TASTE
For Jewish cooks, kugel's a true culinary chameleon
| • | Fillet that fish |
By Kathleen Purvis
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
| |||
 |
|
||
Passover involves asking questions, especially the Seder ones that start with "Why is this night different from all other nights?"
So let's start with a question:
How do you decide what's a kugel when a kugel can be almost anything?
In Jewish food, kugels are as common as pickles in a deli. Look through any Jewish cookbook and you'll find potato kugels and noodle kugels, fruit kugels and vegetable kugels, sweet kugels and peppery kugels, even sweet- potato kugels and pecan kugels.
Susan Jacobs, director of education at Temple Beth El, says, "A kugel is a pudding or a casserole. Now, if you ask what goes in a kugel, you'd get a million answers."
Deborah Hirsch, a bakery owner who belongs to Temple Israel, spent several minutes trying to explain the whole kugel thing:
"If you keep kosher — and of course, I do — there are two kinds. There are dairy, which have milk, or there is parve, with no dairy. Parve can be eaten with anything except dairy, but primarily, parve is eaten with meat.
"Then you get to Passover and you can't have any flour. So what we tend to eat are potato kugels.
"And a lot of these kugels depended on where your family came from. If your family came from Russia, you were going to eat potato kugel. If your family came from the Mediterranean, where they had pasta, you'd eat noodle kugel.
"As a rule, if it's meat — and we count chicken as a meat — then you're going to serve a parve kugel. But there's always an exception," she finishes, laughing. "Because we're Jewish."
OK, let's try a simpler question: Who makes the best kugel?
That one actually gets some agreement: "My grandmother." "My mother."
And "Mary, the cook at Temple Israel."
"I defer to Mary," says Jacobs, one of several people who had high praise for Mary Reel's kugel. "And you can tell her I said so."
Reel, 63, has been cooking at the Charlotte, N.C., area temple since 1982, before it moved from Dilworth to Shalom Park on Providence Road.
Reel is African-American, a native of Newberry, S.C., who lived in Chicago as a girl and moved to Charlotte when she was a teenager.
She was working as a cook, helping at events, when she was asked to cook for a bar mitzvah. It went so well, she ended up getting a job as cook at the temple — even though she knew nothing about Judaism.
"I got books and learned," she says. "The rabbi taught me how to separate meat from dairy and how to kashrut (ritually clean) the kitchen."
She learned to shop carefully, always looking for the "OU" (Orthodox Union) that marks kosher products.
"People see me studying the packages and wonder, 'Why is she taking so long?' "
And when people gave her their recipes, she would tweak them carefully, adding things to make them her own while keeping within the dietary laws.
"There's a lot of things you can make Jewish," she says. "And I never knew anything about it when I started here."
Of course, she had to learn to make good kugel. For a large bar mitzvah, she might need 12 or 14 pans of it.
She started out with an old favorite, the basic noodle and pineapple kugel, bound with sour cream and topped with bread crumbs. But she quickly dropped the pineapple.
"I thought it made it too juicy and it didn't hold together."
She learned another trick, too. She bakes pans of kugel, wraps them really well and freezes them. Then she cuts the kugels into squares and reheats them before serving.
"They don't crumble up so bad when you try to slice it," she says.
And that's really the kugel story: It's very forgiving food. It's adaptable, you can make it with inexpensive ingredients, and you can make it in advance. You can even bake it ahead and keep it warm for a long time.
For Jewish women who obeyed the laws against working after sundown on the Sabbath, kugel was handy stuff.
"My grandmother, who was Orthodox, had a gas range," Susan Jacobs remembers. "And she had a metal sheet she put on the burners before sundown on Friday."
Jacobs' grandmother put everything on the sheet, from tea kettle to kugel, and it all kept warm until they got back from temple.
"If you are religious, you can keep things warm. Once it's heated, you can't reheat it, but you can keep it warm.
"Or we'd eat it cold, straight from the refrigerator."
There's one more mystery about kugel: Even when it's sweet, it's always served as a side dish, never a dessert.
It sounds odd, says Hirsch, but sweet kugel tastes really good with roasted meats.
"It's very confusing," she says, laughing. "It takes Jews their whole life to sort this mess out."
MARY REEL'S NOODLE KUGEL
From Mary Reel of Temple Israel. Noodle kugels aren't kosher for Passover, so for the temple's big Seder, she makes potato kugel from a mix.
Topping:
Cook the noodles according to package directions and drain. Grease a 13-by-9-inch oven-safe baking dish. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Combine the cooked noodles, eggs, granulated sugar, brown sugar, sour cream, butter and vanilla. Spread in the baking dish.
Combine the bread crumbs with the cinnamon and brown sugar. Add the melted butter and toss to coat crumbs. Sprinkle all over the top of the kugel.
Bake 45 minutes to 1 hour, until brown on top and bubbling around the sides. Remove from oven and let cool. Wrap well with plastic wrap and aluminum foil, then freeze.
Remove from freezer and thaw at room temperature about 30 minutes, until soft enough to cut. Cut into squares and place on a baking sheet. Warm in a 350-degree oven (or 300 degrees in a convection oven) for about 30 minutes until headed through.
Makes about 8 servings.
DEBORAH HIRSCH'S PARVE KUGEL
From Deborah Hirsch of Charlotte, a member of Temple Israel. This version is handed down from her great-grandmother. Many older kugels were cooked in round containers.
Cook egg noodles in boiling water for 10 minutes, then drain. Combine with parve margarine, eggs, cinnamon and sugar.
Sprinkle the bottom of a ring mold generously with brown sugar and walnuts. Fill mold with the noodle mixture.
Bake at 375 degrees for 1 hour. Let stand for a few minutes, then unmold onto a serving platter. Slice in wedges and serve as a side dish with a meat dish.
SUSAN JACOBS' PASSOVER APPLE KUGEL
From Susan Jacobs, director of education for Temple Beth-El.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Break matzoh into pieces and soak in hot water for 1 to 2 minutes, until soft. Drain, but do not squeeze. Add eggs, sugar, oil and cinnamon and mix, but don't break up the matzoh pieces. Fold in apples, raisins and walnuts.
Pour into a greased casserole. Cover and bake for 45 minutes.
PICK A KUGEL
The variations are endless, but these are the most common. (And yes — your mother's was the best.)
Noodle. Usually wide, flat egg noodles, although the traditional Jerusalem kugel is made with thin spaghetti and spiced with pepper. Most American versions include sour cream, so they can't be served with a meat. Most versions are a little sweet.
Potato. Common in families that originated in Eastern Europe, and often served at Passover because noodles aren't kosher for Passover. The potatoes usually are grated but also can be sliced or cooked and mashed. Potato kugel usually is parve, so it can be served with a meat.
Matzoh farfel. Matzoh that is broken up and used as a noodle substitute for Passover.
Vegetable. Usually grated or pureed vegetables, anything from spinach to carrot to cauliflower.
Fruit. Usually very sweet and may contain nuts. The fruit might be anything from apricots to fruit cocktail. Fruit kugels often have a noodle base, or may be similar to bread pudding.
Variations: Wherever Jews settled, they adapted local ingredients into kugels. In her book "Matzo Ball Gumbo," author Marcie Cohen Ferris documents the use of traditional Southern ingredients, such as sweet potatoes or pecans, into kugel. The recipes were often created by black cooks who worked for Jewish families.
