For members of Brooklyn’s Arepan Jewish community, the smaller the meat- and cheese-filled pastry, the better the cook.
Hanukkah, which begins this year on the night of Dec. 7, is equally proud of its unique tradition of using not one, but two candles to light the menorah, which is a great way to light the menorah. It represents both the miracle and the reception he received from the Syrian people after Hanukkah. Escape from the Inquisition – like eating a small pastry filled with meat and cheese.
Rachael Harary Gindi, 92, from this close-knit Bensonhurst-based community, remembers her mother gathering with friends to make sambusek on holidays. She said Guindy especially liked the cheese-filled version that her family traditionally prepared on Sunday nights when they ate dairy products.
“I couldn’t order it from anywhere,” she said during a recent sambusek-making session in her Century City apartment overlooking Los Angeles. Therefore, the only way to obtain them was to make them yourself.
In 1941, Guindy’s family moved to New Orleans. “It was pure culture shock for me,” she said. “Before that, I was eating everything at home. I didn’t even know what fries were.”
Still, her family maintained a connection to the past, traveling every summer to Bradley Beach, New Jersey, where the community gathered. At the age of 16, she met her husband Jack there. They married and moved to Los Angeles the following year.
Since she was young when she married, Guindi learned to cook from watching her mother-in-law, who was born in Aleppo.
“She was an old-school cook,” Guindy said. “I was still a child when I got married and helped my girlfriend’s mother, but I didn’t really study.”
Dishes passed down by my mother-in-law included kibbeh hamde, a sour-salt soup with potatoes, carrots, and small meatballs, and eja patet, potato pancakes seasoned with allspice. (Even if they did not learn from her mother, many Syrian-Jewish cooks of the mid-20th century followed the recipes of Grace Sasson, another member of the Brooklyn Arepin Jewish community. People write questions to her in her published book.)
Sambousek, which means “triangle” in Persian, was popular in the Middle Ages from Andalusia, Spain, to India.
Food historian Nawal Nasrallah believes that sambusek is one of the dishes that came east to India in the 10th century. According to Poopa Dwek’s epic The Flavors of Aleppo, the Legendary Cuisine of the Syrian Jews, the 13th century Aleppan cookbook al-Usra Illa al-Habib fi Wassuf al-Tayyibat. Four recipes are also published in Wa Al Teeb.
Years later, cheese sambouchek remains Guindy’s dairy staple, even during Hanukkah, but she has made some changes. Miller’s Muenster cheese (the only kosher cheese available outside of processed American production) has been replaced with shredded mozzarella and kashkaval. When they hit the kosher market. About 50 years ago, she began using only wheat flour in her dough, first out of necessity (she couldn’t find traditional semolina) and then out of preference.
Although there are more modern ways to make these flaky pastries, Guindy still uses a commemorative yahrzeit glass to cut the dough and pinch it closed between her thumb and forefinger, resembling a scallop shell. Groove the edges. And of course they are small, only a few bites each.
Cheese sambouchek, of course, was one of the first recipes Guindy taught Mercedes Borda, her housekeeper of 39 years, so she keeps it in the freezer or shares it with Guindy’s children. It was just something to bake to feed the eager appetites of my grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Gindi was in the kitchen watching Borda pick at the dough, but when he deviated from the habit of pressing the tines of a fork into the dough, a technique he learned to make empanadas in his native Bolivia, Gindi walked away. . She took over her chair.
The traditions of the Syrian community are difficult to disappear.