I JUST love the Rosh Hashanah table. To me, it is brimming with abundance, blessing and bounty.
Every Jewish holiday is rich with food symbolism, and every holiday has its taste. Almost like a spiritual manifestation, each holiday has its flavors.
Sukkot and Simchat Torah are all about the filled foods like cabbage and peppers.
Chanukah tastes like freshly fried potato latkes and tiny little cinnamon and sugar rolled doughnuts.
Tu bShevat tastes like dried and fresh fruits, especially the seven fruits of the land of Israel, plus any other variety.
Purim tastes like flaky triangle shaped and jam filled hamantaschen cookies.
Pesach deep red wine, crisp, paper thin and breakable round handmade matzah, as well as so many other flourless treats and confections.
Shavuot cheese blintzes, cheese cake or cheese babka and coffee.
Tisha bAv and Yom Kippur, now here is a Jewish flavor these taste like hunger, but also two satisfying pre and post meals bracket each of these days.
Then there is Rosh Hashanah, when the food itself is almost a form of prayer. Yes, on Rosh Hashanah we have culinary prayers expressed as a taste of things to come as omens, wishes and hopes for the coming new year.
The food symbols most famous are the coiled round challah instead of the usual Sabbath braided challah symbolizing the circle of life as well as the sense of wholeness of the new year upon us. Visit the IJN blog for Rosh Hashanah recipes
And the apple dipped in honey. This for its sweetness, reminding us how sweet life can be, and in hoping for such a year ahead.
IN my home, after the traditional chicken soup and matzah balls, the Rosh Hashanah evening meals are a buffet of all these symbolic foods.
Beyond little tastings at the beginning as symbolic hopes for the year, my mother created recipes for each of these foods, where these ingredients play center stage in a complete dish.
In cooking for this holiday, it is the years debut of the heavier- than- summer food, like those aromatic and warm autumn spices, such as ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg.
Apparently, this is an old Jerusalem custom to create recipes from the symbolic foods (this is the Sephardic tradition as well).
When I was little it was the distinguished, sixth-generation Jerusalem Rabbanit Heisler of our neighborhood who taught us this. (Us meaning my mother. I was just a child then.) And so it is in my parents home: grilled trout, sauteed leek salad, roasted beet salad, zucchini or spinach latkes, butternut squash and cranberries, citrus and date salad, broiled whole marinated carrots, black eyed peas with red peppers and a lemon Dijon vinaigrette, zucchini tea bread, pomegranate garnishes, plum tortes, sticky upside down apple cake and super high honey cakes and so much more. What a feast.
ALTHOUGH I have heard mumblings about the tradition of eating these symbolic foods being paganish or silly I have a great affection for these foods as the moorings of the Rosh Hashanah table.
I have tried to carry this tradition on when I have hosted Rosh Hashanah meals myself. Especially the tradition of having each of these symbolic foods star in their own recipe (although my mother has veered from the traditional Rosh Hashanah culinary repertoire a bit by incorporating savory dishes along with the sweet). Then again, with my sweet tooth, I have gone and veered to the sweet sugar extreme and, following the idea of my friend Mimi, piled little colorful taffys in the wine glass at each table setting.
Some new symbolic foods I have incorporated are dishes with hearts of palm for the verse from Psalms, purify our hearts to serve you with integrity; sweet potato tempura or any other sweet potato dish for the sweetness of it; meat, basar in Hebrew playing with the root of the word, b.s.r, meaning news, that we may be visited with good news; poultry, in Hebrew pronounced oaf having the double meaning of chicken and flying, so may our enemies fly away. You can really have fun with this tradition and, following in the spirit of the rabbis from Talmudic times, you can add foods that are meaningful to you personally.
BUT you know what I love the most? Three of the simanim or symbolic foods, on their own.
The apple or, if you have a persimmon on hand for the Shehechiyanu blessing over new fruits is fun and playful to cut horizontally. The seeds of the fruit form a star shape. And on a night when there is so much symbolism there must be something special about nature creating this starry eyed wonder inside a fruit, right?
Then, what about those incredible madjool dates? Like a Moses basket or carriage, you fit little treats inside the cleft of this huge plump and crinkly skinned brown fruit. It is so luscious and sweet, its sticky sweetness like honey, even a little caramelish. Now here is a serious omen for a sweet new year, for they are so very addictive!
Last but certainly not least: the grand pomegranate.
Can you believe it? A crowned fruit? Prying open a pomegranate, ah, but its one of the pleasures of this world.
Not only is it gorgeous and deep red on the outside, with its sturdy, leathery skin, molded by the subtle ridges of inner sections and chambers that create slight depressions between little crests of the red skin. But hiding and packed so tightly beneath all that beauty are shiny, translucent, crimson-hued gems.
You can either open the pomegranate artistically, preserving its natural shape by cutting two circles around the crown that open and reveal the sections of the seeds, like a heart, cached in chambers, swathed by the thinnest most delicate pale yellow membranes.
Or, to get all those beauties out at once, just cut the pomegranate in half and bang the heck out of it by beating the skin with a wooden spatula.
Be prepared for stained pink fingers and lots of squirting pomegranate juice (I have ruined more shirts than I care to remember).
Of course, you could always just bite into those sweet-tart clusters, letting the juice burst straight out in your mouth and just swallow the seeds.
Whatever you do, these sensual and ornamental scarlet fruits (whose delicate shape alternated with golden bells in adorning the hem of the High Priests garment), is one fabulous Rosh Hashanah treat!
So as we all sit down and around the colorful and meaningful Rosh Hashanah table, maybe just talking, or studying a teaching together from tractate Rosh Hashanah or an idea from the liturgy, perhaps singing together the table is permeated by both the seriousness of the day and the wonderfully light sense of renewal this time brings.
Let us re-commit to be the best versions of ourselves that we can be this year of 5770.
Shabbat shalom and shana tova u-metuka to you and all of the House of Israel!
