Poppy Seed

These delicate cookies are made with lots of juice and zest for a delightful tang; poppy seeds add crunch. (Poppy seeds can turn rancid quickly, so purchase them from a store with a high turnover and keep them in the freezer.)

A platter of fresh fruit served with this lemony dip is a beautiful way to kick off brunch. This fruit salad can also be made into fruit kebobs for a different appearance. Just cut slightly bigger chunks and skewer the fruit onto bamboo skewers. You can prepare the fruit and the dip early and have this all ready when guests arrive. When you make the dip, mince the onion very, very finely or purée it, if you like, and be sure to use a neutral oil, such as canola or corn oil. I find that the onion adds a surprising savory flavor, but it’s not at all overpowering.

A buttery soft frosting blankets this tall and sprightly cake, rich with eggs and dotted with lemon zest and poppy seeds throughout. An impressive and showy dessert for lemon lovers, this can be made a day in advance. It’s a nice end-of-brunch finale.

The unexpected crunch of poppy seeds in these very pretty, delicate cookie cups is the perfect foil for any homemade ice cream or a fruity sorbet.

After years of carefully studying dessert habits, I’ve begun to refine my theory that there are two types of people—those who like lemon desserts and those who like chocolate. I’ve observed that there’s a subspecies that likes desserts with a crunch, a group that includes me. I’m a big fan of seeds, and I like to add them to these jam-filled cookies to put them squarely in the crunchy camp. Or should I say “roundly,” since they are, indeed, round. But feel free to use any cookie cutters you have—round, square, oval, or even heart-shaped.

This is an outstanding loaf of bread and a great way to showcase your talents as an allergen-free baker. I have chosen seeds that I know can be found free of cross-contamination risk with other allergens (see Resources, page 177), but feel free to substitute.

This fabulous low-fat teacake is a favorite with kids and grown-ups alike. My sons like it for breakfast with a glass of rice milk, I prefer it in the afternoon with a nice cup of tea, and my husband eats his with a scoop of Vanilla Rice Dream for dessert. Make it a day in advance so the flavors meld.

The idea for this unique flavor combination came from our friends over at Kim and Jake’s Cakes, a fabulous bakery here in Boulder, Colorado. For a finishing touch, top with Cream Cheese Frosting (page 95), or leave them plain and serve alongside eggs and fruit salad for a delightfully wholesome, yet elegant brunch.

Moist and slightly crumbly, these scones team especially well with soups made of root vegetables—potatoes, parsnips, and the like.

When I have the urge to bake bread on a weekend and want something not quite so time-consuming as French bread, I often make this loaf. It is a healthy bread with a good texture and makes particularly delicious sandwiches. It is also great toasted for breakfast.

I admit that the first time a customer requested hamentaschen I had to go to the local kosher bakery to see what the person was talking about. But then I recognized them immediately and I quickly fell in love with every variety of light pastry stuffed with jam. Use any preserve or jam in the center that you like, but I’ve included a recipe for my favorite blackberry filling. You can sub in a different berry without trouble, with the exception of raspberries, which tend to be very watery and don’t, for the most part, thicken up all that well.

Miss Moina Michael was born in 1869 in Good Hope, Georgia. She was educated at Lucy Cobb Institute, Georgia State Teachers College, and Columbia University in New York City, quite an accomplishment for a woman of her times. She went on to work as a professor at the University of Georgia. When World War One broke out she left her teaching position to volunteer in the war effort. When the war was over Miss Moina returned to the University of Georgia, where she taught continuing education classes for disabled servicemen. She conceived a fundraising idea to help the veterans: selling small silk poppies inspired by John McCrae’s memorial poem “In Flanders Fields.” (“In Flanders fields the poppies blow/Between the crosses row on row.”) Miss Moina from then on wore a red poppy to bring attention to the cause of disabled veterans. By 1921 the American Legion had adopted her red poppy as a symbol of remembrance for fallen soldiers. To me this delicious cake, decorated with red poppies, is as fitting for a patriotic celebration as anything red, white, and blue. Memorial Day is the perfect occasion to serve these poppy seed petits fours.

Lemon can be a baker’s best friend or her worst enemy. Often it tastes less like fresh-squeezed lemonade and more like a 15-cent lollipop. Achieving the perfect balance of lemon flavor in this teacake was a long and arduous journey; fresh lemon juice toys with the acidity in the batter, causing it to rise and fall unpredictably, while the rind on its own has a mousy presence at best. I tried everything from the yellow squeeze bottles of sugar-pumped citric acid to preserved lemons to lemon oil—everything short of boiled-down Lemonheads. Eventually I found that if you grate lemon rind into the batter with a generous helping of a high-quality lemon extract (I prefer Frontier’s product), you end up with a uniform, easy-to-manage batter that maximizes the lemon flavor while downplaying its domineering nature. Add the subtle nuttiness and earthy texture of poppy seeds, and you’ve stumbled onto a marriage unequaled since Luke and Laura’s.

Unlike many other poppy seed dressings, the one used in this fresh vegetable salad is sweet and sour.

As satisfying to me as a big, chewy, still-hot everything bagel schmeared with lots of cream cheese, but these have better crunch and way less carbs!

As a child, I love the holiday of Purim, the time when my mother would make hamantashen, filled with apricot jam or dried prune fillings. As a young adult, when I was living in Jerusalem, I discovered a whole new world of hamantashen fillings, and the magic of the shalach manot, the gift baskets stuffed with fruits and cookies. Traditionally, these were made to use up the year’s flour before the beginning of Passover as well as to make gift offerings. Strangely enough, hamantashen are little known in France, except among Jews coming from eastern European backgrounds. The North African Jews don’t make them, nor do the Alsatian Jews, who fry doughnuts for Purim (see following recipe). French children who do eat hamantashen like a filling of Nutella, the hazelnut-chocolate spread. You can go that route, or opt for the more traditional apricot preserves, prune jam, or the filling of poppy seeds, fruit, and nuts that I’ve included here.

On a recent visit to the Marais, I stopped in at Florence Finkelsztajn’s Traiteur Delicatessen, as I always do. The quarter has two Finkelsztajn delicatessens, one trimmed in yellow (Florence’s ex-husband’s) and one in blue (Florence’s—now renamed Kahn). According to Gilles Pudlowski, the gastronomic critic of Polish Jewish origin who writes the popular Pudlo restaurant guides, Florence’s store is the best place to satisfy a nostalgic craving for eastern European cooking. In addition to Central European Yiddish specialties, like herring, chopped liver, and pastrami, Florence also sells Pudlo, baked in the back of the shop. I have made her recipe, which she gave me a few years ago, and I can assure you it is delicious. Pletzl, short for Bialystoker tsibele pletzl, refers to a circular eastern European flat onion bread, often studded with poppy seeds, that came from the city of Bialystok, Poland. The bread is known in America in a smaller version as the bialy. Try it as a snack hot from the oven, or make a “big pletzl sandwich,” as Florence does. Her fillings vary as much as the different ethnicities of Jews living in Paris today: Alsatian pickelfleisch (corned beef), Romanian pastrami, Russian eggplant caviar (see page 34), North African roasted peppers, and French tomato and lettuce.

“Look at that beautiful brioche,” I overheard a guest saying at a Bat Mitzvah in Geneva. The brioche was the glistening round challah made by Nicole Garai, the rabbi’s wife. During the service at the hidden Quai du Seujet Synagogue, located near the Rhône River, Nicole helps her husband by escorting assigned readers to the bima (platform). The Garais, French Jews, came to Switzerland to start this synagogue in the 1980s. Nicole told me that she bakes challah for people of whom she is fond, like her congregant, Juliette Laurent, braiding it in a round to signify the circle of life for Rosh Hodesh (the first of the month); she also makes it for the new year, and for Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. I especially liked the way she decorated the challah, by first liberally sprinkling a thick band of sesame seeds, then poppy seeds all over the top of the bread. Another trick she uses is to brush the bread twice: once at the beginning of the second rise, after the bread is braided, and again just before she pops it into a cold oven. The procedure of turning on the heat after the bread is in the oven must date back a long time, at least to the beginning of home wood ovens.