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An apple bakes slowly in a schnitzer atop a wood stove. Photograph by Lisa Bramen.

While visiting an Irish friend in the Kilkenny countryside a few years back, I admired her mother’s charming wood cookstove. It was nearly the size of a twin bed, was always kept burning, and produced daily loaves of delicious brown bread and amazing apple pies. But, until I moved to New York from California, I had no idea that many people in this country still use wood stoves to heat their homes.

I recently bought an old farmhouse in the Adirondack mountains, and I now have my own wood stove. It is considerably smaller than my friend’s mother’s, and is designed primarily for keeping the house warm and cozy, not cooking. But, as I’ve recently discovered, it does have some culinary uses.

One of the best (and most unusual) housewarming presents I received was a pair of apple schnitzers, which are little cast-iron dishes for baking apples atop the wood stove (they can also be used in a regular oven if you don’t have a wood stove). They are round, covered in speckled blue enamel and have a spike in the center, onto which you place a cored apple, with some cinnamon and sugar, or whatever else you like, sprinkled on top or in the cavity where the core was (the spike is small enough that there is still space). The apple cooks from the inside out.

I hadn’t heard of a schnitzer until a few months ago, when, at my other job as an editor of a regional Adirondack magazine, I was helping to edit a cookbook compiled from recipes that have been in the publication in the past 40 years. This being the northern part of New York, a good portion of the recipes were apple-based, and one of them was for an apple schnitzer. According to the person who contributed the recipe many years ago, schnitzers are an old German invention. The origin of the word is a mystery I have yet to solve; my German-English dictionary defines Schnitzer as meaning “carver.” Through an Internet search and my iffy college German I gleaned that schnitzers no longer appear to be in common use in Germany, at least by that name (I found a forum where a woman was looking for suggestions on how to bake an apple on her wood stove, and the replies including using aluminum foil, a Romertopf clay pot and something called an Apfelbratgerät, or, roughly, apple-baking device, which may in fact be a schnitzer but I couldn’t find a picture). However, it does appear that the Amish still use them. Lehman’s, an Ohio retailer that was established in 1955 to serve the local Amish community, sells schnitzers on its Web site.

I tried my schnitzer for the first time last night, using a Macintosh (I think a thinner-skinned variety might work better), some brown sugar and cinnamon. It smelled delicious while it cooked, and, about an hour later, I had a yummy baked apple.

I would love to see what else I can cook on my wood stove. Suggestions, anyone?

Courtesy Flickr user PumpkinWayne

Unless you leave your house (or turn off all the lights and hide, as at least one person I know does) this Saturday evening, chances are good that you’ll be faced with at least a few sweet-toothed, half-pint monsters on your doorstep.

It’s a funny custom, isn’t it? Dressing cute children up like ghouls and goblins, and sending them door-to-door to beg for fistfuls of usually forbidden treats… whose idea was that?

The custom of trick-or-treating may have Celtic origins, related to the pagan celebration of Samhain, which marked the end of the harvest and the threshold of a new season. According to this paper by anthropologist Bettina Arnold:

The association between Halloween and ghosts and spirits today comes from the Celtic belief that it was at this time of transition between the old year and the new that the barrier between this world and the Otherworld where the dead and supernatural beings lived became permeable….Trick-or-treating is a modern day holdover of the practice of propitiating, or bribing, the spirits and their human counterparts roaming the world of the living on that night. Pumpkins carved as jack-o-lanterns would not have been part of traditional Halloween festivals in Celtic Europe, since pumpkins are New World plants, but large turnips were hollowed out, carved with faces and placed in windows to ward off evil spirits.

Others argue that Halloween is a Christian, not a pagan holiday, pointing to the early Catholic church’s celebrations of All Hallows (Saints) Day, and the night before it, All Hallows E’en (Evening), when Christians were instructed to pray for the souls of the departed. I can see how that would lead to a certain fascination with ghosts, but the candy? Well, back in medieval Europe, kids and beggars would go “souling” on All Hallows Eve…which sounds like a macabre version of door-to-door Christmas caroling: Instead of a merry song, the visitors offered prayers for dead loved ones, in exchange for “soul cakes.” (These, too, may have had pagan roots.)

Some chap named Charles Dickens mentions this tradition in an 1887 issue of his literary journal, “All the Year Round” (actually, I think it must have been Charles Dickens, Jr., who took over the journal after his dad died in 1870):

“…it was a custom to bake on All Hallow E’en, a cake for every soul in the house, which cakes were eaten on All Souls’ Day. The poor people used to go round begging for some cakes or anything to make merry with on this night. Their petition consisted in singing a doggerel sort of rhyme: A soul cake, A soul cake; Have mercy on all Christian souls; For a soul cake; A soul cake. In Cheshire on this night they once had a custom called ‘Hob Nob,’ which consisted of a man carrying a dead horse’s head covered with a sheet to frighten people.”

Eep! That’s quite a trick, alright. In America these days, not too many people take the “trick” part of trick-or-treating seriously anymore; it’s more like: “Hi, gimme candy.” But according to this New York Times article, Halloween night trickery is a problem in the United Kingdom, where “egg-and-flour-throwing, attacks on fences and doors, menacing gatherings of disaffected drunken youths and the theft of garden ornaments” are enough to make some people—gasp!—”hate Halloween.”

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When I wrote about apple picking in Massachusetts last month, my editor spotted what she thought might be an error in the post: I referred to the “cider donuts” sold at the orchard. Did I mean cider AND donuts, she asked?

Cider donuts at Shelburne Orchards, VT, courtesy Flickr user Organic Nation

Nope. I meant donuts made with apple cider, and my condolences if you’ve never met one!

I don’t eat donuts in general, but I make an exception for these babies whenever I visit an orchard that makes them. Basically, they’re buttermilk donuts with apple cider added to the batter—lending more moisture, and a subtle sweetness—and often spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg. I like them best fresh from the fryer; they don’t taste as good even a few hours later, which puts a fortunate curb on my impulse to take home a few dozen. (Although I suspect that dunking a less-than-fresh cider donut in hot mulled cider would still taste pretty darn good.)

If you’re not near an orchard, and dare to delve into a vat of Crisco for deep-frying at home, Smitten Kitchen has a gorgeous recipe for apple cider donuts. This recipe from A Bowl of Mush is similar.

I don’t know exactly when cider donuts were invented, but they seem to have made their commercial debut in the United States in the 1950s. Using ProQuest, I found the following in a New York Times article from August 19, 1951:

A new type of product, the Sweet Cider Doughnut will be introduced by the Doughnut Corporation of America in its twenty-third annual campaign this fall to increase doughnut sales. The new item is a spicy round cake that is expected to have a natural fall appeal.

According to the 2008 book “Glazed America: A History of the Doughnut,” by Paul R. Mullins, the Doughnut Corporation of America (DCA) was founded in the 1920s by a Russian immigrant named Adolph Levitt who was quite the entrepreneur. He launched a chain of doughnut shops, developed a doughnut-making machine and a standardized a mix of ingredients to sell to other bakeries, and came up with National Donut Month and a host of other marketing gimmicks.

By the way, Levitt’s DCA no longer exists (it was bought out by Lyons in the 1970s), but its name does: In what Saveur magazine calls “a stroke of pure genius,” the brothers behind a small Seattle business called Top Pot Doughnuts bought the DCA trademark. Make that a “formerly small” business; Top Pot now sells its donuts in many Starbucks nationwide. Sadly—or perhaps happily for my arteries—their product line doesn’t include cider donuts.

The dash cake, with raspberry filling. Photo by Abby Callard

Today marks the 6th observance of National Punctuation Day.

What does that have to do with food? Well, let me tell you. For the past five years This year, people have celebrated are celebrating the holiday with a baking contest. The challenge: bake in the shape of punctuation. So, in the spirit of the holiday, I set out to create a grammatical delicacy.

I settled on a rather simple recipe (vanilla cake) and shape (the dash). (Quick grammar lesson: the dash is used to set off information; it’s more informal than a colon. I found an easy vanilla cake recipe online that I altered a bit by adding some cinnamon and nutmeg. (It was 9 p.m. by the time I started baking, after all.)  My idea was to bake a rectangular cake, cut it in half and create a two-layer dash-shaped cake. Here’s the recipe I used:

2 cups (500 mL) sugar
4 eggs
2-1/2 cups (625 mL) all-purpose flour
1 cup (250 mL) milk
3/4 cup (175 mL) vegetable oil
2-1/4 teaspoons (11 mL) baking powder
1 teaspoon (5 mL) vanilla
½ tablespoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon nutmeg
Mix sugar and eggs. Mix in the rest of the ingredients. Bake in a rectangular pan for 30-40 minutes.

To change it up a bit, I decided to add a fruit filling to the otherwise boring white cake. I bought about a cup of raspberries, chopped them up and added a tablespoon of sugar. After the cake had cooled, I cut it in half lengthwise. I poked some holes in the top of the bottom layer, a la Tres Leches Cake, so the raspberry juice could be absorbed. I piled on the fruit filling and put the other layer on top of that. I frosted the whole thing with chocolate frosting (it wasn’t homemade, maybe next year).

To actually enter the contest I’m supposed to submit my recipe, one photograph of the cake before it was baked, one photograph of the cake after baking, and a sample. I haven’t actually figured out if they want me to mail a piece of cake. Attempts to contact the powers in charge of the contest have been in vain.

Submissions must be received by September 30th, so you still have a few days to bake a cake in the shape of a comma or bread in the shape of a question mark. Prizes include non-edible National Punctuation Day goodies as well as a mention on the Web site.

— by Abby Callard

Apples and honey is a traditional Rosh Hashana dish

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, begins tonight at sundown. It’s traditional to dip apples in honey to symbolize the hope for a sweet year ahead, a practice of which I was aware but never knew the origins. To find out, I consulted Jeffrey M. Cohen’s 1,001 Questions and Answers on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (thank you, Google Books), where I also found answers to questions I didn’t even know I had.

According to Cohen, the reason honey is used (and not some other sweet substance) is its association with the manna—described in the Torah as being “like honey wafers”—provided by God during the 40 years that the Israelites wandered the desert. It is supposed to remind Jews that any sustenance or material benefits that come their way are “solely dependent upon God’s grace and favor,” he writes.

Another interpretation Cohen relates is that it symbolizes the dual role of bees—feared for their sting, but prized for the sweetness they provide—reminiscent of the image of a stern but merciful creator.

One seemingly obvious reason he doesn’t mention is that honey was the sweetener of choice in biblical times; neither sugar nor maple syrup were known to the ancient Israelites. Honey, on the other hand, is at least as old as written history; it was mentioned in Sumerian and Babylonian cuneiform writings, and other ancient texts going back 4,000 years.

Aside from apples and honey, other lesser-known Rosh Hashanah traditions revolve around foods that imply good omens. On the second night of celebration, Jews eat a “new fruit” that hasn’t been eaten yet in the season. Pomegranates are a popular option, in part because they (at least symbolically) contain 613 seeds, indicating the desire to fulfill the 613 mitzvot (commandments, or good deeds) mentioned in the Torah. Fenugreek is also recommended, Cohen writes, because its Hebrew name, rubya, means increase. Similarly, carrots are chosen because their Yiddish name is mehren, or many.

Nuts are prohibited at Rosh Hashanah, Cohen explains, for reasons that seem a little murky. He cites two main reasons. The first has to do with the numerical value assigned Hebrew letters and words; in the complicated numerology of Judaism the word for nut is equivalent to the word for sin. Also, he writes, nuts were believed to increase saliva, interfering with the recitation of prayers. These reasons, he admits, seem a little flimsy—which he attributes to latter-day rabbinic authorities trying to rationalize a tradition for which they had no solid explanation.

The original reason, he continues, was investigated by Chaim Leshem, who determined that nuts were an ancient symbol of destruction because their trees and sap overshadow and destroy other nearby trees.

(But hey! Wait a minute! At my Rosh Hashanah meal every year we have teiglach — the honey-laden boiled dough delicacy that comes riddled with nuts. I wonder if its an Ashkenazic/Sephardic difference? — Brian, associate web editor)

Challah, or egg bread, is eaten all year, but at Rosh Hashanah the loaf is round instead of braided, to symbolize the cycle of the new year and of our lives.

And no Rosh Hashanah meal is complete without some honey cake (smitten kitchen has a yummy-sounding recipe that looks moister than usual), which is generally made with coffee. I couldn’t find the reason for the coffee, even in the book of 1,001 questions and answers. Can anyone out there offer an explanation?