The GeneaBloggers go a-caroling

Our fabulous friend footnoteMaven is at it again!

This time she created

GeneaBloggers

Gather ‘Round

THE TREE OF BLOG CAROLERS

Carols Old – Carols New

A Celebration of Christmas & Hanukkah

Listen!

Do You Hear What I Hear?

Visit the site, see and hear the Geneablogger’s Choir!

John Newmark of TransylvanianDutch and I covered some great Chanukah music (no matter how you spell it), from Tom Lehr’s Hanuka in Santa Monica to that great Sephardic Ladino tune Ocho Kandelikas.

‘Ashkefard’ Chanukah: Bimuelos, latkes

What’s an Ashkefard, readers might ask? It refers to someone of mixed Sephardic and Ashkenazi heritage. Our daughter with Persian and Sephardic-Belarus heritage is an Ashkefard, as am I. Many of us are entitled to use the term.

The best thing about being an Ashkefard is that holiday food is doubly delicious. So here are my recipes for Sephardic bimuelos (fried delights resembling doughnut holes) and Ashkenazi latkes (potato pancakes).

I meant to post this pre-Chanukah but was busy cooking. The best thing about this holiday is that there are eight days to try new recipes.

Bimuelos are little round balls resembling doughnut holes. They can be drizzled with an orange or lemon syrup, a rosewater-scented syrup, or honey. I like to serve the first batch rolled in cinnamon sugar.

Don’t make them too big, this recipe makes about 36 small ones, although some people like larger ones. I prefer the smaller as they cook faster, stay golden on the outside and cook properly inside. Cut open a few to make sure the inside is cooked. Regulate heat to make sure the bimuelos don’t brown too fast outside or leave the inside raw.

SCHELLY’S BIMUELOS

3 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
2 eggs, lightly beaten
3/4 cup warm milk
1/2 cup butter (very soft)
Oil for frying
Cinnamon sugar: 1/2 cup sugar with 1 teaspoon cinnamon

Put oil in a deep pan or a fryer and heat to 375F.

Measure flour in a bowl, stir in baking powder and salt, sift twice. In another large bowl, mix the eggs with warm milk and sugar. Add flour mix and the softened butter alternately. Mix with a wooden spoon or by hand. The dough will be soft.

On a floured board or tray, use a teaspoon to grab portions of the dough and roll between floured hands. Repeat making small balls until the dough is gone. Fry in batches until golden brown. Drain briefly on paper towel and, while still hot, roll in cinnamon sugar. Try to keep everyone away from the hot bimuelos until they’re all cooked – good luck on that one!

Bimuelos can also be served with honey or a syrup. The trick to all Sephardic and Middle Eastern pastries is this: hot foods get a very cold syrup, cold foods get a hot syrup. Thus make the syrup ahead of time and chill in the frig. The bimuelos can be served hot or cold. If you make them ahead of time, heat briefly in oven and drizzle with your favorite syrup.

Here’s a basic syrup recipe: Mix and boil together 2 cups sugar and one cup water. Reduce heat to low and simmer for 10-15 minutes or so until the syrup has thickened. Cool and add a tablespoon of lemon juice, orange juice or rosewater (use only 2 teaspoons of rosewater unless you are Persian!). Place bimuelos on serving tray and drizzle syrup over them.

I also keep thinking about placing a chocolate chip or two in the middle of each ball before frying. Wouldn’t that be a great surprise?

Latke-lovers are of two schools of thought concerning every ingredient, with peel or without, with pepper or without, baking or frying potatoes. I peel and don’t use pepper. Since we can’t get Yukon golds here in Israel, I use half frying and half baking potatoes – the texture is very nice.

SCHELLY’S LATKES

10 potatoes (5 frying, 5 baking)
4 smallish brown onions
4 eggs, lightly beaten
1 cup panko (Japanese crisp breadcrumbs)

Take a large bowl, fill it half-full with water, add several tablespoons of salt and mix well.

Using a box grater on the largest hole, shred peeled potatoes, add to the salted water. Mix and let sit for about 10-15 minutes. Drain potatoes in a strainer, reserve the water in another bowl and let it settle while shredding onions. Why save the water? You want to collect the white potato starch that settles at the bottom and add it to the shredded potatoes for improved texture. To the drained potatoes, add shredded onions, beaten eggs and mix well. Add panko, mix again. Let sit for awhile to make sure there isn’t too much excess liquid. If it seems too liquidy, add a few teaspoons of panko.

Notice that I don’t add extra salt to the latkes as the salt-water soak seems to add just the right amount. If people want more salt, they can add it, but this seems to be enough for almost everyone.

Heat about 1-inch of oil in each of two frying pans. I have one huge restaurant one and also use a smaller one. Take a plastic 1/3-cup measuring cup and pack in the mixture, dropping it into the pan, then flatten it with a spatula. This saves your hands from the goo and assures that each latke is about the same size. Make sure to mix the batter well each time. Fry until golden brown on the first side, flip and fry until golden brown on the second side. Drain on paper towel. The panko really helps latkes to crisp up. Serve according to your family tradition: sugar, sour cream, apple sauce, or naked from the pan!

Make these ahead of time – or freeze them on a flat tray and then store in zip bags or in a freezer box – and crisp in 375-400F oven for a few minutes until hot. This recipe makes about 3 dozen latkes.

Enjoy!

Ohio: A helping hand in 1933

Journalism professor Ted Gup’s heartwarming story about a family secret appeared in today’s New York Times.

In the weeks just before Christmas of 1933 — 75 years ago — a mysterious offer appeared in The Repository, the daily newspaper here. It was addressed to all who were suffering in that other winter of discontent known as the Great Depression. The bleakest of holiday seasons was upon them, and the offer promised modest relief to those willing to write in and speak of their struggles. In return, the donor, a “Mr. B. Virdot,” pledged to provide a check to the neediest to tide them over the holidays.

Not surprisingly, hundreds of letters for Mr. B. Virdot poured into general delivery in Canton — even though there was no person of that name in the city of 105,000. A week later, checks, most for as little as $5, started to arrive at homes around Canton. They were signed by “B. Virdot.”

The gift made The Repository’s front page on Dec. 18, 1933. The headline read: “Man Who Felt Depression’s Sting to Help 75 Unfortunate Families: Anonymous Giver, Known Only as ‘B. Virdot,’ Posts $750 to Spread Christmas Cheer.” The story said the faceless donor was “a Canton man who was toppled from a large fortune to practically nothing” but who had returned to prosperity and now wanted to give a Christmas present to “75 deserving fellow townsmen.” The gifts were to go to men and women who might otherwise “hesitate to knock at charity’s door for aid.”

Since then, B. Virdot’s identity had remained a mystery. Who would have guessed he was a Romanian Jewish immigrant who had arrived in Pittsburgh as a teen in 1902?

That is, until last summer, when Gup’s mother gave him an old black suitcase from her attic. Inside were letters from December 1933, 150 canceled checks signed by B. Virdot and a bankbook.

Gup’s mother Virginia had always known – but had never told her son – that the donor was her father, Samuel J. Stone, whose nom de plume was formed of the names of daughters Barbara, Virginia and Dorothy. She didn’t know what was in the suitcase.

The piece covers Gup’s discovery of those letters from all over Canton, Ohio, from across the spectrum, from painters to salesmen to bricklayers to former executives.

One man wrote: “For one like me who for a lifetime has earned a fine living, charity by force of distressed circumstances is an abomination and a headache. However, your offer carries with it a spirit so far removed from those who offer help for their own glorification, you remove so much of the sting and pain of forced charity that I venture to tell you my story.”

The writer, once a prominent businessman, was now 65 and destitute, his life insurance policy cashed in and gone, his furniture “mortgaged,” his clothes threadbare, his hope of paying the electric and gas bills pinned to the intervention of his children.

Women and children also wrote letters. Gup quotes from those and from thank-you letters from written by people who received the checks. He includes many of the letter images in the story.

In 1902, Samuel J. Stone was 15 when he and his family fled Romania, where they had been persecuted and stripped of the right to work because they were Jews. Living in Pittsburgh’s immigrant ghetto, his father hid Stone’s shoes so he couldn’t go to school; he and his siblings were forced to roll cigars.

My grandfather later worked on a barge and in a coal mine, swabbed out dirty soda bottles until the acid ate at his fingers and was even duped into being a strike breaker, an episode that left him bloodied by nightsticks. He had been robbed at night and swindled in daylight. Midlife, he had been driven to the brink of bankruptcy, almost losing his clothing store and his home.

By the time the Depression hit, he had worked his way out of poverty, owning a small chain of clothing stores and living in comfort. But his good fortune carried with it a weight when so many around him had so little.

Evidence of other generosity was also in the old suitcase, such as information on hundreds of wool overcoats he sent to British soldiers the year before the US entered WWII. He put unsigned handwritten notes in the pockets urging them to keep up their spirits.

Stone died at 93, in 1981, in a car he was driving himself to the office. He never went public with his acts of charity.

Read the complete story at the link above.