When Hanukkah and Christmas Collide, Holiday Foods Go Along for the Ride

When holidays collide, a food mash-up is inevitable. Even if you call it “fusion cooking, the trend of combining culinary traditions and ingredients from different cultures has spread to a lot of restaurant menus and to home cooking as well. It’s a great idea for Chrismukkah 2024.

One of our first encounters with a food mash-up was back in 2013 at Cheu Noodle Bar in Philadelphia. We anticipated Asian noodles and chicken lettuce wraps, but we were surprised to see brisket ramen on the menu! Among the noodles, brisket and chili paste we found a giant matzo ball floating in the soup. We learned that Ben Puchowitz, the chef and co-owner, was fond of his Bubbe’s cooking, so he created this Jewish-Korean mash-up in her honor.

We liked the concept. So in 2013, when Hanukkah fell on Thanksgiving, we made sweet potato latkes and our stuffing shared the table with a Hanukkah menorah. 

We’ve never cooked a Christmas feast. Never served a holiday ham. We’ve only gazed upon a chocolate Yule log and imagined how it would measure up to Aunt Ruth’s Jewish apple cake. But with Chrismukkah on the horizon, we put our heads together and came up with eight ways to mash-up Hanukkah favorites with a taste of Christmas. We discovered some interesting options beyond the traditional Ashkenazi recipes.

On the first night: With a nod to the Food Network’s Great Christmas Cookie challenge, you could bling up your Hanukkah sugar cookies. Add some silver luster dust to your Jewish stars and be a bit more intentional with the “shin” icing on the dreidel cookies. If you catch the pre-holiday stock up at the supermarket, you can find fun new products to decorate your Hanukkah cookies.

On the second night: Sufganiyot are pillowy donuts that are eaten in Israel – and now in the United States and lots of other countries around the world – during Hanukkah. They’re round, yeasted and deep-fried, usually filled with jam or jelly, and dusted with powdered sugar or frosting.

In Israel, many bakeries go all out and offer a wide variety of holiday donuts. We’ve never been to Israel in December. Never had a chance to sample any of these from Roladin, an Israeli bakery chain. But we can dream. . .  

Here in Philadelphia, award-winning chef Michael Solomonov cooks up sufganiyot for his K’Far Cafe and for Federal Doughnuts, which has multiple locations (they’re also available at some Whole Foods.) Flavors vary, but halvah lemon pistachio and cookies and cream were some of the recent combos. 

If you can’t find fancy sufganiyot, remember that the classic Hanukkah flavor is raspberry and looks suspiciously like a regular jelly donut. When you serve the platter of jelly doughnuts, make a big sign that says “Hanukkah Sufganiyot.” You’ll get credit for starting a new, delicious tradition!  

On the third night: Take a break from all the carbs. In a tribute to the Christmas Feast of the Seven Fishes, forego the calamari and the shrimp and instead have yourself a merry little fish spread with lox, whitefish salad, sable, sturgeon and herring. Don’t forget the cream cheese and bagels!

On the fourth night: In between games of dreidel, gather the kids together and build a gingerbread house. We might give it a try this year. We love playing with our food! If you get a kit, you don’t even have to bake the cookies! Make it a Jewish home by putting a little sugar menorah ­– instead of a wreath ­– in a front window. Manischewitz even sells ready-to-go Hanukkah house kits.

If you can’t find the Hanukkah House kit, don’t worry. You can easily adapt a gingerbread house – with blue sprinkles and white frosting snow. Use tubes of cake decorating gel to draw an eight-branched menorah in the window or on the front door. You can buy glitter and sugar Hanukkah cake toppers in the baking aisle of Michael’s or Joann’s and, of course, you can find them on Amazon. Use them to decorate your gingerbread house. Stick them on with a  dab of royal blue icing. 

On the fifth night: Divinity Candy is a classic fudge-like Christmas treat that’s popular in the South. It’s made from egg whites, corn syrup and sugar; dried fruits and chopped nuts are often added in. We probably won’t make Divinity Candy, but we are thinking about making burfi, a fudge-like candy that Jews in Northern India eat at Hanukkah. Burfi is made with milk powder, sugar, saffron and pistachios, and this recipe promises that you can make it in 10 minutes!  

On the sixth night: Do you like an after-dinner drink? Make mulled wine. And don’t hesitate to use that leftover bottle of  sweet Manischewitz or Mogen David. Some people say that using a fortified red wine is the secret to a great mulled wine – and both brands are fruity and sweet. Here’s a recipe for mulled wine that actually calls for Manischewitz! –    

On the seventh night: When you get tired of latkes and your kitchen smells like a McDonald’s parking lot from all the cooking oil, try a lighter Hanukkah treat from Italy – a cassola, a sweet ricotta pancake. The cassola pancake is a centuries-old Roman Jewish dish that was prepared for Shavuot, Hanukkah and other holidays. Some people consider it to be the original latke. Potatoes are an Ashkenazi thing.

There are many cassola variations, including cinnamon, chocolate, and citrus-flavored. The Sephardic Spice Girls, who have a popular Jewish cooking website, wrote about one they tasted in the Roman Ghetto that featured raisins soaked in rum. It was light, fluffy and creamy, reminiscent of a custardy flan. 

It’s ironic that the cassola has been adopted by Rome’s Roman Catholic community as a traditional Christmas dessert, because Sephardic Jews have been eating it for thousands of years. Cassola is perfect for Hanukkah: Eating it simultaneously fulfills the traditional custom to enjoy both dairy and fried food at this holiday.

Here’s a recipe from the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle if you want to try making your own.. 

On the eighth night: Ready, set, go – out for Chinese food! It’s comforting, and it’s familiar – and it’s not just because our families used to go out for Chinese food on Sunday night!

Think about it: Kreplach and wontons are both stuffed pockets of dough; the former are filled with beef or chicken, the latter with pork or shrimp. And in both cuisines, there’s lots of chicken broth, loads of garlic and onions, and the vegetables are cooked until you no longer need to chew them.

Happy Hanukkah (and Merry Christmas) to our families, friends and readers!

The next time Hanukkah collides with Christmas will be 2027. It will be here before we know it! You have a few years to come up with some great food/drink mash-up ideas. Please share them with us in the comments!

 

 

Happy Holidays! Whatever You’re Celebrating, Whenever You’re Celebrating

You can always count on July 4th to happen on . . . well, July 4th. There are no fireworks the night of the 2nd or holiday cookouts on July 12. 

Not so with the Jewish holidays, which migrate on the calendar. Every year you’re sure to hear a Jewish friend say something like, “Passover is so early this year!” or “I’m surprised that Rosh Hashanah isn’t until after the kids go back to school.” 

So while we always know where to find July 4th, Hanukkah is hard to pin down.

That’s why this year we were surprised when we noticed that Hanukkah begins on the evening of December 25. This means that our friends who celebrate Christmas will have opened all their presents and eaten all the sparkly sugar cookies earlier that day. They will have already watched “It’s a Wonderful Life” and tried out the new toys. We’ll just be getting started. 

If you want the technical, scientific explanation of why the Jewish holidays wander, read our “Calendar Confusion” sidebar below.

In 2013, Hanukkah was so early that it collided with Thanksgiving. That year, we lit the candles on Wednesday night, November 27! It was big Jewish news because it was the first time in thousands of years that this had happened. And it won’t happen again until 2070, which means we’ll probably not be serving latkes with pumpkin pie and playing dreidel with Miles Standish again in our lifetimes. 

To be honest, we can’t always blame the calendar for the holiday confusion. We’re so accustomed to the holidays moving around that sometimes we move them ourselves to a more convenient date. We would never slide Yom Kippur to a more suitable time, but Hanukkah? That’s a different story.

For many years, we moved Hanukkah to coincide with our kids’ winter break. It’s not much fun staying up late eating latkes and playing with your new toys when you have to wake up for school the next day. We would light candles on the correct calendar days but maybe save the cousins’ Hanukkah party for the weekend.

When the kids were in college, this continued. We lit the candles and ate latkes when they came home. They were too grown up to hunt for the afikomen on Passover, but it was fun to play dreidel together and watch their expressions as they opened their presents.

Some of our kids live out of town, so we’ve also been known to move other Jewish holidays. When Joyce’s son, Ben, came in from Oklahoma in October to attend an East Coast wedding, the family celebrated Rosh Hashanah on the weekend following the holiday.

Because it was the only Jewish holiday on the horizon that the Eisenbergs would be able to be together, they decided it would be a Jewish holiday mashup. They needed to get it all in! Along with roast chicken, there were requests for matzah ball soup and potato latkes. Samantha wanted chopped liver. Ted needed gefilte fish. Holidays mean serious desserts – so Joyce got cheesecake, tiramisu and a berry pie from the bakery!

When Joyce opened the drawer where she keeps her Jewish holiday treasures, she couldn’t resist. “As long as I’m getting out the challah cover, why not include the hand-painted dreidel, the matzah cover that Ben painted in preschool 34 years ago, and the wind-up frog that hops while we recite the 10 plagues? Who’s to say there weren’t frogs hopping around among the Maccabees?”

Of course we love the old decorations. Ellen remembers hunting the aisles of local stores with her kids, looking past the nutcrackers and Santas, searching for any blue and white holiday item – besides candles – or anything six-pointed with tinsel or sparkles to decorate the dining room and perk up the old stuff pulled from the Hanukkah storage bin.  This year was a different story.

At Target, Ellen spotted four different hanukkiyot – all correct!

 

In fact, Target has a mother lode of Jewish holiday decorations. There are Hanukkah-themed plushies, including an applesauce topped latke, and one with sour cream. There’s an LED menorah lighted plaque and really cute kitchen items including oven mitts, aprons, mugs and placemats (including color-your-own ones for kids). They even have wooden toy kitchen playsets featuring latkes, gelt and sufganiyot.

As someone who invested in Hanukkah pajamas for the extended family a few years ago, Ellen might have to make another Target run soon!

So buckle up! The holiday season is just getting started. We have a lot to celebrate. But we have one last question: If Hanukkah is December 25, when, exactly, will we go out for Chinese food?

 

 

Calendar Confusion: Why Do the Jewish Holidays Move Around?

Jewish holidays have a fixed date on the Jewish calendar – e.g. Hanukkah is always the 25th of Kislev – but when these dates are transferred to the Gregorian calendar – the civil calendar that hangs on your kitchen wall – they don’t sit still.

should we keep all the old calendars because we like the pictures?

That’s because the Jewish and Gregorian calendars are radically different. The Jewish calendar is a lunar one: The new Hebrew month always coincides with the new moon. The Gregorian calendar is a solar one based on the time it takes the earth to revolve around the sun. Both of these calendars sacrifice accuracy for ease. Though it takes 365-1/4 days for the earth to revolve around the sun, the civil calendar has 365 days. To adjust for this, a leap day is added in February once every four years.

The Jewish calendar has 12 months, but there are actually 12.4 lunar months in a year. So, a leap month – Adar II – is added to the calendar seven times in every 19 years. This ensures that Passover (also known as Hag ha-Aviv or the Spring Festival) falls in the spring. It also helps keep the other holidays in check.

No wonder everyone gets farmisht about the holidays!

 

 

Guest Blog: The Best Bagels of All Time

A note from The Word Mavens:

Last April, we posted a blog titled: “An Ode to the Beautiful Bagel.” We wrote about the history of the bagel and its hole. We reminisced about the old school bagels we missed and commented on the hipster bagels we’ve sampled. 

We were delighted this week to get an email from Rhonda Hoffman, a fellow writer and longtime friend of The Word Mavens. Rhonda recently came across our bagel blog and was inspired to share a lovely story about her favorite bagels of all time – the ones from Lipkin’s Bakery. We’re sharing it with you below.

We’ve written about Lipkin’s frequently. We were fans of their knishes and rugelach – and evidently they had many bagel fans, too. We too, mourn the loss of Lipkin’s. There are very few old-school bakeries that remain. In fact, Kaplan’s, at Third and Popular Streets in Northern Liberties, is the only one that we can think of that remains. 

By Rhonda Hoffman, used with permission

Let me clue you in on a little secret: The best bagels of ALL TIME were made at Lipkin’s Bakery on Castor Avenue in the heart of Northeast Philadelphia. Unfortunately, after more than 50 years of operating at the same location, this bagel bonanza shuttered its door (and ovens) in 2020. We’ve been bagel bereft ever since.

For years, it was my Sunday morning ritual to make the 10-minute trek from our home to Lipkin’s to pick up a dozen bagels. The bagels were seemingly the size of frisbees.

They were usually evenly divided between sesame seeds, poppy seeds, and “everything” bagels. At first to my chagrin, but later to my delight, an occasional garlic or onion bagel would sometimes slip into my order. 

Because they were hot from the oven, the bagels were gingerly placed into a brown bag to retain texture and flavor. On the short trip home, I would occasionally tap and stroke the closed brown bag and feel the heat rise as my glands started to salivate. 

Back at home, after we each relished a bagel shmeered with our favorite cream cheese spread, I’d leave four out on the counter in the brown bag. I’d then cut a half-dozen in half and transfer these remaining gems to the enclosed plastic bag.

I’d seal it with the mandatory green tie. The bakery lady (and yes, they were ALWAYS ladies), never failed to enclose the plastic bag and tie. 

I unwillingly relinquished these bagels to the freezer for later-in-the-week consumption. They usually never lasted the whole week, and before I knew it I was ready for my next Sunday morning bagel run. 

Because word spread quickly and this “Sunday Special” bagel-buying frenzy became so popular, you had to call in your order in advance and pay for the dozen bagels ($6.00/dozen) prior to your in-person pick-up. (Incidentally, the same bagels sold for $9/dozen during the week). 

Joyce and Ellen, in your never-ending search, I hope that one day you uncover the perfect bagel. 

A generic bagel photo from we don’t know where! Unfortunately we never thought to take a picture of Lipkin’s Bagels back in the day.