Ashkenazi Charoset, East Williamsburg Style

This is my East Williamsburg Charoset: a basic Ashkenazi mixture plumped out deliciously by handfuls of Trader Joes Omegar 3 fruit/seed/nut mix. I was making  charoset with my daughter, Leah, in her East Willimsburg kitchen, and realized, late in the game when I was already mixing chopped apples with cinnamon and the sun was getting ready to set: Aiiiii, we didn’t have any walnuts!  Happily, Trader Joes was right down Metropolitan towards Queens, but once I got there for the walnuts, yeah, I got waylaid by the mixture from TJ’s– so varied and delightful, full of rich nuts, crunchy seeds and sweet dried fruit. There was some sort of berry in the mix–cranberry? cherries? which gave the whole charoset a surprisingly tangy edge. I plan on including this rather elegant trail mix in place of walnuts next Pesach. (fyi: Trader Joes has not sponsored this post).

For those of you who have never been to a Seder, it is the ritual meal that narrates the flight to freedom of the Hebrew slaves, or, by the time we end the evening, ex-slaves.  The word itself means, in Hebrew, “order”:  and in a seder there is a special order to everything. Think of a tasting meal (of simple dishes) with symbolism: the parsley dipped into the salt water tears, the bread of affliction which had no time to rise, the bitterness of the herbs and the egg…..a universal symbol of springtime, the wholeness of the world.  Other holidays and festivals can have a seder as well, and its become popular in recent years: for instance, tu b’shevat, the birthday of the trees when Jews sample the first fruits, or Sukkot, tasting the fruits of Autumn. But most people associate a Seder with Pesach/Passover because the ritual meal IS Pesach: the meal consists of a narration, read from the Haggadah, a book that leads us through from to freedom, each step of the way symbolized by specific foods.

While Jews all over the world celebrate basically the same way, with basically the same foods, there are, of course, so many variations in both, depending on the community. One of my favourites is beating each other with green/spring onions, to symbolize the whips of Pharoah; its a Persian tradition and when my late brother married into a Persian family my daughter and I fell in love with doing this. For one thing it breaks the seder up a bit and lightens the mood because it is SO MUCH FUN.  You get to slap people around harmlessly, whack a swoosh of the delicate green leaves across the person next to you, smoosh against the shoulder of the person across the table, tickle against the ear of whoever you can stretch your arm to reach! By this time everyone should be laughing hysterically, and the room should smell fabulously  perfumed with onion!

We start when we are slaves. A Seder Plate welcomes us to the table with a small amount of each important ingredient for the course of the evening, with Charoset/Haroset/Harosses/Halek (or any number of different names depending on the community you have come from) having an important place in the ceremony. While it symbolizes a thing that oppressed us–the mortar we slaves were forced to build with–the mixture itself is utterly delicious:  a sweet mixture of fruit, nuts, spices and wine. It t is something completely different from anything else you’ll eat the rest of the year: is a confection? a fruit salad? yes, its all of these things, but it tastes remarkably, specifically, evocatively, of Pesach.

We end the meal spiritually with freedom, or rather our hopes and intentions of facilitating freedom. When we raise our glasses and proclaim: L’shana Tova B’Yerushalayim, next year in Jerusalem, we have eaten our way through this epic and universal story, and hopefully (a good reason to make a big batch) we have enough leftover charoset to enjoy throughout the rest of the festival, plopping it here and there as we like. Its lasts beautifully, really, for about two weeks but will be eaten up far more quickly.

Back to our recipe, this is basically an Ashkenazi charoset with the Eastern European flavours that our grandparents brought from Europe. We might have it chopped or sliced to a different consistency, we might use grape juice instead of wine, we might vary the ingredients a little bit. For instance, we always had celery in ours: i like the savoury, saline, edge that celery gives the fruit. You can leave it out if you like. Sephardi charoset/haroset/halik/etc has the same place in the seder but is far more varied and exotic with such ingredients as dates and orange flower water and cardomom. Next year I’m going to share some of my favourite Sephardi Charosets with you.

 

Ashkenazi Charoset, with Trail Mix

Serves 6 to 8

• 3 apples, cored but unpeeled, diced
• 1-2 sticks/ribs celery, finely diced (optional)
• About 150g/6 oz/ 1 1/2 cups omega three fruit/nut/seed mix or any very delicious trail mix, or 100g/1 cup walnut pieces (plus optional dried fruit such as cranberries, raisins,cherries)
• 5-6 tablespoons sweet red wine for Pesach (or any dry red wine, or red grape juice or other fruit juice)
• 1 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• A spoonful or two of sugar/honey, to taste

Combine the ingredients, mix well, and chill until ready to use.

 

Those of us who celebrate Pesach know that a good charoset means snacking on matzo spread with charoset throughout the festival. But its pretty great with all sorts of dishes: greek yogurt. smoked cold meats. leftover cold chicken, cheeses. Hot grain cereal if you are not observing Pesach. I think it might make a great sundae with ice cream, or a layered between spongecake and whipped cream , a Pesach/Passover spongecake of course.