By Melody Amsel-Arieli, Special to JTNews
Childhood holiday foods often hold the keys to our hearts. So it was for my elderly father. With a gleam in his eye, he suddenly recalled a candy-like Rosh Hashanah treat he had loved as a youth on New York’s Lower East Side: teiglach.
Back when, he said, grandmothers used to whip up traditional honey cakes to welcome the New Year, just as they do today. But many also painstakingly rolled, then boiled marble-sized bits of dough in tubs of honey to create this sweetest sweet of all.
Teiglach, which in Yiddish means “bits of dough,” hail from Eastern Europe. These sticky, honey-smothered balls can be coaxed into crowns, served in golden slabs, or piled into pyramids. But whichever their shape, teiglach make the perfect fress. Slicing them, which lends a crushing blow, is a no-no. Instead, aficionados pick this confection apart bit by bit, ushering each luscious morsel individually from hand to mouth. Soon everyone is licking their fingers and asking for more.
“Sweet and crispy,” recalled my father, who has not lost his taste for tradition.
Judy, the teiglach maven of Manhattan’s Wm. Greenberg Jr. Dessert Company, agrees. “Teiglachs should be sweet and crispy, not sweet and soggy. That’s why we’re relieved when Rosh Hashanah comes ‘late,’ as it does this year. Making teiglach in early September, when the weather may still be hot, is a recipe for culinary disaster.”
Just before Rosh Hashanah, Greenberg Desserts ships hundreds of festively wrapped teiglach across the country. On the West Coast, so does the Los Angeles Continental Kosher Bakery. That’s probably because most of today’s cooks, however tradition-minded, hesitate to tackle teiglach’s bubbling honey pots at home.
Teiglach recipes appear in an endless number of modern Jewish holiday cookbooks, proof that this gooey goody still tantalizes. For those who want to give it a try, a teiglach recipe adapted from Joan Nathan’s The Jewish Holiday Kitchen follows.
Dough:
8 medium eggs
2 half eggshells full of water
3 Tbs. vegetable oil
2 tsp. sugar
2 cups all-purpose flour (about)
1/2 cup walnuts
Syrup:
1-1/3 lb. dark honey
1-2/3 cups sugar
4-1/3 cups water
2 tsp. ginger
Optional: a bit of lemon or orange peel
Starting with the dough, beat the eggs well. Add water, oil, and sugar. Blend in the flour and knead well, using enough flour to form a soft, manageable dough.
Break off some dough about the size of a large walnut. On a floured board, roll out a coil to 1/2” diameter. Place a quarter of a walnut about 1/2” from the end, roll into a spiral, and set aside. Alternatively, roll into balls, or, using a larger amount of dough, cut into 4” slices.
Bring the honey to a boil in a heavy casserole. Add sugar, 3 cups of water, and 1 tsp. ginger. When the sugar has dissolved, drop in the teiglach, one by one. Bring to a boil again, cover, and simmer for 20 minutes without peeking. After 20 minutes, add the remaining ginger or bit of orange or lemon peel, cooking until the teiglach are golden and sound hollow inside when tapped. Add 1-1/3 cups cold water to the honey syrup, mix well, and remove with a slotted spoon.
Optional: roll in grated coconut or ground nuts. Decorate with toasted walnuts and/or maraschino cherries.
Makes about 50.
Melody Amsel-Arieli is the author of Between Galicia and Hungary: The Jews of Stropkov.