Ella Sax’s Rice Pudding

November 1, 2012

Author: David Sax

“Granny” Ella Sax’s signature dessert was her rice pudding, baked without dairy, studded with raisins, blanketed in cinnamon, and drenched in maple syrup. In her warm Montreal apartment, with its candy bowls and old world tchotchkes and hallways smelling of chicken soup, a casserole of rice pudding was always in the oven when we arrived from Toronto, as sure as her sweet and sour meatballs bubbled atop the stove. The aroma of those two dishes mingling in the same space form the perfume of memory for Granny Ella.

Granny grew up in Drummondville, a small Quebec town, east of Montreal, which is overwhelmingly French. I’ve been told she grew up in a priviledged family, with drivers, fine cars, and fur coats, but by the time we’d met, all that remained were photographs and antiques cluttering her apartment. My grandfather, Sam Sax, was a garment worker, and from what I heard, Granny Ella never let him forget that. She consistently held to the idea, throughout her life, that she was Austrian gentry, descended from landed Jewish nobility in the heart of Europe’s cultural capital. She dressed impeccably, accessorizing with scarves and costume jewelry befitting a duchess, and spoke as though she’d just stepped off a carriage into a ballroom, greeting everyone with a drawn out “Hellooooo Dahhling”. You could almost hear the waltz playing in the background.

The truth, however, was that Granny’s family was from Bessarabia, which, although technically in the far flung corner of the Austro-Hungarian empire, is in fact current day Moldova, about as Viennese as colonial Haiti was Parisian. Two years ago, I was visiting Romania, and ate at the house of a Jewish cook there, who served a baked rice pudding. It was nearly close to Granny’s, with no dairy, baked rice, raisins, and tons of cinnamon. The maple syrup, Granny’s decidedly Quebec touch, was replaced with fruit preserves, but otherwise it was similar in many ways.

“This is my grandmother’s recipe,” the woman told me. “She came from Bessarabia.” When I came home, I told my father and my aunts, which soon provoked the usual arguments. “Mom was Austrian” vs “Mom was Hungarian” vs “No, she was Bessarabian”. What I thought was definitive proof proved no more final than her recipe itself, which omits what kind of rice to use, its consistency, and how much maple syrup. Like its namesake, it’s best shrouded in mystery, left up to the next generation to shape to their narrative.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 Cup(s)s Rice

3 Cup(s)s water

1 cup(s) raisins

1-4 Tbsp vegetable oil

2 egg beaten

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/4 cup(s) Brown sugar

lots of cinnamon

1 apple peeled and grated

Preparation:

1. Cook rice in water just until all water is absorbed.

2. While rice is cooking, combine oil, eggs, vanilla, brown sugar and lots of cinnamon (the more the better) in a large bowl.

3. Combine with rice, raisins and apple until well mixes together, place in an 8-inch square pyrex pan, sprinkle liberally with cinnamon, and bake, covered, at 350 for 1 hour.

Serve warm with maple syrup.

Gvetch

December 27, 2012

Author: Ronna Dell Valle and Sharon Mason

My mother-in-law, of blessed memory, came to live with Reuben and myself when we had been married a year. She was a dear, sweet woman and we got along famously. She worked, as did I, until our first daughter was born a year later. Mom graciously offered her services as babysitter and we got to go out frequently. This particular Sunday, Mom suggested that she make us Sunday dinner. She made what I later learned was Gvetch. I was very angry with her. “Mom, why did you wait until you were living with us three years before making this delicious dish? I’m angry with you for not having made it long before this day.” Mom received this recipe from a Romanian lady; but, I think it is from the Middle East.

Ingredients:

1 medium size eggplant, peeled, sliced and cut into one inch cubes

1 cup rice

1/2 cup vegetable oil

1 cup diced onions

4 ribs celery cut into one inch pieces

4 carrots, peeled and diced

1 cup water

1/2 cup frozen peas, defrosted, at room temperature

Preparation:

Place all ingredients, except peas, into a roasting pan and mix together. Bake in a 350 degree oven for one hour or until ingredients are soft. Mix every twenty minutes to prevent rice from sticking to the pan. You may need to add a bit more boiling water when stirring the dish if it seems to be too dry. Add defrosted peas before serving the dish. May be used as a main dish with a salad or used as a side dish with meat, chicken or fish. Salt and pepper to your own taste. Enjoy!!

Authentic Spanish Paella de Abuelita

May 20, 2013

Author: GambasandGrits 

My husband is about as American as you can get. Until recently, Sergio had spent nearly all his life in the Lone Star State, having grown up outside of Houston, Texas, attended University of Texas as an undergrad and relocated to Houston as an adult. He loves all things sports (particularly the ’Horns), can grill like a pro, and drives a Ford F150.

But what makes him even more American is the fact that he came from somewhere else. Sergio was born to a Spanish mother and Cuban father in Spain. His father had always dreamed of coming to the United States and, so dedicated was he to fulfilling this chosen destiny, that my father-in-law gave up 2 years of his life in a Cuban work camp before he was permitted to leave his country. Shortly after Sergio was born, his father’s papers came in, and off they moved to relocate in a foreign land (and, I imagine, the even more foreign town of Sugar Land).

Sergio became a naturalized citizen in 1991, an experience that plays out every day in the United States. So even though he is 100% American, he is also (as he jokingly adds) “50% Cuban and 50% Spanish”. As such, he has access to the authentic recipes of his abuela‘s kitchen, passed down orally through his mother.

Among the favorites is her recipe for paella. Paella is one of those dishes that, after you have made it yourself, you will wonder why you pay an arm and a leg for it in the restaurants. While a bit labor-intensive (you constantly have to monitor the paella to make sure the rice is cooking evenly), a good paella is relatively simple and cheap to make. Also, because of the novelty and communalism of it (truly a “family style” dish), it is great for dinner parties.

Ingredients:

1 regular white or yellow onion, diced

6 whole cloves of garlic, unpeeled

1/2 large red bell pepper, 1/2 of which is cut into thin strips, the other 1/2 diced

1 1/2 cups paella rice (or short-grained rice in a pinch)

1/4 pound chorizo (or your favorite sausage or ham), diced in 1/2 inch cubes

1 pound of seafood comprising:mussels and/or clams (in shell) and calamari

1 pound of shrimps (in shell with the heads, the larger the better)

a few threads of saffron

olive oil

salt, pepper and sugar, to taste

Preparation:

1. Place 3/4 pound of shrimp in 5 1/2 cups of water and, after reaching a rolling boil for 3 minutes, reduce to low-medium heat and allow to cook for 30 minutes (shrimp broth).

2. Cover bottom of paella pan in thin layer of olive oil, at medium-high heat.

3. Cook 1/4 pound chorizo just enough to render fat.

4. Once pan is hot, place 6 garlic cloves (still in their peels) in olive oil and remove when thoroughly browned.

5. Place 1 diced onion and and 1/4 red bell pepper, diced, and stir. Once onion is translucent, add calamari and continue to stir.

7. Add 1 1/2 cups paella rice, 1 teaspoon of salt, 1 teaspoon of pepper and a generous pinch of sugar and continue to stir.

8. Remove shrimp from pot, remove the heads from the shrimp, deshell, devein and cut the shrimp into small morsels and mix with rice.

9. Add 1 cup of shrimp broth and 3-5 threads of saffron, and continue to stir until boiling.

10. As liquid boils off, continue to add 2 more cups of shrimp broth.

11. Boil for 5 minutes, covered (heavy or tripled-folded aluminum foil works well), and then lower heat to medium-low.

12. Leave for 10 minutes, covered.

13. Add remaining 2 cups shrimp broth slowly as it absorbed by the rice.

14. Arrange mussels/clams, shrimp (with heads) and 1/4 red bell pepper, sliced, on top.

15. Allow to cook for 5 more minutes, covered.

16. Remove from heat and allow to sit for 10 minutes, covered.

Notes

Paella does require a large, flat-bottomed pan for cooking the rice evenly- the key to a good paella. This does not necessarily mean you must go out and buy a paella pan (although if you cook it frequently enough, it is well worth it, as a paella pan can be used for plenty of other dishes), you can always ad lib and/or make smaller quantities.

Because paella rice must be cooked evenly, most stoves are not ideal to evenly distribute heat across your big-bottomed pan. A grill (charcoal or gas) is a great solution. Just be sure to pay close attention to your rice- it cooks quickly on the grill! Otherwise, turn on all burners to cover as much surface area as possible and rotate the pan to distribute heat evenly.

Fresh seafood (vs. frozen) really makes a big difference.

If you can’t find shrimp with their heads on, substitute chicken broth for shrimp broth and substitute more seafood or chicken for the shrimp.

Grandma Sylvia Abraham’s Holupchus (Sweet and Sour Stuffed Cabbage)

October 26, 2012

Author: Chadley

Grandma Sylvia always advised me, “If you can read, you can cook.” Her mother died when she was very young and she was raised by her father, so when she married Grandpa Alex, she’d never learned to so much as boil an egg. After her wedding, she came home and cracked open her newly purchased Joy of Cooking, and the rest was history. Over fifty years of marriage, and even to the end of his life when cancer curbed his appetite, my grandfather refused to leave even a morsel of Grandma’s cooking — from anyone’s plate — uneaten. Although the reason may have been Grandpa’s Depression era mentality, I prefer to think it was because the cooking was so delicious.

In the kitchen of their Bethesda, Maryland house which I visited every Friday throughout my childhood, the dishwasher was Grandpa’s domain as he had a highly complex loading strategy which we all tried and failed to grasp. Everything else in that narrow, formica-covered space with the mushroom-patterned wallpaper, however, was Grandma’s turf. One of her specialties which I have searched for ever since, to no avail, was a big heaping dish of little fried, salty, whole fish called smelts. How she managed to get a 5-year-old to gobble down plates of whole fish, with the dead eyes staring out at you, is even more of a mystery to me now that I’m a parent of two picky eaters.

Like so many Bubbes, Grandma single-handedly prepared Passover dinners for a dozen hungry mouths with barely so much as a sit-down. But I don’t believe any other Bubbe in the world ended a Seder with her particular party trick. Once the plates were cleared and put into the dishwasher according to Grandpa’s incomprehensible mathematical algorithm, my grandmother would finally collapse at the table, pull off her apron, and roll back her sleeve. From there I can only describe what she did from the perspective of the child I was — My grandmother became a female, Jewish Popeye. With her palm placed lightly on her forehead, her bicep flexed, she then proceeded to pop and bounce her exceedingly large arm muscle in a staccato rhythm so that it danced like a Mexican jumping bean. This was a crowd pleaser for the whole family, and the grandchildren were left to wonder what made their Grandma so well-endowed in the bicep area. Maybe it was her cooking.

Ingredients:

1 lb Lean, raw beef chopped (i.e. hamburger meat), salted and peppered

2 Large Onions 1 chopped fine, 2nd onion chopped medium

2 Cup(s)s Rice cooked (1 cup cooked rice to put in stuffing, prepare 2nd cup cooked rice to accompany servings of holupchus)

1 tablespoon Water

1 Eggs slightly beaten

1 whole Cabbage (one head)

2 Cup(s)s Tomatoes canned, broken up a bit so that tomatoes aren’t whole

1 tablespoon Matzah meal optional

1/2 cup(s) Golden raisins or to taste

4-6 Tablespoons Dried mint or to taste

Pinon nuts optional; to taste

1 tablespoon Honey or more; to taste

Several pinch Ginger

2 Tablespoons Brown sugar or more; to taste

1 Lemon (juice of 1 lemon)

Preparation:

Boil enough water in a large pot to cover about 2/3 of the cabbage head, the goal being to steam it and soften the leaves. Put cabbage in and cover pot. Pull off outer leaves as they soften. This will probably have to be repeated several times as you work towards the middle. All leaves should be soft enough to fold but not overcooked. This is best to do a little ahead so that the cabbage cools enough to work with.

Mix together the raw beef, 1 onion chopped fine (save the other onion for later), 1 cup cooked rice (prepare and save the 2nd cup rice to serve with the holupchus), the tablespoon of water, the egg, and the optional matzah meal. Roll up the meat mixture into small balls for filling little cabbage leaf packages that should be folded up like envelopes, open side down.

When all cabbage rolls have been put into a large pot, put in on top the tomatoes, the second onion (chopped into medium sized chunks), the honey, the ginger, the brown sugar, and the juice of one lemon.

Cover and simmer on low heat 1 hour – 1 1/2 hours approximately, tasting as you go.

Serve the holupchus with the cup of cooked rice. You can prepare more rice to accompany this if you want to serve the holupchus as a main course rather than as an appetizer.

Enjoy the sweet and sour goodness!

Stuffed Grape Leaves

June 16, 2014

Author: Sandy Speier

This is a recipe from Susan Zemelman and Steve Zemelman. They got the recipe from a Lebanese student at Brandeis.

Ingredients:

Jar of grape leaves in brine

1 cup of cooked rice

½ cup of ground beef

Salt and Pepper

2 lemons

4 garlic cloves

½ cup of brown cloves

Preparation:

Spread out grape leaves

Mix cooked rice and raw ground beef, and salt + pepper. Form into balls.

Wrap meat balls in grape leaves. Use a casserole, pyrex or microwave dishes with cover.

Bake grape leaves in 350 degree oven with juice

Brush of lemons, crushed garlic and sugar