Do you love hamentaschen? I’m betting you do.

I sure do, but I’m not at all fond of the over-sweet, stodgy hamentaschen flooding grocery stores and supermarkets right now. It’s so worthwhile making my own, that I’m going to interrupt my pre-Purim baking marathon to post this recipe. It’s a real, old-fashioned hamentasch with a delicate cookie crust. The filling is up to you. I’ve kept it pareve to accommodate those eating meat meals on Purim day. But I must say that these hamentaschen are fabulous filled with dulce de leche.

Old-Fashioned Hamentaschen

Source: Jewish Cookery, by Leah W. Leonard

Yield: about 24 hamentaschen

Preheat oven to 375° F – 190° C.

Ingredients for Dough:

2/3 cup margarine

1/2 cup sugar

1 egg, beaten

3 tablespoons water

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

2 cups sifted flour

Method:

Blend margarine and sugar. Add egg and mix to creaminess.

Add water and vanilla. Stir in flour till you obtain a dough you can gather into a ball.

Place dough ball in a plastic bag, close it well, and chill 2 hours to overnight.

Roll out on a floured surface till the dough is 1/8″ thin. It’s convenient to cut the dough up into quarters or halves and work with those smaller amounts.

Cut into rounds. The size of your cookie will depend on the size of the rounds, of course. With a biscuit cutter, I made 24 hamentaschen.

Place a level teaspoon of filling in the center of each cookie round. Mrs. Leonard’s instructions are that the filling should be “the size of a hazelnut,” referring to fruit and nut fillings.

Pinch the sides of each filled cookie together to form a triangle that shows the filling in the center.

Place on baking-paper lined sheet and bake about 12 minutes or until lightly browned. Remove to a rack to cool.

Filling: Any firm jam or preserves. I used a sugar-free apricot jam in this batch. But here’s another very old-fashioned European filling, also from Jewish Cookery.

Poppyseed Filling

2 cups ground poppyseeds

1 cup water

1/2 cup honey

1/4 cup sugar

1/8 teaspoon salt

2 eggs.

Combine seeds, water, honey, sugar and salt in a saucepan. Cook over medium heat till thick, stirring to avoid scorching. Allow to cool before adding eggs. Beat thoroughly and if the added eggs thin the filling out, return the pan to heat and cook, stirring, 1-2 minutes longer.

Notes:

Avoid watery fillings as these will force the cookie open and spill.

Plan to bake these cookies as soon as they’re filled and shaped into hamentaschen. If held over too long, their walls will collapse in the oven. As I found out when photographing them before baking.

The chilling period is necessary to create the firm yet delicate consistency of the cookie. Don’t neglect it.

These hamentaschen are just special. Enjoy, and Purim Sameach!

It’s really much cheaper to make your own condensed milk. And you can make quantities of it at one time with almost no effort. But it does require time and patience. It’s something to stir while doing other kitchen projects. Like an intensive cooking or cupboard-cleaning session, or a morning of  phone calls you’ve been putting off. Actually, the coolest thing would be to have a magical spoon that stirs all by itself. Lacking that, just old-fashioned patience and time will  do.

Why would I want to make my own condensed milk? Well, here in Israel, all condensed and evaporated milk is imported in squeezable tubes and cans. Living in a dairy-rich country, it seems wrong to buy a milk product that’s been shipped across the planet. That’s Noble Reason Number One.

Then, while these products have kashrut, they don’t bear a “mehadrin” hechsher (the most stringent kashrut approval).  As the milk I buy is “mehadrin,” it’s sensible to put the excess into products that even my most stringently observant guests will eat. That’s Noble Reason Number Two.

And Number Three, for some reason I had too much milk taking up room in the fridge and I wanted to use it up before it got old and I had to (shudder) pour it down the drain.

As a teenager living in Brazil, I used to hang out in the kitchen with the servants and watch them cooking. The two maids, Rose and Lydia, would let me get in their way among the pots and pans, answering my questions with good humor and occasionally poking sly fun at my ignorance. All our food was made from scratch, from the bread crumbs that coated shnitzels, to the daily rice and black beans, to Floating Island for dessert. (For some reason, those ladies loved to make Floating Island, although I don’t believe they ever ate any of it themselves.) They made lots of condensed milk for us back then.

My mother has often said that she misses her two girls, for girls they were when they worked in our home – rather, young women whose own watchful mothers accompanied them to the interview when my Dad hired them. We have often wondered if dainty-stepping Rose married her Portuguese policeman, whom she didn’t like but who was terribly in love with her and wrote letters (first read by her parents) offering his honorable hand and heart. Lydia, who was a little older and not so pretty, graduated from housemaid to cook in our home. Although only semi-literate, she could make out a recipe from Dona Benta’s cookbook and proved to have a light, sure hand with that savory Brazilian fare. I hope she married a nice man and has long been surrounded by grandchildren of her own.

That was long ago.

But condensed milk. All it takes it to put a liter or two or three in a big, wide pan and let it simmer without boiling till it’s reduced by at least half, if not more. Wide is the operative word here; you want lots of space for the water in the milk to evaporate. Once the milk steams, you must keep stirring and removing the skin that forms on top of the hot milk, or it will prevent evaporation. And scrape the bottom every so often to keep stray bits of fat that drop down from scorching. That’s where patience comes in.

It may take as little as half an hour, or up to several hours, depending on the quantity of milk you’re reducing. Get it down to at least half, if not a quarter of the original volume. The milk will turn tan to beige over the process and start giving up that sweet, condensed-milk odor. When it’s been reduced, allow it to cool somewhat, and strain if you want it free of floating skin particles and the inevitable slightly scorched bits. Refrigerate and use as needed. Condensed milk freezes well. If you’re fond of recipes that require it, freeze by the cupful or 2-cupfuls.

Brazilians reserve the skinny layers and when there’s enough, make biscoitos de nata from it – little milk-fat cookies. They are rare nuggets because they’re really a by-product of making condensed milk at home. I have Dona Benta’s recipe but confess that I didn’t make them this time. I put the cupful in the fridge and promptly forgot about it till it did get too old for use. I am ashamed.

But next time I make condensed milk, I’ll make you the biscoitos. Meantime, here’s the recipe, with a photo borrowed from jmarconi via Flickr, whose images of northeastern Brazil gave me a shock of recognition and nostalgia.

Milk Cookies (Biscoitos de Nata)

Source: Dona Benta Comer Bem, Companhia Editora Nacional, 1969 edition.

Ingredients:

2 cups of skimmed milk solids

1 tablespoon butter

1/2 teaspoon salt

Flour, as needed

Method:

Put the milk solids, butter and salt in a bowl. Add just enough flour to make a tender dough. Either roll out on a floured surface and cut out circles, or shape as in the photo above by dropping spoonfulls onto a baking tray lined with parchment and pressing a fork on each to make indentations. Bake at 375° F – 190° C for 12 minutes or until golden.

Another thing you can do with excess milk is make dulce de leche. The  granular texture of the home-made product doesn’t resemble the slick commercial stuff, which is usually smoothed down with glycerin. But it’s the real, original milk jam. Use it to fill pastry, make ice cream, sweeten coffee as they do in Cuba, or spread on toast. Or just serve it on a little plate, with a coffee spoon. Like any other jam, it needs added sugar.

Dulce de Leche

Ingredients:

For each liter of milk, 250 grams – 1 cup of sugar and 1 teaspoon vanilla essence or lemon zest.

Method:

In a large, wide pan, simmer the milk and sugar together over low heat, stirring often. Cook till the milk has reduced to a semi-solid mass and you can see the bottom of the pan when you stir. Add vanilla or lemon zest just before removing from the fire.

Photo of dulce de leche by Fabiana of the delicious Brazilian blog, Figos & Funghis.

Sometimes nothing but a peanut butter cookie will do. With a glass of milk, naturally. And something different in the cookie – not chocolate chips. Looking through my freezer, which often yields gratifying surprises, I find a bag of cranberries. Ah! Perfect.

This recipe requires a lot of cranberries. A lot of everything, in fact. So the cookies, which have a slightly crisp crust yielding to a just-chewy-enough interior with those bright little berries in it – are good just before a brisk, 30-minute walk. And don’t eat too many before heading out.

Just a word to the wise.

Peanut Butter/Cranberry Cookies

Printable version here.

Yield: about 45 cookies

Ingredients:

1 cup margarine or butter at room temperature

1 cup brown sugar

1 cup white sugar

2 large eggs

1 cup peanut butter

3 cups flour

2 teaspoons baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

1-1/4 cups dried cranberries

Method:

Preheat oven to 350° F – 180° C.

1. Beat margarine (or butter) till smooth. Add the brown and white sugar, beating till all is blended and creamy.

2. Beat the eggs and add to the butter mixture. Beat in well. Add the peanut butter, and beat some more.

3. Sift together the flour, baking soda and salt. Add to the peanut butter mixture and mix thoroughly. Add the cranberries and beat, beat, beat again, until the fruit is well distributed throughout the mass.

4. Line a cookie sheet with baking paper. If not using paper, don’t grease the sheet.  Use a tablespoon to separate pieces of dough onto the cookie sheet.

5. Bake 10-12 minutes or until the cookies are slightly brown. Allow them to cool down; they will become crisp.