Welcome to your own personal Jewish Deli! This is the ultimate in comfort food and it works all year round so grab a cardigan and get ready to get cozy.
These are some of the flavors that make a place like Zingerman’s Deli famous. We use the same meal to make our own matzo balls and the knishes are made in the Deli’s kitchen. The rugelach is from Zingerman’s Bakehouse and they’re pretty darn good at making traditional Jewish pastries (like rugelach) taste better than what most folks grew up with. Sorry, bubbe.
In This Installment
Matzo Ball Soup Kit
Potato Knish
Apricot Rugelach
Matzo Ball Soup Kit
As I’m sure you know, Zingerman’s is a Jewish Deli founded by a couple of Jewish guys forty-odd years ago. And like any Jewish Deli worth its schmaltz, we serve some darn good matzo ball soup. It’s amazing stuff. If you’re sick, you get some matzo ball soup from Zingerman’s, you eat it, you take a nap, and instantly you’re healthy again.
Seriously. Everyone here in Ann Arbor knows that.
So you should take it as a big deal to know that Zingerman’s Deli is now using this very matzo meal from the Matzo Project in Brooklyn, NY to make their matzo balls.
A famous deli has changed the most important ingredient in their most traditional soup to this very matzo. Like I said: this is a big deal.
Not only does it make delicious matzo balls and soup, but the packaging is fun and hip and unique (sorta like us). A great gift for any matzo ball lover.
Potato Knish from Zingerman’s Deli
(from the writings of Ari Weinzweig)
Writer Laura Silver says, “You can find a good knish, you just have to know where to look.” If you live around Ann Arbor, or if you’re up for having them shipped in, the ZCoB is a good place to start your search. Silver, author of Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food, has her family roots in the Polish town of Knyszyn, in the northeastern part of the country near what’s now the border with Lithuania. Jews were a prominent presence in the community, dating back from about 1600 on through until the Holocaust, and Knyszyn is considered by many to be the historical home of the knish. Wherever they originated, knishes have long been part of Eastern European Jewish comfort food, especially for those with less financial means. Mashed potatoes (or it could also be kasha, which is buckwheat) stuffed into a pocket of dough which was then fried or baked. Knishes, then and now, offered an inexpensive and filling way to eat, especially at this time of year when fresh vegetables were not to be found in that part of the world. The Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem, who was born in Pereyaslav in central Ukraine 164 years ago last week, wrote knishes into his famous story “Tevye the Dairyman,” (which 100 years later became the Broadway show film “Fiddler on the Roof”). Imagining a feast he’d like to go to, Tevye declares, “We’ll start right in on the knishes.”
Growing up as I did in Chicago and not New York, I have no memory of my mother bringing home knishes. I experienced them first I think when I went to the famous Yonah Schimmel’s on the Lower East Side in New York, where they’ve been making knishes in much the same style since 1890. Schimmel came here committed to teaching spirituality, but there was no money in that so his wife started making knishes. It’s said that it was the first knishery in the country. We could, though, consider the knish a spiritual eating experience!
Apricot Rugelach
(from the writings of Ari Weinzweig)
In the way things weave together in my mind, the study of Ukrainian culture and history has given me a higher appreciation for apricots than I’ve ever had. What has always existed on the culinary periphery of my mind is now front and center. In the same way that any food we care about likely has intellectual and emotional roots which we re-access every time we eat it, when I see, think about, or eat an apricot I now think of Ukraine.
I’ve been enjoying these apricot rugelach out of hand because they taste so darned good! If you don’t know rugelach, Amy and Frank wrote in their cookbook, “Zingerman’s Bakehouse,”
“Rugelach evolved the Eastern European Jewish cookie called kipfel. In the early 1950s, the name “rugelach” appeared, and now it has taken over. The word seems to come from rug (Slavic for “horn”) and lakh (a diminutive plural), thus “little horns.” … Rugelach are the most popular and well-known Jewish cookie in the United States and are definitely the most popular Jewish cookie we make at the bakery. This version … has a delicate and flaky dough (two-thirds of the dough is fat—butter and cream) encasing special fillings, sprinkled with sugar, and baked until golden brown.“
It’s just a wondeful crispy, flaky, cream cheese pastry, rolled around a sweet filling of apricot preserves. A perfect dessert.