“Nobody I know likes honey cake all that much. Including myself. Unless you count my mother” – Susan Weissman, author of Feeding Eden: The Trials and Triumphs of a Food Allergy Family.
“I hate the rubbery texture of most honey cakes” – Arthur Schwartz, the “Food Maven.”
“They were coarse and totally unloved… This life is too short to eat terrible cake” – Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen.
Well, that doesn’t sound too promising, does it?
As you scour the web about honey cake, a Rosh Hashanah tradition, you realize that many people wouldn’t place it in the Jewish culinary pantheon alongside latkes, hamantashen and cheesecake.
Actually, honey cake is not even an ancient Rosh Hashanah food like black-eyed peas, leeks, spinach, dates, carrots, gourds or sheep’s heads. All of these are part of the Rosh Hashanah “seder”. These foods have names in Hebrew (or Yiddish) which are reminiscent of – or even puns of – good omens for the Jewish people.
So how did honey cake find its way onto our holiday table? Leah Zeldes explains, “Honey cakes, perhaps baked by Jewish slaves, were among the sacrifices sealed into the tombs of the pharaohs. Basboosa, a honey-drenched Middle Eastern cake made from semolina, is likely closer to the original.”
Leah Koenig writes in the Forward that the first Jewish honey cakes (or lekach, which comes from the German word lecke, meaning “lick”) originated in Germany in the Middle Ages. “During this period, the dessert was primarily eaten on Purim and Shavuot and sometimes served as a treat for young yeshiva students… From Germany, the dish traveled to Eastern Europe, where Jews celebrated with honey cakes at simchot (happy occasions) and holidays alike.
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According to [the late food writer Gil] Marks, the overall use of honey as an ingredient declined in Eastern European cooking during the 17th century but remained popular in Jewish cuisine.”
Lekach: A Piece of Honey Cake with the Rebbe
For all the naysayers, there was a time not long ago when thousands of people would line up for a piece of honey cake. Truth be told, they were probably lining up so that they could spend a moment with the person who was handing out the cake. That person was the Lubavitcher Rebbe who on the eve of Yom Kippur would distribute a piece of lekach, honey cake, to his followers.
The reason? On Rosh Hashanah one’s material prosperity for the year was written, and on Yom Kippur it will be sealed. In the event that it was decreed on Rosh Hashanah that one should face poverty in the coming year and be forced to ask for handouts, it is hoped that requesting the piece of sweet cake will be sufficient to fulfill the decree.
Okay, so maybe it wasn’t the honey cake the chasidim were really after but the blessing that came with it.
Won’t someone come to the defense of this food? Someone like Penny Gershman and her Zadie’s Orange Honey Cake. Penny’s grandfather was a synagogue rabbi for most of his career but when he was young, he spent his summers working in the kitchens of hotels in the Catskill Mountains where he learned to cook and bake.
“I have vivid memories of the two of us standing in his two-by nothing kitchen in Kew Gardens Hills, NY baking orange honey cake. … Now, around this time every year, I go to the store and, without thinking, I buy the jars of honey. I have taken it upon myself to keep making the orange honey cake for every Rosh Hashanah. I make it for my parents and my sister. They know if I don’t make it, no one else will, because it was my special thing with my grandfather. I may not be the scholar my grandfather was, nor am I the advisor and friend he was to literally thousands of people but I am helping to pass on the legacy that was my Zadie. And I do this by making our cake.”
Next time, in pursuit of the perfect honey cake.