Skip to main content

Auntie Sally’s Challah

image_thumb1 Everybody needs an Auntie Sally. If you don’t have one, you can borrow mine, but beware: she’s opinionated. If Nanny was the easygoing elder of the family, Auntie Sally is – well – not. Whether it’s a nose ring, a religious view, you are almost certainly WRONG in Auntie Sally’s world.

This is a woman who can’t understand how it is even physically possible to be a Jew and not speak Jewish. They’re practically the same word. It’s the way we’re wired, right? This from a woman with a Sephardi daughter-in-law; not much Yiddish in that family, I assume.

Everybody has her tzuris, and Auntie Sally has had plenty in her lifetime, including a concentration camp, so I smile and I’m happy just to listen.

Which is why I wasn’t too offended when she said tonight that my challah was bad. Wrong. Too dense! Not fluffy! Like hers!

“Get a paper and a pencil, dahling.”

Yes, she really does talk like that. She was my most accented relative, growing up, and as she admits herself, 62 years after arriving in Canada, she’s still a greener.

So I ran and got a paper and wrote down her recipe. I’ll make it this Shabbos, despite the preponderance of eggs. Unless cousin Freddie manages to email me his mother, my Auntie Dora’s recipe for blueberry bun dough.

Which, I suspect, may be quite close to the Holy Grail: my Bubby’s challah dough. You see, my Bubby had one dough for absolutely everything that required yeast: pletzl, blueberry buns, challah. You’d think that would be a BAD thing, and certainly it was a family joke, except for the fact that it was DELICIOUS.

Heavy as lead, like all her baking, but delicious nevertheless. My Bubby made an apple pie that could break your foot if you dropped it. Her eyerkichlach (egg kichels, little dry sugarless “buns” that make your tongue gum around drily, searching for your palate) were legendary for their heft, especially when she sent them home (in a sour-smelling rinsed out bag which those little bags of milk had come in) with us “for your mother,” where they would sit and sit and sit. I doubt they ever went bad – just sat in the bread box, acquiring density.

But her challah was nice. And her pletzlach were nice – okay, as a kid I was mostly obsessed with slicing them open so I could butter the inside (they were about an inch thick, so this wasn’t easy).

My Auntie Dora was my Bubby’s cousin, who was then taken into her home, which made them – according to my Bubby – sisters. Then Dora married my Bubby’s brother Sam, so they were sisters-in-law as well. That’s how family worked in the old country.

So I’m hoping her dough recipe is a lot like the one my Bubby made, though I have no idea if she made a family recipe or one she discovered here in Canada. She was awfully young when she came over here.

Here’s her actual recipe! I moved the recipe over to my bread blog. The recipe plus this rant was originally a single post, but I have split it because I want to keep that blog more or less on topic – if only to demonstrate that I really CAN stay on-topic when I set my mind to it.

P.S. Don’t even try to make the dough into blueberry buns. First, Auntie says blueberry muffins are better than blueberry buns. So the buns are maybe a little bit WRONG even though she didn’t say so, maybe not wanting to diss her sisters-in-law and other family who swear by them. But second, “that’s a different dough. This is CHALLAH.”

In case you were wondering, though, this is not a bread recipe. I know it’s a bread blog and sometimes features bread recipes… but as Auntie says, “I don’t make bread… just CHALLAH.” Oh, yeah, and pizza, too. But shh… don’t tell her that’s bread.

I never mentioned how Auntie Sally knew my challah sucked so very badly.

Um, here’s how: because I baked some and brought it to her once. When she was in the HOSPITAL. Having heart surgery. I shlepped down a couple of times a week, and one time I baked and brought it to her – on a busy Friday! – and handed it over and yup – it was WRONG.

I love it. I love knowing there’s one person in the world who will tell it like it is, even if it’s from a hospital bed, choking down too-dense challah and wishing it had more egg, more fluff… wishing it was more like hers.

Interested but missed the link above? Click here for the recipe!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

לימודי קודש/Limudei Kodesh Copywork & Activity Printables

Welcome to my Limudei Kodesh / Jewish Studies copywork and activity printables page.  As of June 2013, I am slowly but surely moving all my printables over to 4shared because Google Docs / Drive is just too flaky for me. What you’ll find here: Weekly Parsha Copywork More Parsha Activities More Chumash / Tanach Activities Yom Tov Copywork & Activities Tefillah Copywork Pirkei Avos / Pirkei Avot Jewish Preschool Resources Other printables! For General Studies printables and activities, including Hebrew-English science resources and more, click here . For Miscellaneous homeschool helps and printables, click here . If you use any of my worksheets, activities or printables, please leave a comment or email me at Jay3fer “at” gmail “dot” com, to link to your blog, to tell me what you’re doing with it, or just to say hi!  If you want to use them in a school, camp or co-op setting, please email me (remove the X’s) for rates. If you just want to say Thank You, here’s a

Hebrew/ עברית & English General Studies Printables

For Jewish Studies, including weekly parsha resources and copywork, click here . If you use any of my worksheets, activities or printables, please leave a comment or email me at Jay3fer “at” gmail “dot” com, to link to your blog, to tell me what you’re doing with it, or just to say hi!  If you want to use them in a school, camp or co-op setting, please email me (remove the X’s) for rates. If you enjoy these resources, please consider buying my weekly parsha book, The Family Torah :  the story of the Torah, written to be read aloud – or any of my other wonderful Jewish books for kids and families . English Worksheets & Printables: (For Hebrew, click here ) Science :  Plants, Animals, Human Body Math   Ambleside :  Composers, Artists History Geography Language & Literature     Science General Poems for Elemental Science .  Original Poems written by ME, because the ones that came with Elemental Science were so awful.  Three pages are included:  one page with two po

It's Heart Month: 3 days left to save lives!

Dear Friends & Family: Hi, everybody! Sorry I can’t stop by in person... you're a bit out of my area.  :-) We’re out walking up and down on our street on this beautiful afternoon to raise money for Heart & Stroke.  This cause is important to me (I won't say it's close to my heart , because that would be tacky!).  I hope you'll join me by donating online. Growing up, I watched as every single one of my grandparents' lives were shortened by heart disease and strokes, and my father had a defibrillator that saved his life on more than one occasion.  Heart disease and stroke kill 1 in 3 Canadians and are the #1 killer of women. Please click this link to be redirected to my main page at the Heart & Stroke website: http://tinyurl.com/AtlasHeart Thus ends my personal appeal.  Official information follows.  :-))) ----- Heart disease and stroke is the #1 killer of women - taking more women's lives than all forms of cancer combined. But no one is immune. Th