Jewish Holiday Baking for the Gentile Cook

When my fiancée asked for me to pick up a copy of A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking by Marcy Goldman I was a little surprised in her interest, but the book is very useful for a gentile baker.

It’s a little tricky to navigate the structure of the book if you aren’t trying to coordinate with Jewish holidays, but the recipes are wonderful and good for any time of year. The book contains many innovative uses for flour, eggs, honey, fruits and other traditional ingredients in Jewish cooking, like poppy seeds.

Our favourite recipe from this book is one of the simplest, the Melt-in-Your-Mouth Mun or Poppy Seed Cookies, which is a recipe for making a huge amount of crisp poppy seed tea biscuits. It uses very few ingredients and only takes about 40 minutes to make what seems like a huge amount of them. They are so simple, but they taste like the sort of cookie you would buy a big package of; crispy and sweet with a nice subtle flavour from the poppy seeds. The cookies are small so you can go through them quite quickly. They’re great to put out for guests or just to keep around the house to snack on.

Not sure whether 2009 counts as a throwback, but we're sharing a recipe from Goldman's book below, so you can have your own poppy seed cookies.

Melt-in-Your-Mouth Mun or Poppy Seed Cookies

Makes 6 to 7 dozen cookies

These light and thin, easy-to-roll cookies are a lovely way to break the fast.

3/4 cup vegetable oil

1 1/3 cups sugar

3 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Approximately 31/4 cups all-purpose flour

2 1/4 teaspoons baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/3 cup poppy seeds

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line 2 large baking sheets with parchment paper. In a medium-sized bowl, briskly whisk together the oil and sugar.

Vigorously whisk in the eggs, and then the vanilla, mixing until well blended. Fold in the flour, baking powder, salt, and poppy seeds.

Cover the dough with a tea towel and let it rest 5 to 10 minutes. Working with a third of the dough at a time, on a very well-floured board, roll it out as thin as possible, between 1/16 and 1/8 inch thick. Make sure your rolling pin is well dusted with flour—a heavy pin covered with a rolling pin stocking is ideal. Rolling between 2 sheets of parchment, the bottom sheet lightly floured, makes this easier. Cut into 2-inch rounds, transfer to the baking sheets, and bake until the tops are lightly golden, 12 to 15 minutes.

VARIATION: Lightly brush each cookie with vegetable oil and sprinkle with sugar before baking.