Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; all that night Adonay moved back the sea with a strong east wind to make dry ground, and the waters were divided. Then the children of Israel went through the sea on dry land, and the water served them as a wall on their right and on their left. (Exodus 14:21-22)

Seeds as walls to her right and to her left.

This post brought to you by the ongoing campaign to exploit my infant daughter for artistic purposes.

(My self-imposed goal for next week’s bread is to compose some intelligent commentary to put up in addition to a photograph. They told me babies were hard, and since every parent said the same thing I believed them. My advice to future parents: Believing it does not prepare you to live it.)

Shavua tov, and enjoy the game!

I expect to be unusually busy for a while. Thanks for understanding!

Normally those two loaves, which along with either wine or grape juice form the bare bones of a Shabbat dinner or lunch, are not so hard to come by in our home. This past Friday was different, being yet another early sunset winter Friday and one in which I was distracted by another project for part of the day. As it became clear that I was not going to have time to bake challah—my usual recipe usually takes around three hours, most of it devoted to rising and baking time—I decided not to worry too much about missing a chance to create a bread midrash for this week’s parasha and fell back on an old favorite recipe.

“Dear,” I said to Terri, “what would you say to beer bread for Shabbat lunch?”

She nodded. “That would be appropriate. Joseph and his brothers are still in Egypt this week, and beer was invented by ancient Egyptians.”

If you don’t know why I married this woman, you haven’t been paying attention.

My standby recipe for beer bread is a quick bread, meaning a bread that is chemically leavened (usually with baking powder or baking soda) rather than leavened with yeast. That means there’s no rising time, just a mix and a bake. I’m not sure where I first came across it, but I’ve been making it since college and  have it committed to memory by now. It’s incredibly easy to make, savory and slightly bitter without being unpleasant, and in case you were wondering, ultimately non-alcoholic.

Beer Bread, for when you want fresh-baked bread in an hour and a quarter.

• 13½ oz. all-purpose flour (Equivalent to three cups of sifted flour. Scooping and leveling will compact the flour and result in a dense, bricklike bread. If you don’t have a sifter, drop individual spoonfuls of flour into a one-cup measure, and when the measure is overflowing, run a straight edge across the top to level it without shaking the measure, since shaking will compact the flour. Trust me, baking is just one of those cases where a food scale is the easiest way to be consistent.)
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon table-grind salt (or 1½ teaspoon kosher salt)
• 1 tablespoon caraway seeds (optional)
• 12 oz. beer (one standard American bottle or can) at room temperature
• ¼ cup oil

1. Heat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit (190 Celsius). Grease and flour a loaf pan.
2. In a bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, salt and seeds (if using). Stir to combine.
3. Pour the beer and oil into the flour mixture. The beer will foam. Quickly stir the batter until it is more or less uniform (a lump or three won’t hurt anyone) and scrape the batter into the prepared loaf pan. Bake for an hour, turning once halfway through.
4. When the loaf is done, let it sit outside the oven for a few minutes and then transfer from the pan to a cooling rack. You can eat it immediately—it is delicious hot—but if you want any hope of slicing it without the whole thing falling apart, let it come down to room temperature first.

Notes: The type of beer you use will have a strong effect on the taste of the bread. For example, some people find that India pale ale produces an excessively bitter bread. I have read that stouts shouldn’t be used in this kind of beer bread, though I don’t know why. Anyone have a clue?

Here’s an excerpt:

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Joseph saw his brothers and recognized them, but pretended not to know them and spoke harshly to them. He said, “Where have you come from?” They said, “From the land of Cana’an, to buy food.” (Genesis 42:7)

In last week’s parasha, Joseph’s jealous brothers sold him into slavery and faked his death, showing their father Joseph’s bloody tunic as proof. Joseph was taken to Egypt, where his uncanny ability to interpret dreams brought him to the Pharaoh’s attention. Years later, a regional famine—a famine for which Egypt was prepared, thanks to Joseph’s advice—forces the brothers to travel from Cana’an to Egypt to secure food. If Joseph’s brothers have spoken of him at all between his sale and their journey to Egypt, the conversations are not recorded.

When the brothers reach the Egyptian capitol, they go to the court of Tzafenat Pa’neach, a powerful Egyptian official second only to the Pharaoh, and ask to buy food so that they can bring it back to Cana’an for their families and their aged father. They do not realize that Mr. Pa’neach, who dresses like an Egyptian and appears to speak only Egyptian, is an older version of the brother they sold years before. Joseph/Pa’neach recognizes his brothers immediately, but maintains his façade for the rest of the parasha.

The bread on the right is in disguise. All three are made from the same black-seeded dough.

Shabbat shalom!

Reblogged from Bible Belt Balabusta:

The classic Marshmallow Dreidel, with my mini version for older kids. Bump up the educatainment value with a food-safe marker and a guide to writing the 4 Hebrew letters (name of letter, what it stands for in Hebrew and English).  Bump it up even more and make an Israeli dreidel for contrast: in Israel they use a Pey instead of a Shin. See below.) Don’t you dare make these yourself and hand them out to kids.  The whole point of edible Jewish crafts is that the kids do the making.  You can be there, …

While we’re on the subject of food and Chanukka, I think I’m duty-bound to repost this. Enjoy!

1. Know your potatoes (assuming you’re making latkes out of potatoes). Waxy potatoes, also known as boiling potatoes, contain less starch and therefore don’t get as thick or bind to each other as well when fried. If you’re using these—and you might want to, because some of them are delicious—make sure you use a little extra egg and flour/matzo meal/whatever as binder. Starchy potatoes, also called baking potatoes, bind to themselves naturally when fried. Yukon golds also make excellent latkes without too much extra binder.
2. Alternate grating onions and potatoes, and mix the batter a little when you switch. When you grate a potato, you expose its internal starches to oxygen, which causes them to turn brown. (This is the same process that browns the slices of a cut apple.) The acid from onion juice slows down this process and makes for a nicer-looking latke. Grating all the potatoes and then the onion allows the reaction to get started quickly, while keeping the potato always in contact with some onion prevents this.
3. Drain the potatoes and onions once they’re grated. Many a cook has mixed up what seemed like the perfect latke batter, only to have it become watery and difficult to handle when the time comes to fry. (Frying very wet batter can also be dangerous, since lots of water dropped into hot oil causes spattering.) This happens because the vegetables continue to “bleed” watery liquid for a while after they’ve been grated. You can let them sit in a bowl for ten minutes and then tip it out, or even better, drain them for ten minutes in a colander and then squeeze out the excess.
4. Stir in the salt at the last minute if your circumstances allow. Salt leeches more moisture out of the vegetables and creates the same problem addressed in point 3.
5. Stir the batter between frying batches. No matter how diligent you are about steps 3 and 4, some liquid will always settle at the bottom of the bowl. Stirring from the bottom up redistributes it and keeps the batter moist, while not stirring results in a puddle at the bottom and a final batch of weird, splotchy latkes.
6. Keep the oil hot. Fried foods don’t have to be fatty, and the best way to keep them crispy and not soggy with oil is to make sure that the oil itself stays between 350 and 365 degrees Fahrenheit (177 to 185 Celsius). If you have a frying thermometer, use it. If not, drop a small test latke into the oil—enthusiastic sizzling should begin on contact, rather than sluggishly building up. Also, if you find your oil running low, do not add oil while there are latkes in the pan. This will cause the temperature to plunge and result in soggy, oily pancakes. Instead, finish the batch in the pan and then add more oil, giving it time to heat up before you start on the next round of latkes.
7. After frying, drain the latkes well. Some extra oil always follows a latke out of the pan, so place them on a towel-lined plate to dry. You can also drain them directly in a wire mesh strainer positioned over a bowl or the sink, which allows both sides to remain crisp rather than steaming the underside.

If you have any other advice for better latkes, please share! Chanukka sameach!

Israel loved Joseph above all his other sons—for he was the son of his old age—and made for him a striped tunic. (Genesis 37:3)

It was red and yellow and green and brown
And scarlet and black and ochre and peach
And ruby and olive and violet and fawn
And lilac and gold and chocolate and mauve
And cream and crimson and silver and rose
And azure and lemon and russet and grey
And purple and white and pink and orange
And red and yellow and green and brown and
Scarlet and black and ochre and peach
And ruby and olive and violet and fawn
And lilac and gold and chocolate and mauve
And cream and crimson and silver and rose
And azure and lemon and russet and grey
And purple and white and pink and orange
And blue (Andrew Lloyd Weber, “Joseph’s Coat”)

The passim in Joseph’s ketonet passim may have been strips of differently colored cloth. Other translators suggest that they were sleeves. Whatever the scholarship, this bread pretty much designed itself. The colors in this case are nigella seeds, white sesame seeds, paprika and turmeric.

Shavua tov!

Names have been omitted to protect the hungry—anyone who wants credit for something clever they wrote need merely say so.

“The only truly Jewish food is tsholnt-ḥamin-dafina in all its forms, since it was invented to fill a halakhic need.”

“Kosher for Passover desserts. Would anyone who’s not Jewish actually have reason to eat those?”

“As a Jewish convert who had a much more varied diet than most Americans (I grew up eating sushi way before it was popular, goat soup made with every bit of the goat that’s edible, etc.) I had never, ever heard of kugel before I ate at my now-husband’s parents’ house for the first time. It’s definitely become one of the foods that I most associate with the Ashkenazic Jewish culture.”

“Similar to the last poster (minus the goat soup bit), I had never previously heard of kugel or cholent. I also had never heard of lox (probably would have if I had grown up on the East Coast, however). While smoked salmon exists in many forms in many parts of the world, in the US I think it’s mostly a Jewish thing.”

“Latkes. Sweet wine. Bread with salt. Kasha varnishkes. Bread dipped in honey for the new year, or for Shabbes after a wedding. Parsley and eggs in salt water. Any kind of smoked fish, especially in the morning. Blintzes. Honey cake. Borscht with sour cream. Hot tea in a glass, served with a single sugar cube on the side. Any piece of candy that was hidden in my great-grandma’s pockets.”

“Well lookee here, a recipe for an old Jewish Passover staple using matza that’s completely treif.” (WARNING: The linked page contains video with sound. Best not to click if people around you think you’re working on something important. At very least, turn off your speakers.)

“Cranberry crisp as side dish rather than dessert (ok, maybe that’s a particularly seminary girl thing). Slow cooked meat and starch dishes (obviously), anything that has matzah instead of a standard chametz ingredient (lasagna, pizza, knishes). Knishes themselves for that matter, tzimmes (AFAIK), that bizarre raw broccoli, mayonnaise, red onion and craisin salad that I have never seen in the wild. (Editor’s note: I have no idea what this is. Will have to ask about it.) I’m afraid that my mom cooked way too varied a selection of food to be of too much help here. Most of my ethnic kosher food experiences are the kosher variants of other ethnicities.”

“The executive director of the synagogue where I work argues that there aren’t any Jewish foods anymore, unless you go back to Israel.”

“How about foods that the rest of the world eats in dairy form, but Jews have parevized (is that even a word?) in order to eat with/after meat meals. For example, I did a research paper on food for my Spanish class a few years back (we were supposed to visit a restaurant, but there were no kosher ones at the time with food from Spanish speaking countries), and I discovered that the Jewish version of flan differs from the regular version for this reason. Also, products like Stella D’oro cookies, which were kept pareve mostly for us Jews.”

“That should be a whole category on it’s own—you can combine “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Dairy” and “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Chametz,” as the two groups where one would think we would just survive without having to recreate the food everyone else is eating in (almost always) less appealing forms.”

“Not sure that gefilte fish is uniquely Jewish—I believe my wife was once served it as a traditional Lithuanian dish at a friend’s house.”

I’ll cap it off with an exchange between a married couple. One grew up in a Hasidic community; the other is not Jewish, but probably spends more hours per week in a synagogue than you do:

“That strange thing my co-workers do to brisket that involves ketchup.”

“Adafina; flam pletzele; sufganiyot; mohnkichel; That Apricot Chicken Everybody Makes That Surely Has A Name; gribenes; SHUT UP, WIFE, I LOVE GRAPE JELLY AND KETCHUP BRISKET.”

“THE GRAPE JELLY AND KETCHUP BRISKET IS WEIRD, OKAY? So is the apricot chicken. JELLIES ARE NOT MEANT TO GO ON MEATS. The end.”

This should be fun. As always, further insights are appreciated.

* It’s 1.5 in Roman numerals. What’s that you say? The Roman and Indo-Arabic numeral systems were developed hundreds of years and thousands of miles apart, and shouldn’t be confused? Oh well.

Um.

• Sound with distinct pitches? But what about non-pitched percussion? What about rap? And some sounds have distinct, music-like pitches but would never be considered music, except maybe by John Cage.
• How about rhythmic sound, then? But lots of music doesn’t have a distinct rhythm or meter, and “rhythmic sound” would include the sound of a jackhammer, which you probably don’t think of as music (unless you’re John Cage).
• Artistically manipulated sound? A talented stage actor reciting a monologue by Shakespeare is manipulating sound artistically, but we don’t call it music. (John Cage probably would have been more interested in the sound of an audience member sneezing at the onset of “Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once / That make ingrateful man!” [King Lear, Act III, Scene II].)

Now that I’m no longer eleven years old—and now that “musician” is one of the things I tell people who don’t know what a cantor is but want to know my profession in a single word—I’m better able to appreciate how hard it is to define things that surround us so completely that we rarely think about them. If you’ve always known what music is and assume your audience has as well, why bother to formulate a sentence, paragraph or book to tell anyone what it is? It can’t be made known because it’s already known!

Loyal readers may have noticed—but will be forgiven if they haven’t—that for a blog about food and Judaism, Kemach Torah has barely touched on the subject of Jewish food. That’s not an accident. I’ve avoided talking about “Jewish food” because I don’t know exactly what that is. Of course, I and most people I know recognize some foods as Jewish and others as non-Jewish, but we might differ on which and why. What’s the qualifying factor? For some it may be a matter of technical distinctions, especially with regard to what’s kosher and what ain’t, but for most of us it’s a gut thing. A roast beef sandwich with Swiss cheese, mayonnaise, lettuce and tomato is treyf because it contains both meat and dairy products, but the mayo is what really makes it non-Jewish fare. (Jews add mustard, thank you.) Lenny Bruce understood this, and assumed his audience did too:

Kool-Aid is goyish. Evaporated milk is goyish even if the Jews invented it. [Editor's note: I have found no indication that Gail Borden, the dairy farmer who invented evaporated milk, was Jewish.] Chocolate is Jewish and fudge is goyish. Fruit salad is Jewish. Lime Jello is goyish. Lime soda is very goyish.

All Drake’s Cakes are goyish. Pumpernickel is Jewish and, as you know, white bread is very goyish. Instant potatoes, goyish. Black cherry soda’s very Jewish, macaroons are very Jewish.

So what are the qualities that make food Jewish? Must it be eaten primarily by Jews? Does food have to be kosher in order to be Jewish, and is food that’s kosher inherently Jewish or not? Should food have been created by Jews to be considered Jewish? How long a history should a given product or recipe have within a Jewish community before it ceases to be a food that Jews happen to like and becomes, as it were, part of the tribe? I don’t know any hard and fast answers to these questions, but I plan to explore them over the next few weeks, bli neder.

(The “bli neder” comes into play because my dear wife is 35 weeks pregnant, and it has been pointed out to me recently that that the last time a woman in her family line stayed pregnant beyond 37 weeks … well, let’s just say Guadalcanal was a very interesting place around that time. Parents of newborns tell me that sleep deprivation and the needs of an infant make it hard to get much of anything done, and if they are joking then their timing is way off, because they seem to be utterly serious and completely exhausted. Anyway, thanks in advance for your patience!)