view from central park: tehilla r. goldberg

Tehilla cries ‘Poppy!’ It’s Purim in NY

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As I was grocery shopping at Fairway on the Upper Wehst Side, a product caught my eye: lekvar. I couldn’t believe it. I haven’t seen that Hungarian prune spread in years. It reminds me of my Hungarian grandmother. Late summer, from those chartreuse-fleshed and purple-skinned oval plums, she had them sweetly simmering, then would jar pots of the sticky sweet spread.

Vintage Hungarian. Oftentimes, there was purchased lekvar, but always, always a jar of lekvar in the fridge.

New York is just so heimish, I was thinking to myself. Then I realized: “Oh, right, it’s almost Purim!” So yeah, I guess New York is heimish.

It’s hamantaschen season, time for those delectable Purim pastries that wrap jewel-toned jellies in triangles. I checked to see whether the poppy filling was there, too. Yup, you couldn’t miss it.

When I was a little girl visiting my Bubbie, it was her homebaked Hungarian pastries that we looked forward to as a treat. Sometimes, when I would try to sneak a thick slice of her gooey swirled kokosh cake, I would be disappointed by the weird flavor that had some kind of a strange kick and crunch to it. Then I realized that instead of the coveted, sweet-swirled chocolatiness in my mouth, to my great confusion it would turn out to be a dark filling indeed, but the very much uncoveted thick and moist filling of bound poppyseeds instead.

Mohn! It turned out I had snuck the wrong cake. I would feel betrayed every time.

Here and there, I had always enjoyed the little sprinkling of adorable poppyseeds on other Hungarian treats, their tininess adding a special flair. A bialy, with golden cooked onions, salted and sprinkled with paprika and poppyseeds. A pale pink cherry cake flecked by the black dots. And bagels, of course. I guess that one would be more American than Hungarian.

But there was something about that rich sweetened thick paste that, being the child that I was, I simply couldn’t and didn’t appreciate.

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