Bear with me on this one
I found Molly Yeh’s blog by accident. I had just moved into an apartment with a decent kitchen and was ready to start cooking but, I didn’t know where to begin. It is hard to cook when you haven’t yet compiled a binder full of go-to recipes in the back of your mind. So, I Googled “best food bloggers” and Molly happened to be on the first list I opened. Thank goodness. Since then I have been following her blog and Instagram and attempting her recipes (try the pistachio cream cake!) all while admiring her creativity and dedication, especially when it comes to cooking and baking for special occasions.
When it was almost Rosh Hashanah, Molly Yeh posted an orange juice challah recipe to her blog. This is my favorite type of Yeh recipe. She often takes classic dishes, “inspired by my Jewish and Asian roots and my new midwestern surroundings, bits about life around the farm, or tales from adventures near and far” so her About Me page says, and spins them slightly. This recipe is essentially a standard challah recipe with orange juice and orange zest added. As I delighted in the spin-off, Gary made sure to tell me that this is a “wacky challah recipe” and, many would argue, is wrong. But, I don't have any Jewish relatives so I didn’t have to worry about pleasing any traditionalists by attempting this recipe. I made it once for my family in Virginia and once with Gary - it was that good.
The way that Molly handles cooking and baking within tradition inspired a deep, and incomplete, dive into my personal thoughts and experiences with traditions. She has two distinctive familial backgrounds and keeps up to date with each’s traditions as well as the place-based traditions of her current and past homes. She caters to and admires the traditions, making sure to create the right dish at the right time each year, but occasionally adds tahini or orange or everything bagel seasoning to make it her own. So, the challah is on the table at Rosh Hashanah but it's unlike any other challah.
It took me hours of wondering why my family doesn’t have any traditions to remind myself of the Weeks Family rituals. I couldn’t pinpoint anything we do or make or eat every year at the exact same time, no exceptions. But, I think there are two that qualify: orange cake and cornbread stuffing. There is an orange cake recipe that has been baked and tweaked and baked again in the Weeks family since before I was born (it's even coming up soon in a future blog post!). While we don’t serve it for every birthday, it is 100% a birthday staple. If it isn’t served, it is discussed while eating whatever cake we chose to make instead. It's such a Weeks birthday staple that my grandmother once overnight shipped one, fully iced, to my dad so that it arrived at his house just in time for birthday dinner.
The cornbread stuffing tradition has a similar framework. By no means have the Weeks’ served it at every Thanksgiving, but I did insist on flying to South Carolina this year with the only stipulation being that my mother makes multiple platters of it. There is no better stuffing than this - cornbread, walnuts, sausage, and little else all crispy and topped with gravy. This is a dish that Clay and I dream about even during the sweltering summer months and have sometimes convinced my mom to make at Christmas too.
The thing that makes me pause before calling these traditions is the looseness in which they are observed. Yes, my mom makes cornbread stuffing at Thanksgiving, but it's not a necessity. Thanksgiving would not be ruined without it. Yes, we like to have orange cake at birthdays but by no means has it been every birthday and by no means would we want that. Too much of a good thing, y’know? I want to say that this flexibility, these loose traditions, are tied to our family framework. Holidays become very confusing logistically when you’re parents are divorced. Its enough to be together and happy and celebrating in whatever form possible. Having to develop traditions within that structure and then carry them over the years when you are with the other parent for the holiday would not be easy or fun. This, plus the non-expectation of having the same dish at the same time every year, makes us enjoy when we do have them more. How often does the act of tradition become a burden more than an enjoyment?
Our traditions are more like an urge than a ritual. These dishes are foods that are ingrained in us, but are not time or place based. They are “oh my goodness we haven’t had orange cake in so long!” based and “Mom, how am I supposed to live without your cornbread stuffing this year!?” based. They are specific cravings that we indulge in whenever they arise - it just so happens that they are loosely tied to special occasions.
Still, I am nostalgic for strict, ancestral traditions. The taste of the dishes that had been slaved over for days and have been the focal point of drooling daydreams for a full year is, I assume, incomparable to any other dish. I’m also sure that the stress surrounding these occasions is palatable. Even thinking about making 1,000 pierogies for one meal makes me sweat. But your mother and your mother’s mother and her mother’s mother have been doing it for centuries so you better get your butt in the kitchen and start cooking!
Looking at Molly Yeh’s blog, I get jealous when she has classic recipes to post for every holiday. I envy the fact that she has grandparents that sit in the kitchen with her for hours to teach her the correct way to make lefse. But I appreciate the freedom that I hold in not having yearly productions of day-long cooking looming over me. I am not beholden to any tradition. I don't have any relatives to impress or perform for to produce perfect replicas of our family recipes. I am free to make whatever I like, to create my own traditions, even. I can take the time to appreciate the cultures of other others through preparing their dishes though, I realize that these dishes will never be the same when I create them, but that’s not the point. I’m not upstaging anyone’s mother’s mother’s mother. They are meant to honor and enjoy -to appreciate through each moment of preparation and eating.
Despite my initial urges to have annual traditions, I realize there is nothing missing. We have had great holidays without strict traditions and we will continue to have them. If that cornbread stuffing doesn’t make it to the table this year, it will still be a wonderful meal. The absence of the cornbread will simply make way for a new dish for us to try. A dish that may become a Thanksgiving staple. Or a dish that we throw out. Or a dish that we remember years from now and decide to resurrect. There are no rules when there are no traditions.
To make Molly Yeh’s recipe pull double duty as a half-baked thought experiment in traditions and blog fodder, I found a recipe in the Salem County Cookbook to compare it to, the Orange Bread.
The challah:
Obviously delicious. It was soft, warm, and lightly sweet. The smell of the orange in the dough was more present than the taste and adding the black sesame seeds on top of the loaves gave this recipe the nuttiness needed to balance out the fragrance of the orange. I will definitely be trying this again - maybe as the bread for a turkey sandwich?
The orange bread:
Because of the substitution of baking powder for yeast, this turned out to be more muffin-y than bread-y. It was dense and a bit crumbly and the orange flavoring was forward, but not overpowering. I would make this again for any of my early morning pastry needs.Like a muffin, the orange bread had a crunchy, almost caramelized top to it. Actually, because it's cooked in a loaf pan, the entire outside of the loaf was like a muffin top! You won’t be needing to call Newman over to take care of any garbage bags full of muffin bottoms anytime soon...
For the recipe, click here.