Hello, honey. This is the time of year when honey shines our apples, sweetens our cakes, and slicks our lips and tongues. Straightforward talisman of a sweet year to come,honey appears and reappears in the course of High Holiday meals.
We will eat our honey tossed with rounds of carrots — the carrots resembling coins to symbolize prosperity, the honey sweetness. It’s a kind of Jewish take on Chinese Double Happiness.
We will eat honey spilled over fried bits of dough and nuts in teglach. (In Italy, they fry the dough in olive oil and load it with hazelnuts and lemon rind. Those Italians….)
We will eat lekach, or honey cake. Simple Ashkenazi cousin to the elegant pain d’epices, it will be, depending on the baker, either moist and fragrant or dry and tough, the pastry equivalent of over cooked brisket. German Jewish records as far back as 1200 tell of yeshiva bochers bringing honey cakes to their teachers at the start of a school year.
And, of course, we will suck the honey that oozes off wedges of tart, juicy apples, glossing our lips and coating our tongues with its stinging sweetness.
It wasn’t always thus. Beekeeping was unknown in ancient Israel.When the Bible speaks of honey, as in the Land of Milk and…, it is referring to a syrup made by reducing the juice of boiled dates. Sephardim still make many of their Rosh Hashanah sweets with fruit syrups and dried fruits rather than honey. In Egypt, the Jews dipped their apples in a simple sugar syrup, perfumed with orange-blossomwater.
In American Jewish cooking, honey reigns. Good thing: The various farmer’s markets are reliable sources for excellent honeys. Sage and eucalyptus varieties carry echoes of the local hills. Clover and orange-blossom are less distinct, but fine for cooking. For thyme honey, I stop in at C & K Imports, a Greek specialty store on Pico Boulevard near Normandie. They can also sell you homemade plain yogurt on which to drizzle your liquid gold.
Whether from thyme or tupelo, a bee will fly 25 miles each day to forage nectar. The bee draws it up through a proboscis into its honey sac, where enzymes start breaking down the sugars. Back at the hive,the bee transfers it to workers who pump the nectar in and out of themselves for 20 minutes, forming a thin droplet. They deposit this in a cell of the honeycomb, the waxy secretion of young workers.Aided by the beating of the bees’ wings, the nectar continues to evaporate until it is 20 percent water — a sturdy, lasting food for hard-working bees. More than 20,000 bees inhabit an average hive. To make a pound of honey, workers will, on average, travel as far as three orbits of the earth.
It’s a complex, miraculous process — parts of which science has yet to understand. The moral might be that sweetness, whether in a liquid, a year, or a life, is no simple achievement, the result of hard work, good luck and mysteries we can only begin to fathom.
A Sweet Year, Yes, But Healthy?
There are lots of reasons to like honey, the food writer Harold McGee reminds us, but nutrition is not one of them. This may seem counter-intuitive, even heretical, to those of us who grew up during the health-food boom of the 1970s. But science will out: Honey contains little vitamin and mineral worth. Since our bodies use B vitamins to convert sugars to energy, honey actually uses up more B vitamins than it supplies. As for the so-called miraculous by-products of honey production, bee pollen and royal jelly, no scientific proof exists that they do much good for any creature other than bees — and the health-food stores that profit from them.
Applesauce Honey Cake
Honey cake is still the dessert of choice for Ashkenazic Rosh Hashanah tables. Problem is, they often turn out more symbolic of slavery than of sweetness — as dense and dry as the bricks used to build the pyramids. Applesauce keeps this cake tender and moist. A touch of pepper or coriander makes for an elusive spiciness.
3 large eggs
3/4 cup dark brown sugar
1 cup honey
3/4 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
2 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
Pinch of ground coriander or white pepper (optional)
Pinch of cloves
3/4 cup chopped walnuts or almonds (optional)
1) Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2) Lightly grease a 9-inch square pan or a 9-inch-by-5-inch loaf pan. Line it with baking parchment or wax paper, and grease the paper.
3) Sift the flour with the baking powder, baking soda and spices.
4) In a separate bowl, beat the eggs until blended. Add the brown sugar and honey and beat well, about 3 to 5 minutes. Add the oil in a thin stream, beating until blended. Beat in the applesauce.
5) Beat in half of the flour mixture. Stir in the nuts.
6) Pour the batter into the pan. Bake in the square pan for about55 minutes, or 1 hour 5 minutes in the loaf pan. The cake is done when a cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean, or when it does not give to the slight pressure of a finger.
7) Cool in the pan for 10 minutes. Turn the cake out onto a rack.Remove the paper and let cool.
8) Wrap the cake tightly in plastic wrap or foil. It can keep fora week or two at room temperature.
