Street party stuffed cabbage

The annual Chandos Road Festival will be this Sunday afternoon the 27th September. Fortuitously, the Jewish festival of Sukkot begins at midnight on Sunday, which gives us an opportunity to produce some appropriate festival food alongside the salt beef beigels with which we hope to feed the masses!

Aron's sauerkraut

Sukkot is in part a harvest festival and it is traditional to serve food at Sukkot that represents the bountifulness of harvest time. Vegetables and fruit dishes garnished with pomegranate are served and in Ashkenazi culture stuffed cabbage and chicken soup with kreplach (triangular ravioli stuffed with meat) are popular.

Our Sukkot menu includes Spinach salad with walnuts and pomegranate, Chicken soup with kreplach and Hungarian stuffed cabbage.

Of all the unskilled work that I've found myself doing since we opened Aron's, there are two jobs that have transported me back to another place and time. The first is filleting salt herring and the second is shredding cabbage to make sauerkraut.

It used to be common place in the Hungarian countryside for families to be semi self-sufficient. I was fortunate enough to know one such family very well and it was always a pleasure to visit them and help with seasonal work in their small holding. Maize was grown to feed their two pigs. They had a huge walnut tree, lots of apples, peaches, apricots, quince, strawberries and vegetables galore. Vegetables would be pickled or more accurately fermented in brine which would then keep for months through the winter. Baby melons, green tomatoes, peppers, tiny "pearl" onions, carrots, cucumbers and of course cabbage.

The outer leaves of the cabbage were first removed whole and retained as "wrappers". The remaining leaves were then finely shredded with a huge long bladed knife and submerged, along with the whole leaves, in a brine flavoured with caraway seeds and juniper berries.

Stuffed cabbage was one of the dishes that would be made when the whole family gathered to help with the bi-annual pig killing. Everyone had individual responsibility for one or more parts of the piggy process and I was left alternatively begging for work or consuming countless plum palinkas and proffered tidbits until I was incapable of doing anything except watching.

Our recipe uses minced beef rather than pork and instead of smoked pork bacon we will use our own smoked lamb bacon. But otherwise the stuffed cabbage we will serve on Sunday will be essentially the same.

The meat is mixed with rice, paprika, onions, garlic, herbs and eggs to bind it and it's then formed into patties and wrapped in individual cabbage leaves. The cabbage bundles are placed in layers in a large pot and covered with more onions, the diced smoked bacon and plenty of shredded sauerkraut from which the excess salt has first been rinsed. Water to cover and simmered gently for about 3 hours.

We'll serve it with a slice of fresh bread and a generous dollop of sour cream.

When I shred cabbage it takes me back to autumnal days spent on the Great Hungarian Plain enjoying the hospitality of Sanyi and Margitka and their extended family.

dinner menu plus..

This weeks dinner menu includes a little background info about the dishes:

Aron's Deli dinner menu
Thu 24th Sep - Sat 26th Sep

Starters
Bone marrow with pickled garlic, paprika and rye toast £6.25
Chicken soup with matzo balls, kreplach, soup mandel & egg noodles £6.50
Hortobagyi pancakes filled with veal goulash and baked with sour cream £7.00

Mains
Roast duck leg served with braised red cabbage & onion crushed potato £12.50
Hake goujons in an almond and breadcrumb crust with a green salad £13.75
Romanian skirt steak with a board sauce & potatoes sauteed in goose fat £14.50

Warm bone marrow with toast is one of my favourite dishes at Rosenstein Vendeglo in Budapest. Gently rub the toast with the pickled garlic clove, crush the marrow onto the toast, sprinkle with paprika and a little salt and enjoy (preferably with a glass of kekfrankos).

Chicken soup with everything. Corn fed chicken gives a natural yellow hue to our chicken soup (we don't condone cheating with a pinch of saffron). This soup contains, chicken meat, celery and carrot battens along with our home made matzo balls, kreplach (triangular ravioli filled with chicken liver and chives), crispy soup mandel crackers and home made egg noodles.

The Hortobagy is a national park on the Great Hungarian Plain in eastern Hungary, These savoury pancakes are a recent Hungarian culinary creation, first becoming popular with East German tourists in the 70s and 80s.

Roast duck leg with red cabbage is another classic Hungarian combination that is best enjoyed with a glass of kekfrankos. Raising ducks and geese was a trade synonymous with Jewish people in Hungary and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. This dish is an autumnal tradition, the remaining meat and liver is preserved in its own fat for winter consumption, the neck is stuffed, the skin turned into crackling and finally the carcass is made into soup.

Hake goujons with a side salad is an adaptation of another of Tibor Rosenstein's dishes. At Rosenstein's it is made with fogas (pike perch or zander) a freshwater fish. Here we make it with Hake. The crisp almonds neatly complement both the fish and the plainly dressed salad. Try it with a chilled glass of Wien1.

Romanian steak is actually a New York City inspired dish. In New York skirt steak is also known as Roumanian (sic) steak because it was a cut eaten a lot by Romanian Jewish immigrants. We serve it seasoned with olive oil and fresh herbs accompanied by potatoes sauteed in goose fat.

Festival food September 2015

The following is available in addition to our regular menu: Rosh Hashanah - Jewish New Year (Monday 14th Sep)
available Tue 15th Sep - Sun 20th Sep
New season apples with Hungarian akacia honey	£1.50
Sweet Potato Latkes with apple and mango sauce	£5.75
Chicken soup with matzo balls and soup mandel (mandlen)	£5.95
Spinach salad with pomegranate and walnuts	£4.95
Honey cake	£3.25
Challah with honey and raisins (Barhesz)	£0.60 / slice
Mint tea	£1.85
Yom Kippur - the day of atonement (Wed 23rd Sep)
available Tue 22nd Sep - Sat 26th Sep
Chopped herring with beigel chips	£5.25
Matjes herring and new potato salad with apple and sour cream	£5.50
Chicken soup with matzo balls, kreplach, noodles and soup mandel	£6.25
Lemon tea	£1.85
Sukkot - Feast of the Tabernacles (Sun 27th Sep - Sun 4th Oct)
available Sunday 27th Sep - Sun 4th Oct
Hungarian stuffed cabbage (Sun 27th Sep only)	£9.75
Chicken soup with matzo balls, kreplach, noodles and soup mandel	£6.25
Spinach salad with pomegranate and walnuts	£4.95

Appetizers

Our menu is divided into three main sections: Deli sandwiches, Brunch and Appetizers (spelled the american way with a z). Understandably many people assume that the appetizers are our starters or dishes that offer a lighter alternative to the meat heavy staples to be found elsewhere on the menu.

This is partly true as our appetizers mostly consist of smoked or pickled fish but it doesn't explain the use of the word appetizer.

Aron's doesn't operate a kosher kitchen for reasons that I will do my best to explain at a later date. However we do make a conscious effort to adhere to many of the principles of a kosher kitchen - for example our use of cuts of beef and veal from the forequarter and not the hindquarter which can't be used to produce kosher meat.


In this way we endeavour to bring a little more authenticity to our food.

The original New York Jewish Delicatessens were established in the late 19th Century to feed the Jewish immigrant community . Many of these immigrants were single young men who worked long hours in the rag trade to make enough money to bring over the rest of their families. In the absence of a grandmother to cook for them, the delis provided this new community with much needed kosher home cooking.

The deli sandwich developed as an effective solution to the problem of greasy finger marks spoiling the client's expensive cloth.

But a kosher kitchen requires the complete separation of meat from dairy and the Delicatessens, some of them in tiny premises were full of sausage, smoked meat and chicken. The solution to this problem was peculiar to the development of Jewish food in New York with large numbers of Appetizer shops producing and selling dairy products (cream cheese and sour cream) as well as fish in all manner of variants but absolutely no meat! Russ and Daughters is one of the last remaining appetizer shops in New York.

http://www.russanddaughters.com/whatisappetizing.php

So our appetizers, whilst produced in the same kitchen as our sandwiches, are named after this NYC tradition of pickled herring, smoked fish salad, smoked salmon, lox and cheese blintzes etc.

A large part of the satisfaction I get from running Aron's Deli is through learning about the rich culture and history of Jewish food. The stories behind the food we make at Aron's.

Dinner menu

Aron's Deli dinner menu
Thu 10th Sep - Sat 12th Sep

Starters
Bone Marrow with garlic, paprika and rye toast / Csontvelő pirítóssal £6.25
Hungarian beef consommé with seasonal vegetables and matzo balls / Marha leves maceszgombóccal £6.50
Gefilte fish with carrots and chrein £6.75

Mains
Kasha varnishkes with duck and gizzard confit £12.50
Romanian skirt steak with a board sauce and potatoes sautéed in goose fat £14.50
Veal schnitzel with pickled baby green tomatoes, preserved lemon, cucumber salad and parsley potatoes / Borjú Bécsi £14.50

Dinner is served every Thursday, Friday and Saturday evening from 6pm in place of our brunch menu. Our full range of deli sandwiches and appetizers are also available in the evening.