What makes Jewish food Jewish?
“Not food Jews eat,” said the late Gil Marks in an interview about his monumental Encyclopedia of Jewish Food in 2010.
After all, he pointed out, contemporary Ashkenazi Jews probably eat more salsa and sushi than schmaltz. Jewish food, he said, is food that “almost becomes sanctified by its use in Jewish life.”
Marks, a rabbi, historian, and extraordinary repository of culinary knowledge, was born in West Virginia and died, far too young, in Jerusalem in 2014.
His words came back to me as I began going through my food lists and recipes, stained from years of cooking in preparation for Rosh Hashanah.
What are the foods that have become sanctified in our family?
Tradition, with room for change
The main courses have remained fairly constant over the years. We have also adopted many of the Rosh Hashanah simanim, symbolic foods long associated with Sephardi and Mizrahi holiday tables. Their Hebrew and Aramaic names become puns for our hopes for the coming year. We eat beets, selek, while expressing the hope that our enemies will be removed, and leeks, karti, with a prayer that those who hate us will be cut off.
Those ancient puns require little explanation at an Israeli Rosh Hashanah table.
But what about dessert?
Where I grew up in Colchester, Connecticut, my aunt made teiglach, those little knots of dough boiled in honey. In my early married years, I made them, too. Mine came out more like fossils. So teiglach disappeared from our family menu.
Honey cake, ubiquitous in Israel and with a history that goes back nearly a thousand years in Jewish sources, seemed the obvious replacement. There was only one problem. I didn’t like honey cake.
For a while, I moved on to a complicated honey cake recipe that a dear friend had published in The Boston Globe. It had chopped apples and nuts and a glaze and required considerable time and attention.
Eventually I passed the recipe on to the next generation, asking our children and grandchildren to make it. Their verdict was that it wasn’t worth the effort. None of us really liked honey cake that much.
This brought me back to another cake of my Connecticut childhood: babka. Babka has become fashionable in recent years, but it was a holiday staple in Colchester, a small Connecticut town of about 5,000 residents.
We had something unusual for such a small town: the famous Colchester Bakery, owned by Walter and Mary Gadle, of Lithuanian heritage. They weren’t Jewish, but the bakery stood next to our synagogue and had rabbinical supervision. Its baked goods became part of Jewish communal life, the default choice for every kiddush.
A green loaf of Colchester rye was presented to the governor of Connecticut for St. Patrick’s Day. Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, father of America’s nuclear navy, was reportedly such a fan that he once made a 3 a.m. request for bread from the bakery to be brought to him at the submarine base in Groton.
The Gadles shaped my lifelong taste in pastry. And among their pastries was babka, cinnamon babka with raisins.
Making room for a new babka
MARKS TRACED Jewish babka to Eastern Europe in the early 19th century. Housewives used extra challah dough, rolled it out, and filled it with ingredients such as cinnamon, jam, or honey.
Jewish bakers used oil rather than butter, keeping the cake parve so that it could be eaten after a meat meal. The dough was less rich than that of some non-Jewish versions, making the swirls of filling and the crumb topping particularly important.
Chocolate came later, largely an American Jewish contribution. I remember very clearly when chocolate babka entered my life.
I was 17 and had just returned from a Young Judaea summer in Israel. I stayed overnight with a fellow Young Judaean who lived in New Jersey. Her father was a baker, and in honor of his daughter’s return he had prepared an enormous chocolate babka.
I had never tasted anything like it. It was a revelation. My favorite cake ever.
Decades later, babka would acquire another kind of fame when Jerry Seinfeld and Elaine Benes went to a bakery to buy a chocolate babka for a dinner party, only to discover that another couple had taken the last one. Forced to settle for cinnamon, Elaine protested that it was the “lesser babka.” Seinfeld insisted that cinnamon “takes a back seat to no babka.”
I am unwilling to take sides.
This year, as Rosh Hashanah approached, I found myself talking babka with Robin and Yussie Chait, the owners of Emmer & Cane, an artisan bakery they run in Ramat Beit Shemesh.
When I first saw the name Emmer & Cane, I thought it sounded rather like an elegant English company with a royal warrant. The explanation is simpler. Emmer is an ancient form of wheat. Cane is sugar.
Montreal-born Robin and American-born Yussie both came from business backgrounds. During the pandemic, Robin began perfecting sourdough baking at home. Eventually the couple, parents of six, decided to create a bakery specializing in baked goods that North American immigrants long for.
There are English muffins. And, importantly for me, there is babka.
“The dough shouldn’t be sweet, but the creamy inside is plentiful, and the crumble tops it off,” Robin says. “A perfect comfort food.”
Babka is a diminutive of baba, grandmother or old woman in Slavic languages, a cousin of the Yiddish bubbe. The older, tall, fluted Eastern European cakes bearing the name were said to resemble the pleated skirts worn by grandmothers.
As a grandmother myself, I like that. But I also think grandmothers are allowed to edit tradition.
We’re going to skip the foods no one actually likes. We can borrow customs from Jews whose ancestors lived in different countries from ours. Our children and grandchildren can add something new.
So this year, I’ve ordered three babkas: cinnamon, chocolate, and Emmer & Cane’s Cookie Dough Babka.
The first two have history. The third? I haven’t tasted it yet. Maybe that’s the one for the grandchildren.
Shana Tova. May it be a sweet one.■
The writer is the Israel director of public relations at Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Her latest book is A Daughter of Many Mothers, co-written with Holocaust survivor and premier English-language witness Rena Quint.
