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Why Dairy?

Many explanations exist for the tradition of dairy dishes to celebrate Shavuot.

that surround Pitigliano, with our paper
bags full of broken pieces of our handmade
matzot. … The fish seemed to know that
we would come because they were there by
the hundreds as soon as the first crumbs
reached the water.”

Louis Finkelman | Contributing Writer

A

famous food custom for Shavuot:
cheesecake and other dairy
delights, like cheesecake and

blintzes.
In the 16th century, Rabbi Moshe
Isserles observed “the custom everywhere
is to eat dairy foods on the first day of
Shavuot” (Orah Hayyim 494:3). By every-
where, he meant everywhere in Poland,
where he lived, in Italy, in Greece and in
North Africa, where Shavuot comes with
fancy dairy foods.
Rabbinic literature provides us with at
least a dozen ingenious explanations for
why we serve dairy on Shavuot, which
begins this year the night of June 11.
Perhaps milk, the food of innocent babies
who have never sinned, befits Shavuot,
when we commemorate receiving the pure
Torah.
Another explanation: The male lover,
in the erotic biblical book Song of Songs,
compares kissing his beloved to tasting
“milk and honey under your tongue”
(4:11). The rabbis read the delicious kiss
as a metaphor for the ecstatic revelation at
Sinai, which we commemorate on Shavuot.
Or maybe our ancestors first heard
the laws of kashrut on Shavuot and dis-
covered that they had no kosher meat,
so, of course, they made dairy. Rabbi
Nathan Laufer, in his forthcoming book
Rendezvous with God, suggests that
because at Sinai our ancestors ate manna,
which tasted “like rich creme” (Numbers
11:8), so we also eat creamy foods.
Perhaps the most convincing reason for
dairy foods on Shavuot is that milk and
cream are plentiful this time of year. In
the era of factory farms and supermarkets,
we do not often realize that cows produce
much more milk in May.
Rabbi Isserles wrote “dairy foods” not
“drinking milk.” All human babies drink
milk, but, except for Northern Europeans,
most adults have trouble digesting milk.
Many Jews, even blue-eyed Ashkenazic
Jews from Northern Europe, true to our
Middle Eastern ancestry, tend to do better
with cheese than with fresh milk.
Recipes from Northern Jewry include
the beloved cheesecake, cheese pancakes
and blintzes; recipes from Greece and
North Africa include “Siete Cielos,” Ladino
for “Seven Heavens,” seven layers of pro-
gressively smaller circlets of cake piled up
with symbolic shapes baked on the tiniest
top circlet.

30 June 9 • 2016

*

Rabbinic literature provides us

with at least a dozen ingenious

explanations for why we ser ve

dair y on Shavuot.

MATZAH ON SHAVUOT
A little-known food custom for Shavuot: eat-
ing food made from matzah.
The source for this custom seems clear
because we count the days from the Festival
of Matzot until Shavuot. Rabbi Mordechai
Greenberg observes that “Pesach and
Shavuot are one festival. Just as Sukkot is
seven days,” capped off by an eighth day
called “atzeret,” so, too, Pesach” lasts seven
days, and, seven weeks later, it gets capped
off by Shavuot. Emphasizing this relation-
ship, the Talmudic rabbis called Shavuot
“Atzeret.”
Edda Servi Machlin, in her book The
Classical Cuisine of the Italian Jews, combines

recipes with recollections of her childhood
in Italy.
“In Pitigliano, in addition to the dairy
dishes, a typical Shavuot menu would
include Matza Coperta, a Passover dish
repeated on this occasion because Shavuot
… comes exactly seven weeks after Passover,”
she writes.
The Jews in Pitigliano baked their own
handmade matzah in time for Passover.
After Shavuot, they ate no more matzah
until the next year, “yet no matzah should
be thrown away. Feeding it to fish was a
beautiful solution. After the Shavuot mid-
day meal, we would go in groups of families
to the banks of one of the clear water rivers

EDDA SERVI MACHLIN’S
MATZA COPERTA MATZAH
OMELET
6 matzot
12 eggs, lightly beaten
½ teaspoon salt
½ cup dark, seedless raisins
¼ cup pinoli (pine nuts)
Freshly grated rind of 1 lemon
6 Tbls. olive oil (or other vegetable oil)
¼ cup granulated sugar
1 tsp. cinnamon
Soak the matzot in cold water until they
are soft. Squeeze the water out, but do not
leave the matzot too dry. Combine with
eggs, salt, raisins, nuts and lemon rind.
Heat 3 Tbls. oil in a large, heavy skil-
let. Add the mixture slowly and flatten with
a rubber spatula. Fry on a low heat until a
light crust is formed on the bottom of the
omelet. Invert into a large dish.
Add the remaining 3 Tbls. of oil to
the skillet, and slide the other side of the
omelet into it. Fry gently until a light crust
is formed on that side. The omelet is done
when it is firm all the way through.
Place on a serving plate and pat dry with
a paper towel. Combine sugar and cin-
namon and top omelet with this mixture.
Serves 8.

TRADITIONAL CHEESECAKE
1½ cups graham cracker crumbs
3 Tbls. sugar
1/3 cup butter or margarine, melted
4 pkg. (8 oz. each) cream cheese,
softened
1 cup sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
4 eggs
Heat oven to 325°F.
Combine graham crumbs, 3 Tbls. sugar
and butter; press onto bottom of 9-inch
springform pan.
Beat cream cheese, 1 cup sugar and
vanilla with mixer until blended. Add eggs,
1 at a time, mixing on low speed after each
just until blended. Pour over crust.
Bake 55 min. or until center is almost
set. Run knife around rim of pan to loosen
cake; cool before removing rim. Refrigerate
cheesecake four hours.
Source: Kraft