Hidden Sweetness

I was dramatically shaped by my aunts and grandmother because they convinced me there was always a cookie available.
–Newt Gingrich

The general definition of cookie – 'a small flat or slightly raised cake' – is inadequate and even misleading, given the fact that America's favorite dessert has assumed so many incarnations, so many sizes, and shapes and flavors.

–Martha Stewart

Today, me will live in the moment, unless it is unpleasant. In which case, me will eat a cookie.
–Cookie Monster

While I am an admitted Purim Pooper, there is one custom associated with the holiday that I do adhere to and (almost) enjoy: 

Hamantashen (aka hamantaschen; homentashn; homentaschan; humentashen; המן־טאַשן; or [Hebrew] Oznei-Haman ).

Hamentashen are traditionally eaten on (and before and after) Purim for a variety of reasons, one of which is that just as the sweetness and flavor of hamentashen are not outwardly obvious but are hidden in layers of dough, the Miracles and Majesty of God are not obvious in the Purim Story, but hidden under layers of intrigue and plot.  

When I was a kid, back in the Old Country, two Sundays before Purim, my mother, may her memory be a blessing, would break out her hand-operated grinder, her rolling pin, and about 10 kilos of flour and begin her yearly task of making hamentashen. 

It was an all-day project, the result of which was hundreds of hamentashen by the end of the day. 

Sundays in the HolyLand are just another workday, and not Baking Day as it was in the Old Country, but I still manage to make enough hamentashen to go around. It takes me a few evenings because it is a fiddly project, and I don't normally do fiddly, but for hamentashen, I make the exception. 

My mother used her grinder (which she inherited from her mother) to grind the fillings for the cookies. She never trusted me to grind the ingredients, as she figured I would grind my fingers off. She was probably right. 

Back in the Old Country, at least in the last century, there were only two possible options for hamentashen fillings that my mother made: poppyseed, which she would grind into a paste and add honey or something – I don't actually know because I never ate the poppyseed hamentashen – and prune, which she would grind into a paste adding raisins and jam to the mix. That one, I DID eat. 

The dough that was made for hamentashen was the same dough my mother used for her infamous 'roly poly', which was a baked roll filled with sugar, cinnamon, sometimes raisins, and sometimes Turkish Delight. I do not care for Turkish Delight. In fact, I did not care that much for roly poly; that was ok, it was mostly made for company and I was usually spared. (In fact, I was usually told to stay away from the roly poly, and stop picking out the raisins for heaven's sake)

(I just Googled 'roly poly' to see if it is a known baked good or just something my mother invented, and discovered that roly poly is, in fact, "An isopod crustacean of the family Armadillidiidae, also known as pill bugs". But I digress)

Today, I use a food processor to make both the same roly poly dough and any filling I might want. Of course, living in a different country forces me to adapt to different ways. Flour has a different texture here, so the amounts differ. And back then, in the cold of the Old Country, the only fruit juices available were apple and orange. The roly poly dough calls for a quarter cup of orange juice, but in a pinch, apple juice could be used. Here, in the Land of More Than Plenty, there are 27 different varieties of fruit juice available. This year, I used mango juice because that's what I had in the cupboard, but I could have easily used pear or cactus fruit or melon juice. As for the filling, mostly I simply buy it, because I'm that lazy. I use pie filling - blueberry, apple, or cherry. I, also, due to demands from the younger, wilder generation, fill the cookies with butterscotch spread and, of course, the ubiquitous Israeli chocolate spread.  

These latter hamentashen are kept under lock and key with strict orders from the children not to serve them to guests or add them to mishloach manot.  The key is kept safely in one of the kids' bedrooms to which I am not allowed to enter under penalty of having to clean it up.  

I do still make the prune filling, unique in Israel, where the majority of fillings are poppyseed (bleh) or date (meh - since making my life in Israel, I have added humus, tehina, olives, avocadoes, 14 different kinds of eggplant dishes, small amounts of spicy foods, shwarma, pomegranates, and exploding chocolate to my diet. But not dates. But hey.). 

My mother would roll out the dough and cut circles using a cleaned glass from a yahrzeit (memorial) candle. Indeed, as was common in many homes at the time, we had a whole set of yahrzeit glasses, washed out and used when the other glasses were in the dishwasher. It was the biggest glass my mother owned, and perfect for making hamentashen circles. 

  

In Israel, yahrzeit candles are usually in tin holders, and decidedly not conducive to baking. Also, it always seemed so Old Country to use a yahrzeit glass to cut circles in dough! Also, this is the 21st century! There are better and more modern options out there. 

I use a coffee jar. 

Here's the thing: in all the years that I have been making Israeli hamentashen, never ONCE has the coffee jar fallen off the table as I was rolling out the dough and smashed into a thousand pieces on the tiled floor. 

Purim miracles are real, people. 

While I was never allowed to grind poppyseeds (a skill I haven't, in fact, ever felt I needed but lacked), I did learn how to fold circles into triangles and became quite proficient at creating the proper shapes. 

My mother, as mentioned above, made two kinds of hamentashen. It was essential that the two flavors could be differentiated in the baked cookies because some of us did not care for one of the fillings. Therefore, one kind was baked normally, and the other kind were placed, once assembled, upside down onto the baking sheet so that the ridges from folding into triangles were smoothed out. It was, therefore, easy to tell the difference between the two—one had ridges and did not.

I, however, use far more than just two fillings. Piffle!!! There have been years when I've made six (!) different kinds of fillings (all of them from store-bought containers that were surprisingly difficult to open, but hey, SIX!). I would separate the different kinds of baked hamentashen into different containers, but I didn't ever have to label the containers or even bake the hamentashen upside down. It was quite simple to differentiate between the various fillings, because my hamentashen, unlike my mother's perfectly formed confections, tend to explode all over the place, and the filling, ofttimes, becomes the coating. 

But hey. 

My mother, as I said, made seemingly hundreds of hamentashen every year, enough to last until Passover, four weeks later - at least. One memorable year, I remember pulling out a couple of (prune-filled) hamentashen from my lunch bag at school, the first week of June. "It's ok," I told my jeering friends, "we sold them along with the whiskey for Pesach". 

I don't make as many hamentashen as my mother did, and I give many away to the kids and others. I do, however, make too many, and there is always the mad dash to finish them up before Pesach. 

It's a hard job, but somebody's gotta do it.