It’s beer and beef, and hold the beans, as temple cooks up a cholent feast

by Johanna Ginsberg
NJJN Staff Writer

The heady scents of beef and beans, barley and garlic, potatoes and beer were already wafting through the synagogue while some of the cooks were still chopping and dicing.

But temptation could not keep the nine cooks from their appointed task: preparing enough cholent for Temple Beth Ahm’s second annual cholent Shabbat, held Friday and Saturday, Dec. 8 and 9.

The event is a celebration of all things cholent — the traditional Shabbat stew of the shtetls of Europe. Because igniting a flame is not allowed on Shabbat, the stews — mostly potatoes and beans or barley with some scraps of beef mixed in — were put on the stove or in the oven before the start of the Sabbath and left to simmer all night, to be ready for serving the next afternoon.

The Springfield synagogue’s communal cook-off honors another shtetl tradition: Families would often bring their personalized pots to the local baker, who would give them space in his oven.

The event was conceived one Shabbat morning in the pews, fourth row, left-hand side, recalled Pam Ross Horn, chair of the adult ed committee.

“Some of our best ideas have come out of a little group on Shabbos morning. We were talking and Miriam [Gershwin] said we should have cholent for kiddush one day. We were coming up to Purim and decided to do it that Shabbat.”

The first cook-off attracted six cooks, who made a total of nine cholents.

“We had a synagogue full of people, and no one left,” said Ross Horn. “We’re not sure if they didn’t leave because they were so happy to be there with the cholent, or because they couldn’t leave after having the cholent!”

It wasn’t the first such event — according to Jewish cookbook author Joan Nathan, Cleveland Jews held a “cholent burn-off” in 1898.

The recipes used at Temple Beth Ahm included some that could have come straight from the shtetl, or at least the Cleveland burn-off, prepared by people like Miriam Gershwin who were raised on cholent in Europe, and has been making it all her life. She offered a simple, traditional pot of potatoes, beef, and beans. She remembers eating it during the winters in her native Czechoslovakia.

“I was eating it from when I was a little baby,” said Gershwin. “Every Saturday my parents made cholent in our own oven, with potato kugel.”

Others included minor twists, like Osnat Kalati’s cholent with eggs. “It’s my mother’s recipe from Poland,” she said. She acknowledged that she sometimes slips in new ingredients like wheat berries, “for some crunch.”

And there were some that probably wouldn’t have had many takers back in 1898 and are decidedly not peasant food, like Ross Horn’s vegetarian version featuring tofu, shiitake mushrooms, and shredded kombu, a Japanese seaweed. (Last year she prepared a cholent based on mole, the Mexican chocolate sauce.)

For sheer out-thereness, however, there was the version prepared by Richard Falkin, who had neither eaten nor cooked the traditional Shabbat stew before. He selected a recipe he found on the Internet featuring hot dogs and beer, and dubbed it President’s Cholent. Why?

“Because I’m the president of the shul. I don’t even know what I’m doing,” he acknowledged, although he was certainly having fun in his apron and toque blanche.

“The way I cook, I add a little more,” he said, pouring from a bottle of He’Brew beer, “and I add a little more.” He refused to put beans in his cholent. “I hate beans,” he said.

---

MOM’S AUTHENTIC KOSHER CHOLENT RECIPE