Ashkenazi – FoodWatcher

This Bread Is Beloved in Paris—& a Relic of Jewish History

You don’t hear much about the pletzel these days. On one hand, it’s an Ashkenazi Jewish flatbread covered with raw onions and poppy seeds. On the other hand, it’s a neighborhood in Paris.

The name comes from the Yiddish for “little square,” as in a li…

You don't hear much about the pletzel these days. On one hand, it’s an Ashkenazi Jewish flatbread covered with raw onions and poppy seeds. On the other hand, it’s a neighborhood in Paris.

The name comes from the Yiddish for "little square," as in a little area within a city. (Technically, the Yiddish spelling of the neighborhood is “פּלעצל,” which transliterates to “pletzl.” The flatbread, on the other hand, is more commonly spelled “pletzel.”) The Pletzl in Paris sits in the Marais neighborhood of the Fourth Arrondissement. A nondescript plaque on the corner of Rue des Rosiers and the Rue Ferdinand Duval tells the story of Ashkenazi Jews rushing to Paris in the late 19th century, fleeing persecution primarily from pogroms throughout the Russian empire. Jewish immigrants continued to arrive in the city from Romania, Russia, and throughout the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Why This Classic Romanian-Jewish Dish Is Nearly Impossible to Find

When said aloud, the word sounds almost like music: Mamaliga. An almost-facsimile of polenta, the cornmeal-based dish mamaliga is native to Romania and neighboring Moldova, as well as parts of the Ukraine. Written as mamelige in Yiddish, and mămăligă in Romanian, the dish inspires an almost romantic yearning, particularly among Ashkenazi and Romanian Jews. In his famous song “Rumania, Rumania” originally recorded in 1925, Yiddish theater actor and singer Aaron Lebedeff extols the delights of the eponymous land through its comestibles: “Vos dos harts glust kenstu krign: A mamaligele, a pastramele, a karnatsele, Un a glezele vayn, aha…!” (In English: “What your heart desires you can get; a mamalige, a pastrami, a karnatzl, and a glass of wine, aha…!”)

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Mamaliga is, in its most basic form, quite simple: coarsely-ground yellow cornmeal—the same kind used for polenta—cooked with water and salt over a low heat. It takes about half an hour to cook, stirring constantly, says Roza Jaffe, a home cook and Holocaust survivor from the region of Bessarabia, which today straddles Moldova and the Ukraine. (I personally spent upwards of an hour standing over my Dutch oven in both of my attempts to make it, though I am a notoriously slow cook).