My NYT cooking notifications just informed me that based on my previous views of recipes, I might like to consider “haroseth.” I never heard of it, and the photograph didn’t give me a good sense of what it was, so I clicked on the recipe.
I’m still confused. The recipe given is mostly dried fruit, fruit jam, nuts, and sweet wine. But it also has onions and a lot of red wine vinegar (which the comments suggest are peculiar additions).
With or without the onions and vinegar, I’m mystified. What is this mish-mash supposed to be? I’m guessing maybe a dessert during Passover, since it is unleavened/grain-free. Is that correct? Is there a particular way to eat it - just plop it in a bowl and eat it with a spoon, or what?
Your search may have been hampered by not using the more common spelling:
Charoset[a] is a sweet, dark-colored mixture of finely chopped fruits and nuts eaten at the Passover Seder. According to the Talmud, its color and texture are meant to recall mortar (or mud used to make adobe bricks), which the Israelites used during their enslavement in Ancient Egypt, as mentioned in Tractate Pesahim 116a of the Talmud. The word comes from the Hebrew word for clay (Hebrew: חֶרֶס, romanized: ḥéres).[1]
Charoset is one of the symbolic foods on the Passover Seder plate. After reciting the blessings, and eating first maror dipped in charoset and then a matzah “Hillel sandwich” (with two matzot) combining charoset and maror, people often eat the remainder spread on matzah.[1][2]
Some varieties are more like a paste or spread, while others are more chopped salad-like.
My “recipe” is apples and walnuts rough chopped, mixed with cinnamon and a combination of wine and grape juice. Very basic but tasty and hits me right in the nostalgia.
After the seder, I just eat it with a spoon as a snack.
It’s not a dessert, more of an accompaniment, relish or condiment apart from its ritual/symbolic role on the Seder table. Its function is kind of analogous to salsa, meaning that there are lots of different recipes and families tend to have their own but the basics are chopped fruit, sweetener, sometimes wine.
When you put it on a piece of matzo and add strong horseradish–zowie! The combination of sweet and lightning-bolt hot will clear your head-- both sinuses and brains. Yum!
Analogous- two different things are similar in function, purpose, or structure, allowing them to be compared even if they are not identical.
I do mine heavy on the dried fruit, stewed in wine and spices and then chopped into a paste and mixed with almond pieces. Then formed into balls and dusted with matzoh meal to keep them from sticking.
Absolutely delicious and this year I did homemade horseradish, too. So good.
Similar for me with whatever dried fruits are on hand. A little honey. No grape juice. This year I happened to have a bag of pine nuts from a recipe a few weeks ago on hand so toasted up a handful of them to throw in. I wouldn’t buy pine nuts just to do it again but it really did add some extra oomph.
This is also very similar to my family’s option. Enough “loose” for the seder, but too much work not to make a big batch, so the rest gets formed into balls that are then rolled in a tin of matzoh meal or crushed pistachios.
My mom made it like a Waldorf salad minus the lettuce and mayo, plus cinnamon. Chopped apples, walnuts, raisins, and cinnamon is basically impossible to mess up. It’ll always be good. I think Mom skipped the wine, though. In my 20s, my first wife had a bunch of tasty haroset recipes from different countries; my favorite was the Moroccan, which had dates. I wish I still had that Moroccan recipe.
Thanks everyone. I’m liking the @ThelmaLou and @Johnny_Bravo options - though if I did the latter, I’d probably think of them as “fruit truffles” instead of chocolate truffles, and consume them accordingly, as a dessert morsel without horseradish. But treating it sort of like a chutney, and having the horseradish too … yum.
Make haroset, chop chop chop! Apples, nuts and cinnamon Add some wine - it’s lots of fun Make haroset, chop chop chop!
Anyone familiar with that? I’m not sure if this is an actual existing ditty or just something my dad came up with. I could never be sure with him.
Anyway, I peel and chop up an equal number of Golden Delicious and Granny Smith apples into nice, very small pieces. Then I put a bunch of peeled walnuts in a mortar and pestle and grind them into powder (if you don’t have a mortar and pestle, wrap them in a towel and hit them repeatedly with a hammer, like they did in the Old Country). Then, in honor of my wife’s Sephardic heritage and because it’s delicious, I also chop up some Majhool dates and add some date honey. I add a liberal amount of ground cinnamon, and then, right before the Seder, some sweet wine (if you add it too early, it’ll get soggy - still delicious, but less visually appealing). Eat it on matza.
A side note to the thread - for those of the tribe participating, do you eat matzoh any other time of the year? I’m a nearly entirely secular Jew, who doesn’t associate with the (small) local Jewish community. And I still buy matzoh periodically outside the season - because the inner me still loves matzoh schmeared with a bit of soft butter. I don’t do it often because of the calorie/fat/carb bomb it represents, but I often buy 3-4 extra boxes on sale after the holiday and spread out the indulgence for several months.
Oh, and matzoh French “toast”, despite several tries by my father in my younger years, is still an absolute failure.
Do you mean Matzo Brei? If you google it, you’ll find a million recipes. Here in South Texas we sometimes call it Jewish Chilaquiles.
This morning I put a slice of matzo in my toaster oven on the lightest toast setting. When it just started to get brown (and I could smell it), I slathered with butter, a bit of salt, and coated it heavily with sesame seeds. (I do this with regular toast, too.) Really good.
Butter and cinnamon sugar make a good topping, too.
One year I put matzo in the toaster oven and forgot it. The cracker caught on fire and I ran outside with the toaster oven in my hands, smoke pouring out. We had two guys working, pouring a concrete walkway. One of them was a pastor making some extra money. He asked me if I was trying to make a burnt offering.
Shall we say, it started as Brei, but was unacceptable to our childish tastes, raised on Frosted Flakes(*). It was then doctored up with cinnamon and sugar (thus the French “toast” description) and still failed. So my dad ended up making Brei for himself.
We were reform, and mostly didn’t keep kosher, but my father always did during Passover and tried to get my brother and I in the habit of doing the same.
(*) - for the record, they were my Dad’s cereal of choice, and what he ate most of the year, while my step-mother ate Grapenuts by choice. So we kids were raised by our father as sugar addicts!
