How Much Should a Hamantaschen Weigh?
As I was passing a neighbor yesterday morning on my way to work, she shouted out, "Happy Purim, Ed." And so I say to all of you, Happy Purim. I have no idea what Purim is all about, except that I think that someone named Esther triumphed over a dude named Haman. All I really know about Purim is that you get to eat hamantaschen, sweet triangular cookielike pastries filled in their exposed center with poppyseeds or prune or raspberry jam.
I associate hamantaschen with an anvil-like heaviness and a desert-like dryness. You could break a toe or two with the hamantaschen I grew up with, and those six-ounce heavyweights are what you are most likely to find anywhere hamantaschen are sold. They look like the one above, bought at Fairway Market today. They're tasty enough, but you feel like you get its dense essence two bites in.
Fairway also sells prepackaged Reisman's hamantaschen from a bakery deep in the heart of Brooklyn. These smaller specimens are pretty awful, really. The filling is too sweet and cheap-tasting; the less said about it the better.
Which leaves us with the one store-bought hamantashen that Esther, were she alive today, would be kvelling about, made by Emily Isaac at Trois Pommes Patisserie (doesn't sound very Jewish, does it?).
