September 22, 2010

While most people equate Sukkot with autumn vegetables, I picture the holiday as a tea party. Among Jews who build sukkahs, the evening meal is the most popular time to gather inside these modern-day harvest huts.

Because temperatures often dip at night, I much prefer spending afternoon hours inside a sukkah with a favorite book. As sunlight dapples its pages, I enjoy nibbling cookies and sipping a cup of tea.

Held at the end of the growing season, Sukkot began in ancient Israel as a harvest festival. Just before the crops were gathered, Jews erected huts adjacent to the edges of their fields and lived inside them for a week. In Hebrew, one of these dwellings was called a sukkah, and sukkot evolved into the plural form of this word. Today, the holiday is observed for eight days.

Even in a world where food is gathered in supermarkets, many Jews still build sukkahs in their backyards or attach them to one side of their homes. Sometimes they share a communal sukkah constructed at their synagogues.

A contemporary sukkah is a quickly assembled shed made from wood or other materials. It has a lattice-work roof that supports greenery. This allows sunshine and moonlight to filter inside. Its walls are lined with dangling fall fruits and vegetables whose counterparts are cooked into recipes consumed during the holiday.
While people no longer live inside their sukkahs, it is customary, weather permitting, to eat as many meals as possible inside the huts.

Since the gap between lunch and dinner falls during the best part of an autumn day, I suggest throwing a Sunday afternoon tea party during Sukkot. It’s a convenient time for those who attend school or go to work. In many parts of the country, the temperature is likely to be more cooperative than at night.

My favorite part of social gatherings revolves around dessert. There’s nothing better than a generous portion of pastry, preferably homemade.

During my childhood, I not only loved sweets, but the gooier and more chocolate-laden the better. Over time I’ve gravitated to desserts typical of Sukkot celebrations — those composed of baked fruits.

Although flaky and delicious, Sukkot desserts usually don’t garner much attention. Perhaps that’s because they often overlap with the pastries that were served two weeks earlier on Rosh Hashanah. Apple cakes, apple pies and apple strudel are popular pastries at both holidays.

Sukkot desserts, however, are a distinct genre in Jewish cuisine. Traditional holiday sweets are made with fall fruits such as pears, plums and late-season berries.

Holiday pastries are studded as well with dried fruits, nuts and seasonal spices such as cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and cardamom. Fruits that are abundant in seeds — notably pomegranates — also are popular in Sukkot baking. Their plentiful seeds symbolize fertility and hopes for a bountiful harvest.

Another group of dessert recipes popular at Sukkot are pastries that call for an etrog, a citrus fruit with a heady lemony scent. Known in English as a citron, an etrog is one of the four species that Jews wave in each of the four directions of the globe during Sukkot.

The other three species are contained in a lulav, which is made of three myrtle twigs, two willow twigs and a palm frond. Together, all four represent God’s dominion over Creation.

Observant Jews often go on a quest for the perfect etrog, one with unblemished skin and graceful proportions. In America, etrogs can be difficult to find, unless you scout for them in neighborhoods where observant Jews live or order them in advance from companies such as the Esrog Headquarters at (800) 550-7230.

Because of the etrog’s role in Sukkot ritual, Orthodox and Conservative Jews usually don’t cook with them until after Sukkot ends. While honoring the etrog, many traditional Sukkot pastry recipes call for lemon juice and zest.

As an outdoor hut, the sukkah inspires the most informal baked goods. Lemon bundt cakes, applesauce cakes, apple tortes, plum and raspberry crisps, pear and apple strudels, pumpkin breads, spice cakes, walnut squares and lemon pound cakes are popular Sukkot desserts.

I suggest serving these confections with coffee, tea, milk or club soda. But for a festive flair, I much prefer the garnet hue of mulled pomegranate juice.

What better way to celebrate Sukkot’s agrarian past than with a buffet of seasonal pastries beckoning under an open-air roof?

The following recipes were developed by Linda Morel.

APPLE PIEWITH FILO DOUGH CRUST
(Dairy)

For those who are afraid to attempt pie crust dough, this pie’s flaky crust is easy to finesse.

4 baking apples, such as Gala, Pink Lady or Cortland
1 teaspoon lemon juice
2 teaspoons sugar
2 teaspoons flour
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
Dash salt
8 tablespoons unsalted butter
12 sheets packaged filo dough, defrosted

Peel and core apples, cut into wedges, then cut wedges into thin slices about 1/8 inch thick. Place slices into a large bowl and add the next seven ingredients. With a wooden spoon, gently stir apples until all ingredients are well incorporated. Cover with plastic wrap and reserve at room temperature.

In a small saucepan over low heat, melt butter.

Grease a 10-inch deep-dish pie pan with a small amount of additional butter; set aside.

To assemble pie:

Place the sheets of defrosted filo dough on a 12-by-16-inch sheet of parchment paper, cover with plastic wrap, then cover the plastic wrap with a clean, damp kitchen towel.

Lift 1 sheet of filo dough and place it on a second 12-by-16-inch piece of parchment paper. Re-cover the stack of filo dough with the plastic wrap and towel each time you remove a sheet of dough.

Using a soft-bristled basting brush, spread some of the melted butter over the surface of the first sheet of filo dough. Using the instructions above, remove another sheet of filo dough and place it over the buttered filo dough. Brush the second sheet with butter. When you’ve piled up and buttered 4 pieces of filo dough, gently lift the pile off the parchment and place it inside the pie pan.

Because the filo dough will extend beyond the edge of the pie pan, drape it evenly on both sides. This first pile of filo dough will not cover the entire bottom of the pan.

Repeat this procedure, brushing with butter each time, until you’ve made a second pile of 4 sheets of filo dough. Lift this pile off the parchment paper and place it at right angles to the first pile of sheets inside the pie pan.

Repeat this procedure until you’ve made a third pile of 4 sheets of filo dough. Lift this pile off the parchment paper and place it on a diagonal to the other 2 piles of filo inside the pie pan. You will have covered the entire surface of the pie pan.

Spoon the apple mixture evenly inside the pie pan. Fold over onto the apples the filo dough that’s draped beyond the pie pan. (The folded dough will not cover the entire surface of the apples.) Brush the folded dough surface generously with melted butter.

Bake in preheated 350 F oven for 50 minutes or until filo dough is lightly browned and apples are cooked through. Cool slightly before slicing. Serve with vanilla ice cream, if desired.

Makes 8 servings.

Each fall after the High Holy Days have passed, the Jewish people move from comfortable homes into impermanent huts in backyards, driveways and on balconies for the festival of Sukkot. By eating and living in these fragile shelters, we train ourselves to temporarily subordinate our gashmiut (materialism) to the value of ruchaniut (spirituality).

To be sure, most of Jewish tradition does not promote an ascetic ideal. Rather, we hope that removing ourselves from our customary comforts for eight days will help us, when we return to our normal lives, to have a heightened ethical and spiritual sensitivity about consumption and to act with greater integrity toward our world.

In addition to living for eight days mostly at the mercy of the elements, Sukkot presents opportunities to connect with and reinforce a sense of guardianship over the natural world. In taking up the lulav and etrog, we are reminded of our duty to safeguard nature with its many blessings.

We learn from the talmudic tale of Choni (“the Circle-Maker”) the importance of protecting our world for our descendants. One day, Choni happened upon an old man plant-ing a carob tree. Curious, Choni asked the man how long it would take for the tree to bear fruit. When the man replied that it would take 70 years, Choni reproached him: “Silly old man, do you really think you’ll live to see its fruit?” The old man answered, “I found this world planted with carob trees; as my parents planted for me, so I will plant for my children.”

In our lifetime, food production, distribution and consumption have changed radically in ways that will inevitably affect future generations. While what we eat was once produced at home or by small, local farms, today it is largely produced by massive industrial farms often located thousands of miles away from consumers. Agribusiness, with its toxic pesticides, sewage runoff and monocropping, as well as rampant maltreatment of workers and animals, has a profound and irreversible impact on our world. According to the United Nations, one-fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock pollution; if you count deforestation and every step from seed to landfill, food and agriculture account for as much as one-third of greenhouse gas emissions.

American meat intake has soared to unprecedented levels. Jean Mayer, a Harvard nutritionist, claims that 60 million hungry individuals could be fed if people would reduce their meat intake by just 10 percent. The amount of food consumed by 200 million Americans could feed over 1 billion people in developing countries.

These global issues can be addressed not only during Sukkot, but every time we eat: When one says a blessing over food, the goal is to cultivate a spiritual consciousness of the invisible factors that brought that food to our plates; that it came from our Creator, was prepared in a ritually fitting manner and isn’t environmentally or morally damaging. The blessing is the affirmation that we have investigated what this food is, where it came from, and that it is fully fit for consumption.

Furthermore, one must contrast the affluence that enables us to have regular meals in the sukkah with the poverty of those who live in food deserts and cannot meet their basic food needs. Fifty million Americans, including 17 million children, are “food insecure,” meaning they do not have regular access to food. We may be experiencing an obesity epidemic, but many of those overweight people are also malnourished because of a lack of access to healthy food.

Over the past few years, Jews have become disillusioned with elements in the kosher industry’s maltreatment of workers and animals, and deleterious environmental impact — as evidenced particularly by the Agriprocessors and Flaum scandals, among others. How can we reverse these trends?

We sit in a sukkah to remind ourselves that we, too, are wanderers, like our ancestors who lived in huts as they traveled in the desert. We are short-term visitors in this world, charged with the great task of leaving the world more whole and less broken than we received it.

When the myriad values in the rich Jewish tradition are embraced fully, not only kashrut is observed, but also a respect for human dignity, the sentience of animals and the upkeep of our planet. In a globalized age, Jews must be more aware of the impact we have as consumers in the marketplace, as well as of the conditions where our food is produced.

Today, our votes as consumers may matter even more than our political votes, as corporations have overtaken the nation-states. Of the hundred largest economies in the world, 51 are corporations and only 49 are nation-states. The hundred largest corporations now control around 20 percent of the global foreign assets. The products we own speak volumes about our values.

Perhaps Rabbi Yisrael Salantar, the founder of Mussar, put it best: “Another person’s physical concerns are my spiritual concerns.” Let us take this to heart in the coming weeks. As we welcome in our great ancestors, the ushpizin, let us recall their great ethical message.

Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz is senior Jewish educator at UCLA Hillel, founder and president of Uri L’Tzedek, and a fifth-year doctoral candidate in moral psychology and epistemology at Columbia University.