Hamantaschen Are Still Good

One year later

This newsletter needs some context so here we go: Since 2018, I’ve been a part time Hebrew School teacher and part of that work includes cooking with students, usually around a Jewish holiday. Last year around this time, I was preparing to teach a Hamantaschen class on Zoom and was researching some filling options. I found a very disappointing recipe (the headline was How to Make Hamantaschen Actually Good and the author was a non Jew who had attended a few bar mitzvahs) in Bon Appetit and tweeted about it (I also wrote about it here). It went viral and about a week later, it inspired an opinion column in the New York Times about wokeness gone too far (I don’t want to give it more clicks but the headline is Woke Me When It’s Over and you’ll find it by Googling). The column, in addition to mocking my concern over this, referred to me as “a woman” while every other person mentioned was identified by their profession. The column was a surprise to me—I found out about it when Delia texted me and it was absolutely horrible to wake up and discover it.

I’ve thought a lot about this incident in the past year and I wrote a much longer essay about the experience in Serving Up: Essays on food, identity and culture. You can preorder the book now.

The Jewish calendar is lunar, so Purim, the holiday that prompted this, is still a few weeks away. I’m once again teaching a Hamantaschen class and this year, I’ll get to bake them with my mom and my sister in person. Last year at this time, people weren’t yet fully vaccinated so we all observed this tradition separately. I’ve always been a Hamantaschen fan and growing up, we would make huge batches on every available kitchen surface. Then we’d walk and drive around the neighborhood, dropping off baskets for neighbors. If you’re baking them this year, please give my family’s recipe a try and tag me on Instagram if you do. It did very well in a Hamantaschen bakeoff my friend Adina organized last year.

The lighting in my old kitchen was rough! Excited to take better pictures soon

From a food media standpoint, I’m very disappointed the recipe is still live on Bon Appetit. The magazine has hired some great people in the past year and I’ve really enjoyed some recent stories. While changing the headline and updating the introduction was a good first step, the recipe built on these negative assumptions is still there. It’s a butter dough, which is not traditional for Hamantaschen due to Kosher laws (I don’t keep kosher but most Hamantaschen are parve). If the recipe’s author wants to suggest a butter dough, it better be a good one. The reviews for the recipe continue to be poor, with bakers complaining it fell apart and was hard to work with. The page has great SEO (when I found it, it was the third result on Google) which means lots of unsuspecting bakers will be disappointed this Purim. We hate to see it and they’ve had more than a year to change it.