Customers rush and gush over Md. kosher bakery's holiday treat
By Michelle Boorstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 11, 2009
In sitcom Boston, barflys have their Cheers. In Kemp Mill, the heart of the region's Orthodox Jewish community, the observant have the Kosher Pastry Oven.
A place where headgear is a baseball cap with "Nationals" in Hebrew lettering or a yarmulke knitted with American flags. Where there's a spare prayer book on the counter if you forget every word to a particular meal-related blessing. Where everyone knows your name.
And where, during the holiday of Hanukkah, which begins at sundown Friday, your sunny little strip mall cafe transforms into a mob scene. That's because the Kosher Pastry Oven has some of the region's best-known sufganiyot, a fried jelly doughnut that has migrated from Israel to America as a standard treat for the eight-day holiday.
Starting in a trickle earlier this week and building to a gush Friday, Jewish people have been coming to the Pastry Oven, where the subject of holiday food triggered debate about linguistics, religion and family.
"The story behind the sufganiyot is a military one," stockbroker Lew Sosnowik said Thursday morning to Joel Davis, his daily synagogue-and-breakfast partner, of Hanukkah's historic meaning.
"But the victory was a spiritual one!" insisted Davis, an accountant.
"Every story is dependent on the raconteur," Sosnowik added while a woman told a clerk that she was about to drive her order to her children in New York City. It's not unusual for sufganiyot from the Pastry Oven to be taken aboard planes bound for California or Florida.
In the back, order slips were being added to the dozens already taped to the fridge: for 100 sufganiyot, three dozen, 18 (a lucky number in the Jewish faith), 36 (double that), in Hebrew, English and Spanish for the different staff. Up front, at the counter, trays full of sufganiyot kept replacing empty ones. Discussion among customers bounced from the etymology of the word (biblical Hebrew?) to the Hanukkah food best-known to Americans: the latke, or potato pancake.
Both are not coincidentally dependent on oil, which is central to the miracle at the center of the Hanukkah story: a lamp used to rededicate the Temple in the 2nd century B.C. had only enough oil to burn for one day, yet it burned for eight.
As President Obama appeared on a television in the background, giving his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, customers debated: Can latkes be made in butter, instead of oil? Or does that change their meaning? ("It's not a latke," tsked Davis.) And what about the sufganiyot fillings: Are the caramel and cream varieties you can get easily in Israel or New York better than the classic jelly?
At the helm of the scene is owner Arie Eloul, a Moroccan Israeli pastry chef with an impish smile and knowledge of kashrut, or Jewish dietary law, so deep even those in the most Orthodox garb ask guidance from a guy who drives on the Sabbath (which you're not supposed to do) to synagogue (when he goes).
Eloul expects to sell 10,000 sufganiyot (at $1.25 apiece), and places including Shalom Kosher Market in Wheaton and KosherMart in Rockville are also doing brisk business.
Meanwhile, regulars popped in and out of the kitchen to say hello to Eloul and his wife, Shula. Despite a dinner menu that features $24 sea bass and homemade tiramisu, the vibe at the Pastry Oven is informal. Although the posted opening is 8 a.m., by 7:30 tables are already populated by regulars including Sosnowik and Davis, as well as writer Marla Fogelman of Silver Spring, the New York-bound woman who meets a group of other female writers there each week.
Holidays -- and holiday food -- of course mark the passage of time, and customers talked Thursday about rituals changed with spouses passed on, children scattered. Hanukkah celebrations that might once have been at home with family are now at synagogue dinners with friends.
For Jerry Sandberg the Pastry Oven's jelly sufganiyot are a fine, if limited, alternative to the variety he gets in Brooklyn, where he grew up and where his relatives still live. That said, he knows everyone at Eloul's and comes every other day during Hanukkah.
"The only down side here," he said Thursday, "is you've got to make sure you get here before they run out."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/10/AR2009121004167.html
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