Matzo Apple Cake in Budapest -- Rachel Raj's Recipe

Rachel Raj and ingredients. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

 This originally appeared on the En Route blog of the Los Angeles Jewish Journal.


I’ve been meaning to link to this piece I did for The Forward’s The Jew & the Carrot blog, about the Budapest Jewish chef and pastry cook Rachel Raj. (I had written about her in the past, in an article about the Budapest Jewish food scene in general.)

It was a delight to research—eating pastries in Budapest and talking about food! I like the Cafe Noe I write about here…. it’s a nice, intimate place with a hidden little terrace garden.

Enjoy!  Oh—and here is Rachel’s recipe for matzo apple cake, which is nice and light and good all year round.

Rachel’s Matzo Apple Cake:

Ingredients:

- 3.3 lbs apples
- sugar
- Cinnamon
- 6 eggs
- 6 Tbsp. sugar
- About 5 oz ground walnuts
- Matzos
- Approx. 1-1/2 cups of white wine, sweet or dry

Grate the apples and mix with sugar and cinnamon to taste

Separate the eggs and beat the whites until stiff.

Beat the yolks separately with the 6 Tbsp of sugar, then mix the yolk mixture with the ground walnuts and the beaten eggwhites.

In an oiled baking pan, place a layer of matzo that has been well moistened with wine. On top of this place a later of the apple mixture. Cover this with another layer of wine-moistened matzo, then cover that layer with the nut and egg mixture. Add more layers, making sure that the top layer is the nut and egg mixture.

Bake in a moderate oven (325-350 F) for about 35 minutes, cool and cut into squares. It’s good lukewarm, room-temperature, or even cold.

Jono David's Jewish Geography App Free for 24 Hours

This post originally appeared on the En Route blog of the Los Angeles Jewish Journal

The Japan-based photographer Jono David has used some of his thousands of images of Jewish heritage sites around the world to create a “Jewish Geography” game played via an ITunes app…. He has just let me know that the app can be downloaded for free—but just for 24 hours, from 7:00 p.m. Monday, April 16 to 7:00 p.m. Tuesday, April 17, 2012, Japan Standard Time.
Here’s what Jono says:

Jewish Geography. You know the game. Or do you? Uniquely different than the familiar “Do you know so-and-so?” degrees of separation kibitzing, this fun and challenging app quiz game measures by how many degrees you’re separated from your own Jewish geographical knowledge. Challenge yourself or compete against friends and family. The more you play, the more you’ll know, and the fewer degrees you’ll be separated from Jewish Geography!

Game description, features, and device requirements @ http://www.JewishGeography.co/
Preview on YouTube (time: 00:00:38) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5N9Fl5T-hc

PURCHASE on iTUNES:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jewish-geography/id498428257?mt=8

A fun product by JonoDavid LLC featuring the photography of Jono David from his HaChayim HaYehudim Jewish Photo Library (HHJPL).

Thank you, and happy Jewish Geography playing!

Jono

News for Jewish Heritage Travel Blog

Here's some organizational news for this blog.....As of today I now have a travel blog called En Route: Jewish Heritage and Travel with Ruth Ellen Gruber that is hosted by the Los Angeles Jewish Journal.... so -- I will be posting items to that blog, and then reposting on this site (or, I guess, occasionally vice versa).

This will not affect the Jewish Heritage Travel Facebook page.

And all the archives and other material on this Jewish Heritage Travel blog will remain here intact.

Crystal Cruises Expands Jewish Heritage Tours

 This post was originally published in my En Route blog on the LA Jewish Journal


By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Here’s what looks like some good news for my first En Route post…. Crystal Cruises has announced it will expand its Jewish heritage tour options for the 2012 season.
According to a press release,  the tours “visit neighborhoods, museums, monuments, synagogues, and more somber sites in/near Palamos, Berlin, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Dublin, Hamburg, Rome, Odessa, St. Petersburg, and Israel. “

Announced highlights include:
Haifa: A kibbutz, the ancient holy city of Safed, Golan Heights, and a second-century Jewish burial ground.
Girona: El Call, one of Europe’s best-preserved Jewish Quarters, by Segway or foot.
Dublin: The homes of Dublin’s Jewish Lord Mayors and ex-Israeli President Herzog, the first dedicated day school, and Jewish cemetery.
Stockholm: The Jewish Museum and three local synagogues, from Stockholm’s first (1790) to one whose interior is originally from another synagogue in Hamburg.
Berlin: Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, the Grosse Hamburger Strasse deportation area, Otto Weidt’s broom-making factory, and the 205,000-square-foot Holocaust Memorial (two different excursions).
Athens: Athens’ Jewish Museum, containing 8,000+ domestic and religious artifacts from 2,300 years of Greek Judaism.
Odessa: Kosher refreshments, Ukraine’s only Jewish history museum, Shomrei Shabbos synagogue, and Beit Grand Jewish Cultural Center.
Hamburg: Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial, home of 100,000+ WWII prisoners.
Ashdod: Jerusalem’s Western Wall, Old City, and Holocaust artifact-filled Yad Vashem memorial.

For more details see the Press Release

Geographically off topic -- but right on target

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

I came across a wonderful post on the Cemetery Traveler blog about a visit to an abandoned Jewish cemetery in Gladwyne, PA  -- only a few miles from where I grew up in suburban Philadelphia.

The description of the abandoned site -- and the evocative photographs taken by the blogger, Ed Snyder -- are so similar to those of people exploring abandoned Jewish cemeteries in Eastern Europe that I felt I had to repost.

Snyder writes:

Walking through this place is a MUST for any cemetery explorer – you may be appalled, afraid, amazed, or desire to use the location for your next zombie movie. You walk into the place and it starts off quaint - the tilted headstones, the  lone cradle graves. As you walk further through the weeds, you begin to see small clusters of graves, surrounded by rusty decorative fencing. Most of the fencing has fallen to the ground and is waiting for you to trip over. [...]

The history of this place is not well-documented. The fragments of supposed fact come from letters and oral recollections. "Har Ha Zetim Cemetery", aka Gladwyne Jewish Cemetery and "Mount of Olives," was supposedly established in 1860, and served the poor Jewish population of Philadelphia and Norristown until the 1920s. No doubt some of the the people interred here emigrated from Russia during the pogrom in 1881. The fact that this exodus occurred on Passover of that year oddly coincides with my writing this blog on the eve of Passover, 2012. [...]

Walking through Gladwyne's Abandoned Jewish Cemetery is not like finding a lonely outcropping of headstones in a farmer’s field somewhere – this was a COMMUNITY! A community of ancestors, now lost to the ages. But as you walk through the lanes of graves, the presence of all these people is alive in the air, they were REAL. They lived. They had rites, manners, and customs that were as real to them as ours are to us.

 Read the full post 

Snyder provides  links to further reading about abandoned Jewish cemeteries in the Philadelphia area, including this article from the Forward in 2004 about a Jewish cemetery in west Philadelphia that explicitly makes the parallel with the rediscovery of Jewish cemeteries in eastern and Central Europe, and his own blog post about the site.

Still Early Spring in Budapest

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

I seem to have been eating a lot this trip.... spending a lot of time at the Cafe Noe, in the 7th District Jewish quarter, and Torta, near the Danube, sampling Flodni, Matzo Apple Cake and other items... both places are run by Miklos Maloschik and Rachel Raj.

Matzo apple cake and Flodni, at Cafe Noe. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Cafe Noe is around the corner from the grand Dohany st. Synagogue (the biggest in Europe) -- last week, before the leaves started coming out, I could actually get a picture of the full complex. The section on the left houses the Jewish museum. It was built in the 1930s on the site of the hosue where Theodor Herzl was born, in a style that matches that of the synagogue, which was completed in 1859.

Dohany St. Synagogue. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Early Spring in Budapest

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

It has been a busy visit so far in Budapest, with little time to stop and reflect (or post). Here are a few highlights..... and with luck I'll be able to add a bit more in the coming days. Today at least I managed to stock up on matzo for Passover -- there are several kosher shops now selling kosher for Pesach brands, at a wide variety of prices, I might add. The commercial kosher shops sell it for just about twice the price of what the Jewish-community run outlets do. But that's business....


Let me perhaps tell it in pictures:

Last week I attended the opening of a newly enlarged synagogue -- three times its original size -- in a residential neighborhood in Buda. And then I went there for services.  Here's a link to a 360 degree panorama of the place. And my own pic from the opening:

Synagogue on Karoli Gaspar ter. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

This is one of three synagogues in Budapest that have young and growing congregations. Another is the lovely courtyard Frankel Leo synagogue, also in Buda.

Frankel Leo Synagogue. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Frankel Leo synagogue. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber