

I know – everyone thinks I’m kidding. In the world of cuisine, is there anything more ridiculed than Jell-O? Rarely encountered anywhere these days except hospitals, your great-aunt’s dinners, or in the prep phase of a colonoscopy, Jell-O falls into the same category as Wonder bread, Velveeta, and bologna sandwiches.

The Jell-O of the candy world

Now consider Jello-O’s equivalent in the candy hierarchy. Circus peanuts: those vaguely banana/chemical flavored, orange, oversized “peanuts,” with the consistency of stiffened memory foam and made of pure sugar. What self-respecting kid spends allowance money on circus peanuts when there are Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Sour Patch Kids, and Milky Ways to be had?

Put the Jell-O and circus peanuts together, throw in canned pineapple and a big dollop of Cool Whip, and what do you get? Usually, derision. We’re talking the Rodney Dangerfield of desserts here. But trust me; if you have a child or grandchild assisting you in the kitchen, this is a fun and memorable dish to make together.

My Grandma Blackledge lived on a farm in northern Michigan and she always let me assist her in the barn and in the kitchen. (Don’t worry, we washed our hands in between.) I think it’s safe to assume she got the Circus Peanut Jell-O recipe off the side of a circus peanuts bag. She assigned the best steps to me: dissolving the Jell-O, tearing the circus peanuts into thirds, then pouring boiling water on them (with a helping hand) to watch them melt. It seemed like one big, fun science experiment.

While my own daughters love to help make it, they are somewhat ambivalent about the finished product. Luckily, I’ve developed a fan base among my sister-in-law, nieces, and nephews.

A springtime treat

The bright orange color and pineapple are festive and spring-y, so I tend to make it around Easter or Mother’s Day. I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, but I could eat an entire batch by myself. You’d expect it to be overwhelmingly sweet, but the pineapple’s tartness balances it perfectly.

Note: the circus peanut is an elusive quarry, long relegated to the “senior citizen section” of the candy aisle, usually not too far from the cellophane bags of Starlight mints, French burnt peanuts, and off-brand licorice ropes. I’ve seen them on the candy rack in the Bob Evans’ lobby, or in the store at the front of Cracker Barrels. If all else fails, there’s the Internet!

Saloma Furlong’s Amish Sticky Buns as seen on PBS

March 30, 2014 by Leave a Comment

A NOTE FROM FeedTheSpirit HOST BOBBIE LEWIS: I am traveling this week and am pleased to welcome Saloma Furlong to our online home for stories—and recipes—about faith, family traditions and good food. Stay tuned! I’ll be back soon with some special stories about foods for Christian and Jewish holidays. Here’s Saloma ….

A TASTE OF MY AMISH HOME

By SALOMA FURLONG

At the end of my new book, Bonnet Strings: An Amish Woman’s Ties to Two Worlds, I include some recipes from the Amish community where I grew up. Among them, “Mem’s White Bread” holds the deepest memories. When my older brother and sister started going to school and I was the oldest one still left at home, I would oftentimes make bread right alongside my mother, Mem. She would start first thing in the morning to make all of her loaves. When she reached the stage of turning out her dough for kneading on her breadboard, she would give me a blob of dough and let me knead it right next to her.

Of course, she often had to throw out the loaf I made because I was small and I sometimes would drop my dough on the floor while I was kneading it. It could get pretty dirty. But, sometimes, my bread would make it all the way through the process—I wouldn’t drop it—and then I’d be so proud to eat it!

When I did start going to school, I would come home on bread-baking day and I would tell her: “Oh, you made bread today without me!” So, Mem actually changed her schedule and made bread later in the day, when I was home from school.

When I was growing up, Mem was known as the best bread baker in our church district. I learned how to bake Mem‘s white bread, but it wasn’t until I was baking professionally that I wrote down the recipe. Here is the closest I have come to duplicating Mem‘s bread, including her way of teaching me what the temperature of the water or milk should be when adding the yeast.

She also would make cinnamon rolls from that white bread dough. I don’t have a written-down recipe for that, from her, but I did find a recipe for what I call the “Sticky Bun Stuff” in a Mennonite cookbook that seems to me a perfect way to recreate Mem’s sticky buns.

If you would like to learn more about my story, which was featured in two films about the Amish on the PBS network, please read my interview with ReadTheSpirit Editor David Crumm.

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Celebrate Purim with hamentaschen

March 9, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Purim is coming! This is one of the most festive days of the Jewish calendar, even though it’s not a “holy” day mentioned in the Torah, like Rosh Hashanah or Passover. If you want to know what Purim is all about, read the Book of Esther in the Bible (a post-Torah piece of writing). It’s a wonderful story, with a hero (Mordechai), a heroine (Esther), a villain (Haman) and a fool (King Ahasuerus). It has drama, tension, irony, even humor. At the end, after the Jews of Persia are saved from the dastardly plot to annihilate them, we read, “The Jews ordained, and took upon them, and upon their seed, and upon all such as joined themselves unto them, so as it should not fail, that they would keep these two days according to their writing, and according to their appointed time every year; and that these days should be remembered and kept throughout every generation, every family, every province, and every city; and that these days of Purim should not fail from among the Jews, nor the memorial of them perish from their seed.”

Drown out his name!

Jews all over the world will hear the Book of Esther chanted on Purim, which starts at sundown on Saturday, March 15. Whenever the name of Haman is read, they’ll try to drown it out, using noisemakers called greggers, stamping their feet or just yelling “Boooo!”

Understandably enough, children – who often dress in costumes for the event – love this holiday, so the service where the Book of Esther is read can be rather chaotic. To control things a bit, my synagogue has a big traffic light on the bimah at the front of the sanctuary. Whenever Haman’s name is read it turns green and pandemonium breaks out. When it’s time to stop the noise, the light turns red and things settle down so we can hear the reader again.

Israelis celebrate by taking to the streets for parades, musical performances and general carousing. It’s known as ad lo yada – meaning “until he didn’t know.” The idea is that adults are supposed to get so drunk that they can’t distinguish between “blessed be Mordechai” and “cursed be Haman.”  In many communities, they take this commandment seriously.

But eat the cookies named for him

The main food associated with Purim is hamentaschen,  fruit-filled cookies. Their three-cornered shape is supposed to represent Haman’s hat, though the word actually means “Haman’s pockets” in Yiddish. A sensible explanation (thanks, Wikipedia!) is that the word came from German-Yiddish “mohn taschen,” meaning poppyseed-filled pockets.

How odd that the one food associated with the holiday bears the name of the man who was so evil we can’t stand to hear his name!

In Israel, the confection is called “oznei Haman” – Haman’s ears. This doesn’t make any more sense than “Haman’s pockets.”

A family recipe

My mother wasn’t much of a cook, but she baked  hamentaschen every year. She got the recipe from our neighbor in Northeast Philadelphia, Ida Silver. In 2007, I read a Hadassah magazine article by one Judith Davis about her mother’s hamentaschen, and I realized Judith Davis was the married name of Judy Silver,  Ida’s oldest child, a few years older than me. But the recipe in the magazine was not my mother’s recipe!

I hadn’t seen Judy in at least 40 years but I tracked her down – she worked at the University of Massaschusetts – and emailed her. In her response she admitted that the recipe in the magazine was not her mother’s, which she either never had or lost.

“I must have had a copy at some time, though I have no memory of it,” she wrote. “I love the idea of your mother having used her recipe (it means my mother must have shared some of them with her), and I love that it is being handed down to the next generation.”

Indeed it is! My children always enjoyed my hamentaschen – at some point, each of them served as my baking assistant. Now they are making the same recipe. And in all humility, I must say that I know only one friend whose hamentaschen are as good as these. The cookies are tender, and the honey and lemon give them a nice flavor.

Make a lot!

I usually double the recipe and many years have made several double batches. Now that we are empty nesters and retired (with no office colleagues to share goodies with), I will probably go back to making a single batch. I don’t use a board to roll out the dough. I do what my mother did: cover the kitchen table with an old sheet, work some flour into it and use that as my workspace.

Use Solo brand pastry filling or similar; regular canned pie filling is too runny and will make the hamentaschen soggy. Prune and poppyseed are the most traditional fillings, but children tend to prefer cherry or apricot.

An apple cake from the heartland

March 3, 2014 by Leave a Comment

 

I met Mary Hooper Nelson many moons ago when I went to Cleveland for my first co-op job as a student at Antioch College. Along with a dozen or so other young adults, we were copyboys at the late, lamented Cleveland Press (yes, the girls were called copyboys–when an editor bellowed “Boy!” we had to jump!) Mary, a Cleveland-born journalist, now lives in Kinsley, Kansas, not far from Garfield, where folks consider themselves lucky to have a grocery store.

Garfield, Kansas, is a sleepy, drive-by hamlet in Pawnee County on the U.S. 56 highway, built on part of the legendary Santa Fe Trail. Passing through, a few tourists may stop and rest for a bit in the city park and perhaps peek into the Wayside Chapel, but there is not much in the town to detain a visitor.

Garfield was never a metropolis, but in the late 19th century and first half of the 20th, it was a robust agricultural community with a thriving small-town economy. It was typical of the many towns that sprang up throughout the Great Plains as settlers poured in to break up the hard prairie sod and plant wheat.

Supplying the railroad builders

Garfield started out in 1872 as Camp Criley, a supply station for workers building the Santa Fe Railroad.

In 1873 the “first” settlers arrived (the actual first inhabitants were, of course, the Pawnee and Kiowa peoples) and turned the rough sutler’s post into a recognizable town. They were from Lake County in Northeast Ohio and must have thought a great deal of their congressman, for they named the town after him. He was James A. Garfield, later elected U.S. president.

In appreciation, Garfield pledged a bell to the first church to be built in his namesake town. That was the Congregational church, built in 1875. Soon to follow were a Methodist church in 1878, and, as the town’s population swelled with Swedish immigrants, a Lutheran church in 1879.

My husband, Bryce Nelson, grew up in Garfield in the 1950s. He had numerous aunts, uncles and cousins in and around Garfield; his Nelson grandparents had eight children.

There were plenty of kids to play with and lots of old-timers to spin yarns. They’d tell of seeing covered wagons – also called prairie schooners – lumbering along the Santa Fe Trail, and recall examples of frontier justice. One townsman told of seeing a horse thief hanged in the now-vanished settlement of Nettleton in the early 20th century.

Still thriving in the ’50s

In the 1950s Garfield was still a pretty lively place. Although the population was only 300, it provided goods and services not just to the townspeople but also to ranchers and farmers throughout the county. It had two grocery stores, a bank, a lumberyard, two grain cooperatives, a large brick school for grades 1 through 12, a hotel and a restaurant.

Bryce’s great-uncle on his mother’s side, Sherman “Pete” Rains and his wife, Velma, operated one of the grocery stores. It was an old-fashioned place, Bryce recalls, where you could buy groceries on credit.

The old Swedish farmers would sit around in the morning in their bib overalls and feed caps and quaff cup after cup of strong black coffee. Velma would have slices of her raw apple cake on hand. “Coffee and apple cake draws Swedes,” says Bryce – and other folks too!

Bryce’s mother, Dorothy Nelson, collected family recipes, including Velma’s recipe for raw apple cake. It’s delicious, kind of crunchy on top and moist and dense inside.

Nearly a ghost town

Today, Garfield’s population is about 190. The businesses are gone, all of them. The last place in town to buy anything was a convenience store at the co-op, but that closed years ago. The Congregational church was torn down in the late ‘50s, although the Lutheran and Methodist churches remain and hold regular services.

James Garfield’s bell today hangs in the Wayside Chapel in the town park. The school was torn down a few years ago. School children now are bused to Larned, 10 miles away.

It was the automobile that did in Garfield’s business district, and those of innumerable towns throughout America. Once people in those villages could afford cars, they started driving to the cities where there were more stores and a greater variety of goods.

At least Garfield still has a post office.

For now.

A Cherry Apple Pie for Presidents Day

February 17, 2014 by 1 Comment

 

I am a Scrooge when it comes to Presidents Day: Bah, humbug!

When I was in school we got two—count ‘em, two—days off in February, one for Lincoln’s Birthday on February 12 and the other for Washington’s on February 22. Their actual birthdays were the actual holidays.

Then in 1971, our federal government decreed that most federal holidays would be celebrated on a Monday. A three-day weekend was nice enough for those of us in school or working in traditional office jobs – but it kind of took the wind out of the birthdays of two of our greatest presidents. I think the holidays had more meaning when they were celebrated separately.

What a relief that they didn’t change the date of Independence Day. Imagine celebrating the Fourth of July on July 2 or July 6! (Want to learn more? Stephanie Fenton’s Holidays column explores the strange history of Presidents Day.)

It’s still Washington’s Birthday

When I was doing research for this piece, I was astonished to learn that the official name of the holiday is still Washington’s Birthday. How would old George feel to know that his birthday is now always on a Monday? And how would old Abe feel knowing that he is officially ignored altogether?

I think Lincoln has always been my favorite president. He preserved the Union through a disastrous civil war. He was responsible for the passage of the crucial 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, even though it wasn’t ratified until after his death.

When I was younger I didn’t see nearly as much to admire in Washington. A great general, yes. Our first president? Big deal. Then in 1984 (was it really 30 years ago?) there was a wonderful TV mini-series about Washington starring Barry Bostwick. And I realized just how hard a task he faced as our first president.

George kept us together

We may have been “a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” as Lincoln would put it fourscore and seven years later. But in 1776, and even in 1789 when Washington was elected (by the Congress, not We the People), who knew what that meant? Some of the early Americans actually wanted to make Washington our king! Luckily he would have none of that! The new nation could have easily fallen apart in its early years; indeed there were a number of rebellions against the infant federal government. It was Washington’s leadership that kept us from foundering.

Plus I’ve had a soft spot in my heart ever since George Washington helped me win second place on Jeopardy! 10 years ago. (My one and only game was broadcast on April 2, 2004.)

I was getting creamed by the guy who won that game by a wide margin and who went on to win about eight more. And due to a couple of stupid mistakes, I was in third place going into Final Jeopardy, which was in the category George Washington. The “answer” was this: “In 1798, George wrote to John Greenwood, a man in this profession, ‘I am …ready to pay what ever you may charge me.’”

I was no expert on GW. But I did know that George was famous for his ill-fitting wooden false teeth. So I guessed, “What is a dentist?” I was right! And I was the only one of the three contestants who got it right, salvaging a little bit of the ego that had been bruised by how poorly I’d performed in the game and moving me ahead of the third person.

A pie for two presidents

I promised you another pie recipe this week from Sweetie-licious Pies by Michigan pie-meistress Linda Hundt. This cherry apple pie is appropriate for both Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays because it’s an apple and cherry pie. Apparently Abraham Lincoln loved pies, especially apple. And of course we all know the myth about George Washington copping to chopping down his father’s cherry tree (first recorded in a book about Washington by Mason Locke Weems). What better excuse can there be to eat cherry pie every February?