Jewish Ambrosia : Call It Stew With a Reputation--Those Who Know Cholent, the Sabbath Treat, Surely Can Agree on This

In the Old Country, it was said that if you wanted to reach a ripe old age, the best thing to do with cholent was to take it straight out of the oven, walk it to the kitchen window, open the window 10 inches and dump the stuff into the trash.

And these were its fans. Enemies of cholent--a hefty Jewish concoction cooked overnight Friday in a sealed clay pot and eaten at lunch Saturday--used to say precisely the same thing.

Charlene Wolfe, a 49-year-old Northridge resident whose conversion to Judaism in 1981 put an end to her training as a nun, hadn’t tapped into any of this lore. All she knew from cholent before first encountering it at her mother-in-law’s home was through her husband’s vigorous protestations that this traditional Sabbath treat was the Jewish answer to ambrosia.

Reheated Stew

Unfortunately, Wolfe’s mother-in-law was not a world-class cholent maven. Beaming with a misplaced sense of pride, she served up the reheated remains of a once-frozen stew that Wolfe has since learned to characterize as “industrial strength.”

“I never told her this,” she recalled, “but I had a real problem swallowing it.”

Wolfe, an amateur gourmet cook, had by then heard too much hype about the dish to believe that such a hideously overcooked, glutenous mass of beef, potatoes, barley, beans and onions could possibly have left such an indelible impression on a people otherwise known for their culinary sophistication. Surely it got better than this.

Her husband, a semi-retired publisher of fine press collections of poetry who took no great umbrage at her aspersions about his mother’s cooking, suggested that a worldwide survey of cholent might, in fact, make for a good book.

The good news, as her book will attest to when the aptly named Ambrosia Press publishes it as a limited-edition, fine press volume next year (and later, possibly, as a trade paperback), is that you don’t need to be Jewish to prepare a palatable cholent.

“You do, however, need a light touch,” she said.

Wolfe, who has not yet decided on a title for her book, discovered in the course of her research that there are as many different kinds of cholent as there are communities of Jews throughout the Diaspora. And as a recent trip to Israel revealed, traditional cholent recipes that might otherwise have been lost are still being preserved there by immigrants from such countries as Iraq, Yemen and Poland that no longer have sizable Jewish communities.

The mystique of cholent is as much a matter of its great age and variety as any inherent culinary qualities that it might possess. The dish is the result of a prohibition, cited in the Old Testament, against cooking on the Sabbath, and a seemingly contradictory admonition in the Talmud that it is nevertheless a mitzvah, or meritorious act, to eat a hot meal on the day of rest.

Both directives could be accommodated, it was discovered, by devising a stew hearty enough to withstand continuous cooking in a low-heat oven from before the start of the Sabbath on Friday night until midday Saturday.

In the shtetl , or European Jewish ghetto, Wolfe discovered, Jewish families would traditionally place their respective clay cholent pots in the communal baker’s oven. At noon Saturday, the children would be sent from the synagogue to the oven to fetch the steaming meal.

Wrong Pot

“More often than not, though, the kids would bring home the wrong pot,” Wolfe noted. “So a poor family might find itself with a rich, meaty cholent, while wealthier people might have to settle for a thin, largely vegetarian gruel. Cholent really became very much of a potluck type of thing, and people enjoyed the risk involved--it contributed to the overall sense of community.

“Some cholents were more like soups than stews, while others were so lumpy and dry they could only be eaten with soup.”

Jews who settled closer to the Mediterranean also made cholents, but the ingredients--and the names for the dish--changed from place to place. Sephardic Jews, who settled in Spain and later were dispersed throughout southern Europe and the Middle East, used lamb or chicken instead of beef and rice rather than barley. Some North African and Turkish Jewish communities also tended to cook whole eggs in their shells in the cholent pot, with the eggs eaten either as breakfast or as an appetizer.

“Eating eggs cooked in cholent for breakfast was sort of like a double mitzvah,” Wolfe said. “This way, you ate two hot meals on Shabbos.

“During a recent visit to Israel,” Wolfe recounted, “I ate a cholent, prepared by the wife of a British rabbi living in the Old City, which had so much honey and dates in it, it tasted like candy. Frankly, I couldn’t eat that, either.”

Wolfe was astounded to learn that cholent, which predates traditional European stews by centuries, may have inspired a host of national dishes in a number of countries.

In Spain, for instance, she learned that a popular pork-based dish called hamindas , or haminodos , had its origins in a cholent prepared by the Marranos--those Jews who escaped expulsion in 1492 by professing to be Christians while secretly maintaining an allegiance to Judaism.

“To convince their neighbors that they were true converts,” Wolfe said, “the Marranos were forced to eat pork in public. So they substituted the hard-boiled eggs they had once placed in the pot for pork, and they would eat this outdoors, in plain view.”

The Spanish subsequently brought this dish to America, where it was adopted and transformed, she believes, into such ostensibly blue-blooded American fare as Boston baked beans.

‘Jewish Chili’

As cholent, however, the dish hasn’t fared particularly well in the New World. An attempt by Hillel Foundation, the Jewish student union, to sell it at USC’s annual international food fair in 1984, for instance, didn’t go over well, even when the cook, Hebrew Union College librarian Yaffa Weisman, advertised it as “Jewish chili.”

Interest in cholent hasn’t died entirely, however, and the response to ads Wolfe placed in various Jewish magazines requesting recipes has been brisk. Wolfe’s book will first be marketed through mail-order and by synagogue sisterhoods.

“I got a letter from an older man who had grown up and lived in Kentucky all his life. ‘I ain’t had no cholent since I was a kid,’ he wrote. ‘I’d surely be beholding to you for the recipe.’ ”

Wolfe, still eager for cholent recipes, is reading typed ones sent to Cholent, Dept. M, Box 7014, Tarzana 91356.