Purim’s Culinary Mask

What food traditions of the holiday have been lost or hidden?

by Ted Merwin
Special To The Jewish Week

Reveling and revelation mark the holiday of Purim. We disguise ourselves in imitation of the biblical Queen Esther, who hid her Jewish identity until the last moment, when she needed to expose Haman’s genocidal plot to her husband, King Ahaseurus. As on Shavuot, when the ways of the Lord were revealed, Purim is a holiday in which the hidden is uncovered, secrets are exposed and people are seen in their true colors. But what Noshing is Sacred wants to know is, what are the culinary traditions of this holiday that have also been lost to us — and to our palates?
To find some answers, I turned first to Jayne Cohen, author of the just-published “Jewish Holiday Cooking: A Food Lover’s Treasury of Classics and

Improvisations” (Wiley).
Cohen told me that kreplach were typically enjoyed on Purim (as well as on Kol Nidrei night and on Simchat Torah) since they are made by “beating” the filling in the same way that Haman’s name is drowned out during the reading of the Megillah with sounds of beating and stamping.
Kreplach fillings were traditionally sweet rather than savory. According to John Cooper’s indispensable book on the history of Jewish food, “Eat and Be Satisfied,” Jews in Poland and Prague in the 17th century kneaded the dough for kreplach with honey and spices, and filled it with fruit, preserves, raisins and nuts. Other popular dessert-type dishes involved brushing choux pastry rings with oil and butter and sprinkling them with poppy seeds, or frying thin cakes in oil. Cooper notes that the latter were similar to pancakes eaten by Christians on Shrove Tuesday, which also falls close to the onset of spring.
For the Purim seudah, the meal that breaks the Fast of Esther, Cohen also prepares other foods that are filled or stuffed in some way, including garlic-mashed potato knishes, roast turkey with challah stuffing (served with roasted grape and chestnut gravy), braised breast of veal stuffed with kasha and mushrooms, roasted red peppers filled with mujaddarah (lentils) and served with tomato-garlic sauce, and cider-baked apples stuffed with halvah. She relies on ingredients like kasha, chickpeas and tahini, since Queen Esther is said to have consumed only seeds and legumes in order to maintain her beauty and avoid eating non-kosher food.
Turkey is included in the Purim feast, Cohen said, because King Ahaseurus was said to have ruled an empire that stretched from Ethiopia to India, and turkeys, which were discovered in the New World, were wrongly thought to have come from India. (They were also thought to be stupid, like Ahaseurus.) But Cohen also pointed out that salty, spicy foods are especially appropriate for Purim, since their consumption encourages drinking — an important part of the holiday.
Hamantaschen also have a long history. According to Rabbi Gil Marks, author of “The World of Jewish Cooking,” hamantaschen have little to do with Haman’s pockets (the literal translation of the word from German, sometimes associated with the pockets in which Haman carried the lots, or purim, that he used to determine the date of the intended massacre). They have more to do with Teutonic poppy seed pastries first mentioned in Jewish sources in the Mahzor Vitry, a seminal early 13th-century French prayer book that contains a parody for Purim.
Poppy seeds (mohn in German) were identified as Haman’s fleas, and thus made a staple of the holiday. Americans often call them “moon” cookies, but Marks told me that poppy seeds were an important spice in the Middle Ages and were also frequently used to make oil.
Some cooks are reinventing hamantaschen by departing from the traditional fillings. They are turning from poppy seed, apricot and lekvar (prune butter) to chocolate, fresh apples, pistachio nuts, lemon or lime curd, and gourmet jams like guava or mango. Rachel Rappaport, a food blogger in Baltimore who has appeared on National Public Radio, said that the one rule of picking hamantaschen fillings is that you “have to pick something on the thick side, or it oozes back out.” Last year, she made vegan hamantaschen, using canola oil rather than butter, and filled them with homemade jams made from kiwis and boysenberries.
Outside the Ashkenazic context, other traditions abound. Persian Jews traditionally brought vegetable omelets and halvah (flavored with cardamom, rosewater and saffron) to the synagogue to commemorate the deceased. Sephardic Jews connect Purim and Chanukah, both of which are post-biblical holidays rooted in Jewish history, by eating the same treats on both occasions, such as marzipan, baklava and Orejas de Haman (Haman’s Ears — Oznei Haman in Hebrew), which are fried strips of dough dipped in syrup or honey.
Marks pointed out that one reason for an emphasis on dessert rather than dinner foods for Purim is that the holiday “falls at a time when there weren’t a lot of excess animals — unlike Passover, with all the baby lambs, calves and goats.” But he conceded that some aspects of Purim food may remain shrouded in mystery. “It’s the one holiday in which there is no divine miracle that occurs. But the Jews are saved anyway. This lends a sense of the mysterious that extends even to the foods that we eat.”

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization