Hamantaschen in the kitchen with Amie

We make cookies for Purim and I attempt to define Jewish food

Amie McGraham with a batch of chocolate hamantaschen.

I’m usually a solitary cook, but last week I had some welcome company, Amie McGraham, author of the excellent Cook & Tell newsletter.

You may remember that I visited Amie last fall at the Maine island home where she grew up. I wrote a short profile, which you can find here:

Tributes: A Food Writer Mom and a Toon Blogger

Amie was on Day 5 of what she called her “California Culinary Field Trip.” When she proposed a visit, we had at first considered making a cool ribbon cake that Amie thought might be reminiscent of the Christmas fruitcakes I like so much.

Instead, with the Jewish holiday of Purim arriving at the weekend (it concludes this evening), we decided to bake hamantaschen together. Amie said she was interested in learning how to make the triangular-shaped cookies that are so associated with this holiday. But first she wanted to interview me! As a former journalist used to asking questions rather than answering them, I was a wee bit nervous, but Amie, who studied journalism herself at one time, is a pro. She filled her notebook with her observations, written in a distinctive hand.

Coincidentally, Amie’s style of note taking (which I have admired in cards and recipes she’s sent me) and those of three other fine food writers—Colu Henry, Jolene Handy, and Domenica Marchetti—were the subject of two posts on Jillian Hess’s Noted blog last week. Here’s a link to the piece on Amie and Domenica.

As we talked about my background, I did learn a little more about hers. Though Amie’s mother Karyl Bannister was a longtime food columnist, newsletter writer, cookbook author and ultimately the inspiration for her daughter’s Cook & Tell blog, Amie said she took her mom’s cooking and recipe testing for granted when she was growing up.

“I didn’t really pay attention,” she said. “I just knew she cooked a lot.”

But now, after many years pursuing another career path and being too busy working to focus on cooking, Amie has discovered some of the same joy and commitment that motivated her mother. These days, she tests and retests recipes of her own and solicits more from others via email or snail mail, and, like me, reads many blogs and cookbooks. It’s become a passion that has spurred her to hit the road and hang out in the kitchens of friends both new and old. She’s filled with curiosity—and sometimes throws out seemingly simple questions that are hard to answer. Here’s one that had me stumped, at least at first.

“What is Jewish food?”

(I’ll get to the cookie part of this edition in a second, I promise!)

There definitely isn’t a one-word answer to that one. Or even a short one—other than “There isn’t just one type.” Or, “There are as many Jewish food styles as there are places where Jews have lived”—which is almost everywhere. Add to that Jewish dietary laws, including the prohibition against eating pork and shellfish, cooking on Shabbat, and mixing milk and meat. Then consider the even more stringent rules of keeping kosher for Passover—something many Jews might not do now, but which was once, just a few generations back, was almost universally observed. You end up with foods and styles of cooking that are all over the map—literally.

I referred Amie to one of my favorite Jewish cookbooks, The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York: A Cookbook. Published in 2001 by Claudia Roden, it includes more than 800 recipes from all over the world, from the Jewish quarter of Cairo, where the author spent her childhood, to the food of the Ashkenazi Jews of Russia, Poland, Germany, England, France and America, to the Sephardic and Mizrahi foods of Spain, Italy, the Middle East and North Africa.

Along with the history of the food come histories of the wandering people who created it. “Jewish food tells the story of an uprooted, migrating people and their vanished worlds,” Roden says. The stories Roden tells are as interesting as the recipes. Of the popular foods of Eastern European Jews that became foundational in America, she writes:

What was first known in the West as “Jewish food”—gefilte fish, chopped liver, pickled cucumber, chopped herring, and potato latkes—was the cooking of Russian, Polish and Eastern European Jews, who immigrated to America and Western Europe in waves; this started as a trickle in the mid-seventeenth century and turned into a great flood by the late nineteenth and early twentieth. … Through these migrations the world first became acquainted with the cheesecakes of Eastern Europe, the borscht of Russia, and the strudels of Hungary.

And finally…Hamantaschen!

Hamantaschen (the “en” at the end makes the cookie plural) were undoubtedly among the Jewish foods that the immigrants brought with them to this country. You can read about the cookie’s origin, the holiday of Purim and the meaning of the name (Is it a hat, an ear or a pocket? You decide!) in a blog I wrote three years back.

Hamantasch: The Purim Cookie

I made two doughs and two fillings ahead of time to shape into cookies with Amie. Making the dough and fillings is the easy part. Shaping isn’t too difficult once you get the knack of it. There are many styles of doing it—some fold, while others pinch. I’m in the pinch school of hamantasch-shaping.

Amie turned out to be a natural, deftly turning rounds of dough into triangles that miraculously didn’t morph into mini-volcanos once in the oven!

In the post above, you can find my preferred recipe for hamantaschen dough from writer Joan Nathan, along with ones for prune and nut filling, a favorite of my mother’s, and others for apricot, and poppy seed, all very traditional. This time, instead of straight prune filling, I subbed apricots for about one-third of the prunes in the recipe after getting the idea from Maida Heatter’s hamantaschen recipe in Happiness Is Baking. Amie, not a prune lover, said she was surprised at how tasty the mixed apricot-prune filling was. She’s saving a pop tart hamantaschen recipe I sent her for a future trial run! Pop tarts are definitely Amie's jam!

Chocolate Chip-Brownie Hamantaschen that I tested for Leah Koenig for a book of Jewish dessert recipes she’s researching.

After testing a Chocolate Chip-Brownie Hamantaschen recipe for Leah Koenig of The Jewish Table¹ a few weeks back for Leah’s upcoming book (tentatively titled The Dessert Table: Unforgettable Jewish Sweets), I was hoping to post the recipe, but Leah said her publisher won’t allow her to share a recipe in progress. Luckily, she published another fudgy recipe, Triple Chocolate Hamantaschen, last year. It turned out to be a winner—a sturdy and delicious chocolate dough with a brownie-like, chip-laden filling.

Amie’s handiwork.

Turns out the dough lent itself to experimenting with other fillings as well, including Nutella and hazelnuts, the prune and apricot mixture, and peanut butter and raspberry jam. Two other fillings, a date-apple-walnut-cinnamon combo and fig preserve and walnut fillings, were perfect inside Joan Nathan’s orange-scented dough. As you can see, the sky’s the limit—or your imagination—when it comes to making hamantaschen!

Any ideas on other great fillings? I’d love to know!

Thoughts on two in the kitchen

It’s fun to cook with a friend, especially one so eager to learn. Amie found out she’s not as bad with a rolling pin as she’s thought at first and ordered the same French tapered maple one I’ve got. She wants to work on perfecting her pie crust technique and try making it with lard. I told her I probably would stick with butter.

I discovered that I don’t have to be so uptight about throwing fruit filling into chocolate dough and chocolate filling into vanilla dough. Life is all about experimenting, right? Next time, Amie visits (and she swears she’s coming back!) we’ll make time to visit the town’s excellent independent bookstore, Pages. And maybe we’ll make that ribbon cake.

Sadly I shooed my photographer husband Jeff out of the kitchen before he could snap pictures of Amie and me, but I do have one of us from our meeting in Maine!

Amie and Ruth on Amie’s island in Maine. (Photo by Jefferson Graham)

Thanks for being here! If you haven’t read Amie’s terrific newsletter, do check it out, and please subscribe!

And while you’re at it, please like, share, leave a comment and subscribe to my blog. I’d love to hear your thoughts: Do you enjoy cooking with a friend or prefer going solo?

See you soon!

Ruth

1. Leah Koenig is also author of several cookbooks, including Portico: Cooking and Feasting in Rome’s Jewish Kitchen, published in August 2023, a new favorite of mine.