Hamantaschen make it big
AMY SARA CLARK
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
First it was bagels. Then rugelach.
What's the next Jewish food to go mainstream?
Could be hamantaschen.
Hamantaschen now can be seen next to mini-bundt cakes and lemon poppy-seed muffins in the display case of your local coffee shop.
Several large supermarket chains now carry them, and it's no longer something they bring in just around Purim time. The triangular pastries - shaped to reflect the three-cornered hat of Purim villain Haman - increasingly are being sold year-round.
"It's a staple," says Chris Calfa, who manages Lassen and Hennigs, a small gourmet food store in New York.
He carries them throughout the year and says he sells approximately a dozen a day.
"They're definitely more popular than they used to be," says Rennee Apostolou, who manages Prolific Oven, a bakery and coffee shop in Palo Alto, Calif.
While the shop used to sell hamantaschen only at Purim, about five years ago they began offering them year-round because of customer demand. People treat them just like any other cookie, Apostolou says.
"We fill ours with figs, so to them it's like a Fig Newton," she says.
Locally, Karsh's Bakery carries danish-style hamantaschen for Purim, but also produces cookie-dough hamantaschen year round.
"Everybody just likes hamantaschen so much that we carry the cookie-dough (style) all year," explains owner Gloria Gardner.
Lynne Wellish, owner of Cookies Amour in Phoenix, is preparing for her first Purim running her kosher bakery. She says the bakery has been making hamantaschen for over a month now.
"We were kind of shocked that we kept selling out of them," she explains. "First we just made a prototype for fun and people were buying them."
In Yiddish, the word "hamantaschen" means "Haman's pockets." According to "The Jewish Book of Why," this reflects a tradition that Haman filled his pockets with bribe money. The cookies are folded to form a pocket that is usually filled with poppy seeds, fruits, jam or nuts.
In Hebrew, the cookies are called oznay Haman, or "Haman's ears."
Many people apparently do not know that the cookies are connected with a specific Jewish holiday. Calfa, for example, was surprised to learn that hamantaschen are connected with Purim.
"I had no idea," he says.
Gardner agrees that not all hamantashen noshers are Jewish. "It's a delicious kind of a treat," she says. "Everybody likes them, not just Jewish people."
Tish Boyle, food editor of Pastry Art and Design Magazine, said she thinks the increasing popularity of hamantaschen is due not only to new interest among non-Jews, but also among Jews who are no longer religious.
"They recognize the shape and are willing to buy it for nostalgic reasons," she says. "It's like comfort food."
Joan Nathan, cookbook author and host of the weekly PBS program "Jewish Cooking in America," says the popularization of hamantaschen has stripped them of their cultural meaning.
"I like the fact that you can only have hamantaschen at Purim. To me that's special," Nathan says.
The new year-round popularity of hamantaschen is "like getting challah all days of the week," she says. "I don't want to get challah all days of the week. I want it on Saturday."
Among the stores where hamantaschen have gone mainstream is Costco, a membership wholesale club where people can get discounts by buying products in bulk.
Like two other wholesale clubs, Sam's Club and B.J.'s, Costco gets its hamantaschen from David's Cookies.
"Costco just got 140,000 pounds," says John Griner, the plant manager of David's Cookies, which manufactures more than 6 million hamantaschen a year.
The company sells most of its hamantaschen to large supermarket chains and wholesale clubs.
Bob Goodman, who markets David's Cookies to major supermarket chains, says supermarkets started carrying hamantaschen to appeal to Jewish clients, but discovered that they appeal to non-Jews as well.
"One of our supermarket chains ordered about 14,000 packages in the past seven weeks. I can't imagine that's all for Jewish people," he says. "You don't have to be Italian to like pasta sauce."
Many stores don't even call the cookies hamantaschen.
"Different places call them different names," Goodman says. "In New England, they call them 'patriot hats' " - a reference to the three-cornered hats worn by Colonial-era Americans.
Jim Dolan, a vice president for retail sales for David's Cookies, says his company markets hamantaschen not as a Jewish product, but as a variation of the chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin cookies that David's Cookies is known for.
That's because the company's products weren't kosher when David's Cookies first opened in 1979.
Ari Margulies, an Orthodox Jew, bought the company in 1995 and made all of the cookies kosher.
He kept the company's predominantly non-Jewish client base, but began marketing Jewish products to them.
Margulies hopes to make hamantaschen even more popular than they already are, perhaps as ubiquitous as rugelach.
When a reporter recently visited the David's Cookie's factory in Fairfield, N.J., Margulies sat at his desk juggling phone calls. He moved to the United States from London 10 years ago, and his British accent is still apparent.
As he accompanies the visitor to the factory floor, the smell of baking hamantaschen fill the air.
This is not a mom-and-pop operation.
The flour is held in 18-foot-high metal containers that look like miniature grain silos. The dough is mixed in a 360-quart mixer. In the weeks before Purim, Margulies's factory dedicates half its operation to hamantaschen.
To fill the flood of incoming orders, David's Cookies has to bake hamantaschen 24/6 - the factory is closed on Shabbat - for three weeks straight.
Hamantaschen are more labor intensive than most cookies.
While the dough is rolled and cut into circles mechanically, the cookies must be filled, shaped and packed individually by hand.
David's Cookies produces some hamantaschen under its own label, but most of the cookies are produced for other companies, such as Rokeach, that sell them using their own names.
Raphi Salem sells them under his own label on his Web site, www.purim.com.
"Everyone says I sell the best hamantaschen around," he says. "I feel like I'm fooling people, but then I tell them. No one ever minds.''
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