For me, Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, is all about traditions — creating them and recalling them. And for my family, 85% of our traditions happen around the dinner table.

So yes, of course you’ve got to listen to someone blow the Shofar 100 times. AND, yes, you’ve got to throw bread, or nowadays pebbles or seaweed, into a flowing body of water to symbolize the things you wish you hadn’t done this year (a ceremony known as tashlich). But mostly, you spend a lot of time eating, especially sweet things like dipping apples in honey, because the major underlying theme for this celebration is to ensure that you enter the new year with sweetness and hope.

(Eat your apples and honey now as things only get sweeter as we head into Fall, eating dozens of 100 Grand bars as I’m passing out candy to trick-or-treaters or overdoing it with Thanksgiving yams that have been sufficiently marshmallowed).

Here are some of my family’s traditions — and some new ones that are evolving in L.A. as modern chefs take on ancient customs.

Mom’s traditions

My mom was born in Newark, but raised in Pico-Robertson. Her parents, Selma and Vic, moved to the neighborhood less for the synagogues and more for the delis — and the ritzy proximity to Beverly Hills.

My mom’s fondest memories of Rosh Hashanah were at the kid’s table in the early 70s, over the hill in Canoga Park at her Nana and Auntie Jan’s house.

She remembers walking into the smell of Nana’s homemade potato knishes — “like the ones you’d get at Label’s Table — but Nana’s were better.” Once seated, there’d always be mixed nuts on the table — so you could nibble your day’s worth of calories before the meal even appeared.

They’d always have sliced apples dipped into a ramekin of honey, tzimmis(carrots, sweet potatoes, and prunes), noodle kugel and brisket, and my mom remembers her older family members vying for the pupik, the gizzards in the chicken fricassee.

Grandma Selma was “world famous” for making sculptures out of chopped liver. In those days, most Ashkenazi liver dishes came from chicken, but Selma’s recipe called for calves liver, and “everyone would go crazy for it,” according to my mom.

Selma molded her chopped liver into the shape of a pineapple, adding cross hatches and a crown of real fruit fronds, adding pimento green olives to make it look like a real pineapple.

Meanwhile, my mom’s Aunt Jackie was the Queen of the Jello Mold — she’d put fruit cocktails inside of wiggly Jello. My mom remembers telling her sister, “Jello is the only food you can’t spit out if you don’t like.”

Interweaving traditions

Chef Rebecca King is a private chef who owns and operates a culinary concierge business and is the purveyor of a “a very unkosher deli” known as The Bad Jew.

King trained in the kitchen at deli-inspired fine-dining establishment Birdie Gs and learned to use the smoker at Texas-style Flatpoint Barbecue. Over the past seven years at pop-ups around LA, The Bad Jew has developed her treyf take on pastrami with her signature Porkstrami.

Her family told her, “Rebecca, you’re gonna get us in trouble” with the branding for The Bad Jew, but she says it really resonates with people.

As a private chef, King has cooked High Holiday meals for a wide range of family traditions.

“I have clients who keep kosher, who are secular. Some want a traditional Ashkenazi meal, others want more adventure, maybe a Mediterranean or Asian twist,” she said.

Her own family background is Ashkenazi — she grew up in Shaker Heights in Cleveland, a predominantly Jewish neighborhood — and her most potent Rosh Hashanah memories are of her grandma’s matzo ball soup and all of the kids wildly running around her grandparent’s penthouse.

But she says she also enjoys cooking in the Sephardic tradition — “I like flavor, really spicy foods, the herbaceousness — just intense flavors that I love.”

“I’ve done it all… 15 million Rosh Hashanah classics,” she smiles, quoting from Aleeza Ben Shalom in the Netflix series Jewish Matchmaking: “There’s 15 million Jews in the world, and there’s about 15 million ways to be Jewish.”

“There’s no way to do it wrong.”

This Rosh Hashanah, King is excited to serve roasted chicken, tzimmis carrots, and her signature oak-smoked lamb peppered with baharat seasoning topped with coriander leaves, with pomegranate molasses and arils, those juicy pomegranate seeds.

King uses pomegranates because they’re another symbolic fruit for Rosh Hashanah, representing fertility and abundance. (I remember learning that there are supposed to be 613 arils in each fruit, and that’s how many commandments there are in the Torah. Though it’s not an exact science.)

Growing a plant-based tradition

Megan Tucker is the Culinary Institute of America-trained chef behind pop-up Mort & Bettys, a Philly-style plant-based Jewish deli. “Everything is made from scratch — and there’s no fake meat here, it’s all seasonal produce,” Tucker said.

The deli is named after Tucker’s grandparents, Mort and Betty. They were both born to New York City Lithuanian-Jewish families in 1912 — and met at a Borscht Belt summer resort, “like Dirty Dancing but without all the drama,” Tucker said as she laughed.

Mort was an engineer and owned a piano factory that was converted to a wartime airplane factory during the war. Betty had a degree in accounting and worked for the city — and even ran for local city council.

Tucker has infused that old-school Jewish tradition into a modern, vegan approach to Rosh Hashanah dishes. This year’s menu is matzo ball soup, a mushroom paté plate, and her popular brisket made from seared oyster and shiitake mushrooms.

It’s cooked in kosher red wine with tomatoes, onions, nutritional yeast, bay leaves, thyme, garlic, and what Tucker calls “real baby carrots, not the cut kind — carrots are so important to soaking up the flavors in the brisket.”

The sweeter offerings will include symbolically round challah (representing the continuity of the seasons), a chocolate pumpkin babka, and an apple honey cake inspired partly by Amish farm stands in central Pennsylvania.

Pre-orders have already closed for Rosh Hashanah specials, but Tucker will be at the Atwater Farmer’s Market on Sept. 17 with whatever hasn’t sold out.

Traditions for the cooking-avoidant, time-pressed wage slave

I know some of us don’t have family in town — which might make it difficult to access traditional holiday feasts. But it is possible to assemble a quick and easy Rosh Hashanah meal.

(Shoutout to my editor, Gab Chabrán, who knows I’m the King Of The Family Meal Deal.)

Listen, I regularly serve dinner to 4-12 at my dining room table, and I’m always on the lookout for great value take-out offers. So, if you just wanted me to drop an instant Traditional Ashkenazi Rosh Hashanah dinner, I suggest you order a Gelson’s High Holiday Meal package. There are many other places you can order this kind of meal, like smaller delis, but what’s convenient (if you live near a Gelson’s) is that since they are doing supermarket-sized volumes, your food will be ready when you need it.

Nothing beats home-cooked — but sometimes you may have a cadre of tiny cousins running around your home demanding food, and you just need something to give them.

The reason you’re feeding people is to facilitate them to go on with their evenings without thinking about hunger. Well-fed people can laugh and be silly with their families, like bootleg retellings of The Wise Men of Chelm (a Yiddish folk tale) or impromptu vaudeville performances from the kids’ table or dishing out gossip from someone your grandma knew in the old country — all of these happy activities require that we not be starving.

So, for me, my point is: WHAT YOU EAT AT THE ROSH HASHANAH MEAL DOESN’T REALLY MATTER — as long as you can keep your guests happy and well-fed so they can postulate on a sweet new year.

Mix and matching old and new traditions

My mom has finally revealed her menu for our family’s meal. Here’s what we can expect from this year’s celebration:

Milwaukee Brisket from a 1970s Jewish cookbook called Oodles Of Noodles (Green Edition). It calls for a brisket/flour/water/Lipton’s Onion Soup mix, and I guess the Milwaukee-ness comes from the recipe calling for a cup of beer. (This year, my mom will be using a cup of glass bottle Mexican Coke instead, as a Jewish cooking Facebook group just recommended it.)

She will also incorporate silan, a date syrup, into the Pomegranate Silan Chicken she found on Kosher.com — with a jar of the silan that her friend Dorit brought back from Israel.

The pomegranates in my mom and dad’s backyard have not quite been harvested, so she’ll have to get them from Smart & Final. My dad will definitely be into this chicken — but I bet he’d really like that pomegranate lamb from Chef King.

My mom will also be making a couscous with seven vegetables — zucchini, carrots, chickpeas, (and four more for sure!) — because seven is a lucky number, like the seven days it took to create the world. She found this recipe in The Nosher section of My Jewish Learning.com. I hope that it tastes like that epic family-sized tagine we had at Moun of Tunis on Sunset earlier this year.

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This story originally appeared at LAist.

A Passover meal kit from Wise Sons

(Courtesy of Wise Sons )

The festival of Passover — Pesach in Hebrew — starts tonight, and will last until next Thursday, April 13.

Ask a Jewish person how they observe the holiday and you’ll get various answers, especially here in Los Angeles. Some will simply attend a seder, the evening meal where the biblical story of the Israelites escaping bondage in Egypt is traditionally retold.

Others strictly observe the dietary practices of the holiday, eating unleavened matzah instead of bread, avoiding any other leavened food such as pasta or cookies and cleaning their homes from top to toe.

And some people sort of do both. Or neither.

I realized how important the tradition was to me in April 2020, when we held our seder over Zoom, the first major celebration that COVID lockdowns prevented us from having in person.

I just remember feeling like this monumental meal I was sharing with my wife and our then 9-month-old twins — and my parents and sister over the internet — just was so sad.

It felt like we were living the hardships part of the Passover story. At one point, I excused myself, walked into the bathroom, and started sobbing, thinking, “Is this the world my children are going to be living in?”

Those were tough times. But we made it through. And this year, I’ll celebrate our freedom from all sorts of plagues, in person on vacation with my family for spring break.

When it comes to festivals, delicious Passover food is somewhat limited. Matzahs are a really hard food to pump up — it’s as if the Swedes were dead set on getting everyone to just eat Wasa crackers in all these unique ways for a week. But in a place as diverse as L.A, there are many tasty offerings out there.

Rosewater and cardamom: Iranian-Jewish flavors

Tannaz Sassooni is a food writer living in Los Angeles. (Check out what she wrote about hummus for LAist.) She’s currently collecting recipes and stories from Iranian Jewish grandmothers for a cookbook she’s working on.

She says the first night of Passover is always at her mom’s house with tons of family. Instead of dipping food in salt water as many Ashkenazis of Eastern European descent do (to simulate the tears of those enslaved), her family dips it in vinegar.

“And our bitter herb is usually a bitter lettuce,” she says. (Ashkenazi tradition uses horseradish.)

“Our charoset is the best charoset in the world,” Sassooni says of the fruit-and-nut mixture on the seder plate to remind us of the mortar used in the building of the pyramids.

“We use my grandfather’s recipe. He faxed it to all of his children from Israel many decades ago, and that’s still what we go by. It has a million fruits and spices and nuts and wine and vinegar and fruit juices — it even has bananas, which I think is very, very strange, but that’s part of the recipe.”

The mixture is then blended in a hand-cranked meat grinder. “It’s a whole endeavor, so you have a nice texture. I’ll take a jar home and eat it throughout the week,” Sasooni says.

Passover often falls within a few weeks of the vernal equinox — Nowruz, the Persian New Year. For Iranian Jews, there’s often some overlap. The Nowruz spring cleaning tradition of khāne-takānī parallels the Jewish practice of removing chametz (bread and leavened food products) before Passover. And, of course, there are those snacks that work perfectly for both holidays.

While her mom prepares badam sookhteh, toasted almonds coated in cardamom (“it means burnt almonds, but it’s almonds that are wrapped in dark caramel”), Sassooni regularly makes toot, the Persian word for mulberry.

But this candy does not actually contain mulberries; it just resembles them. It’s a marzipan made from almond flour, tinted with saffron, and perfumed with rosewater. Sassooni says that when toot is served with tea to friends and family, it ensures a sweet new year and is an excellent compliment for the Passover celebration.

Brisket and chicken soup — the traditional Ashkenazi meal

For Evan Bloom of Wise Sons Deli, his “go-to Jewish holiday” has always been Passover. His first days cooking for large groups were at friends’ Passover seders at UC Berkeley.

“Passover is all about filling your house with people. You are not supposed to turn people away. Seders are always big and always fun,” says Bloom.

The Passover story has a special connection to the Wise Sons origin story. They got their name from the Haggadah, the guidebook for the seder. Bloom says their name refers to the story of four sons who each ask questions about the seder: The Simple Son, The Son Who Does Not Know How To Ask, The Wicked Son, and The Wise Son.

Wise Sons filled a niche in the Bay Area when they started their operation in 2011. There wasn’t a traditional Jewish deli in San Francisco and a population yearned for their grandma’s brisket, with a farm-to-table approach.

Now they have seven restaurants — four in San Francisco, two in Oakland, and one in Culver City. Bloom grew up in Southern California, so having a location in L.A. is a homecoming.

During Passover, they offer a popular seder dinner package.

Bloom says it’s a traditional Ashkenazi meal, apple and walnut charoset, chopped liver, matzo ball soup, roasted brisket or chicken.

“The brisket is pre-sliced and sous-vide — you finish it in the oven,” Bloom says. “During the pandemic, people got really into finishing things at home. It’s easier on the production end so we leaned into it.”

WHERE TO EAT DURING PASSOVER

• • Easy order Seder meal and plate kits (sold separately): Wise Sons 9552 Washington Blvd,
    Culver City, CA 90232
  • Matzoh ball soup, garlic and dill tots, and Hobak latkes: Yangban Society, 712 S Santa Fe Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90021
  • Matzah-crust pizzas with your choice of toppings: Fresh Brothers (various locations)
  • Khoresh: A Persian stew often served with lentils for the second night of Passover-Kabob By Faraj 8680 W Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90035

The potato kugel is from a former employee’s nana, and the peas and carrots in lemon butter on the menu are an ode to Bloom’s own safta (Hebrew for grandmother) — but these peas don’t come from a can. There’s also a chocolate matzo with bittersweet caramel.

Bloom says another popular order is the Seder Plate Kit — which comes with a lamb shank bone, horseradish root, parsley, greens, egg, charoset, sea salt, and an orange.

The orange is a recent progressive addition to the seder. Jewish feminist scholar Susannah Heschel held a seder in the 1980s and chose to include an orange on the seder plate — “because it suggests the fruitfulness for all Jews when lesbians and gay men are contributing and active members of Jewish life.”

Bloom urges people to order through the website in advance because“we Jews often do things at the last minute.” But the roast brisket plate will be on special at the restaurant for the first few nights for any stragglers.

Gourmet chocolate matzah: Compartés

Compartés, an LA-based Oprah-endorsed gourmet chocolatier, offers desserts for Passover. CEO Jonathan Grahm says that they’ve been in business for 75 years. “People remember buying their chocolates as kids — and now give them to their own grandkids.”

Grahm says, “growing up, my grandma kept kosher — so our family seder tradition is to use parve dark chocolate matzahs.” It means the dark chocolate does not have dairy, so it doesn’t run the risk of mixing milk and meat, especially during a meat-centric Passover meal.

Comfort food with Korean and Jewish roots

I’m Jewish. My wife is Korean-Irish-Catholic, but she’s from Encino — which I guess also makes her culturally Jewish.

While my children have a halmoni, who taught my toddlers how to say “mashita” when eating something delicious, my Irish Catholic father-in-law remembers the pickles brining on the fire escapes as he delivered groceries to South Boston bubbies. And that was the first thing he was reminded of when he saw onggi kimchi ceramic pots when he visited Seoul.

A few times a month, our family gets breakfast on Sunday mornings and dines at a Jewish deli, Brent’s, with my in-laws.

It’s a quintessentially L.A. blend — one which we share with Chefs Katianna and John Hong, who run Yangban Society, a Korean American restaurant in the Arts District.

They incorporate their fine dining background with “a multidimensional, autobiographical experience that showcases their respective backgrounds and upbringings,” according to the website. It’s comfort food with Korean and Jewish roots.

The initial concept at Yangban was a deli. Like the ones that Kat grew up with in upstate New York.

Korean American deli reminds her of going to a Unitarian church as a kid, where going to a deli was an incentive. Like the Greek deli or the Italian deli, the places that serve the food of families and communities.

Kat said they were actually removing the deli on the day that I called, to focus on plated table service.

Chef Katianna was born in South Korea and was adopted at 3 months old, when she was brought to the United States and raised half-Jewish in a “mixed celebratory” household in upstate New York. She has lots of fond memories of cooking with her grandma.

“Since my family lives all over,” Chef Katianna says, “We can usually celebrate only once a year, so it’s like one big celebration — Christmas and Hanukkah and Passover — with matzo balls and menorahs.”

Meanwhile, John grew up in the Jewish suburbs of Chicago: “Koreans getting bagels, it all felt natural.”

Yangban offers several Passover-adjacent items on its menu, like the matzo ball soup. Chef Katianna Hong uses her grandmother’s matzo ball recipe and floats it on a creamy foam broth of emulsified chicken bones.

Also on the menu is hobak latkes made with produce from Girl & Dug (a Korean American-owned farm) containing squashini, Yukon potato, diced onions, white kimchee, egg, matzah meal, and a little Korean pancake (pajeon) mix . For snacking purposes, you can nibble on the garlic and dill tots — fried tots tossed in house-made roasted garlic butter, chopped dill, and scallions, served with whipped crème fraiche, dill oil, and applesauce for dipping.

Chef Katianna says her matzah mandu — Korean dumplings — will most likely be added to the menu, so stay tuned.

Hobak latkes, made with squashini, Yukon potato, diced onions, white kimchee, egg, matzah meal and Korean pancake (pajeon) mix.

(John Troxell/©John Troxell

/

Courtesy of Yangban Society )

Matzoh ball soup – inspired by Chef Katianna’s grandma’s recipe, made with matzoh ball recipe and then add Korean mirepoix (hobak squash, leeks, and Yukon potato) confit in schmaltz with added sujebi dumplings and finished with fresh chopped dill and scallions.

(Courtesy of Yangban Society )

Matzah pizza: Fresh Brothers

Everyone who’s committed to eating matzah for a week has devised creative ways to make that bland cracker more palatable.

Whether that’s spreading butter on it, or more ambitious projects — matzah brei, anyone? — most of us have stumbled on the matzah pizza from Fresh Brothers. (Sounds easy, but it’s not. When I make it at home, it’s often like a too-crunchy Boboli that always falls apart.)

The pizza chain was founded in 2008 and has 24 locations in Southern California, including Terminal 2 of LAX and the Rose Bowl.

Fresh Brothers have been serving matzah pizza for the eight days of Passover for the past 10 years. “At our sixth store, the Beverly Hills location, my brother told me he noticed a drop in sales for one week in April,” says co-founder Scott Goldberg.

They realized the drop in this predominantly Jewish neighborhood was because many folks had given up leavened bread for Passover.

“So we said, ‘why not try matzah pizza as a gimmick, and that gimmick was a hit,” says Goldberg. “It turned into an annual tradition that we call Matzah Madness, ’cause it’s always around March Madness.”

Now every Fresh Brothers location has it for the eight days of Passover. Goldberg says they’ll typically sell 7,000 – 9,000 matzah pizzas over that period.

They’ve been actively contacting synagogues to inform them about this promotion while clarifying that none of what they’re serving is actually kosher for Pesach. “Some folks are not personally kosher, but they still keep Passover,” says Goldberg.

The architecture of a matzah pie is crucial if you don’t want it to crack in half or get too soggy. Goldberg says the key is to take one piece of matzah and put a little bit of cheese on it, then add a second sheet of matzah on top — the way a taquero slides in the second tortilla for structural support — which also kind of makes for a stuffed crust matzah.

Goldberg says that their signature margherita pizza is popular, and they ensure that pans and knives don’t allow meat and milk to touch. (Not quite Glatt kosher standards, but the intention is there.)

Meanwhile, Goldberg’s personal favorite matzah pizza is Da Works, pronounced in his native Chicago-ese, with decidedly un-kosher sausage, pepperoni, mushroom, green peppers and red onion.

The joys of the diaspora

The Exodus from Egypt was the start of the Jewish diaspora — and the diaspora is where I feel most at home.

This is where I have the opportunity to connect with our cousins from so many other tribes, especially somewhere like L.A. There’s this sense that we are all related through our own experiences, and we all have the same interests — that is, taking the lessons we’ve learned from the past, the security of familial support, and if we have children, hoping that we can make their lives better.

And this Passover — in contrast to the hardships of 2020 — my family and I are lounging on the beach in Cabo. And since the drinks are included at the all-inclusive resort, we’re planning on having at least the four ceremonial cups of wine — and holding a fifth one out for Elijah.

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This story originally appeared at LAist.

The LAist staff come from many backgrounds, as do many Angelenos. When we asked our colleagues what particular food they prepare (or buy) to celebrate the holiday season, the dish that makes them moisty-eyed when they think about it, they responded with dishes from the Philippines to Britain to Guatemala.

So we put it all together, below. We hope it will inspire you to reflect on your own gastronomic holiday traditions when you’re gathering with friends and family to celebrate this year.

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Panettone Estilo Chileno

Monica Bushman, LAist Studios producer

Monica’s family celebrates the holidays with a panettone, a fruitcake first produced in Italy. It’s become a staple because her mother, Maritza, is from Chile, and it reminds her mom of panettone’s Chilean Christmastime cousin, Pan de Pascua.

(I was surprised to learn Pan de Pascua does not just mean Easter; Monica tells me that in Chile it also refers to Christmas. Santa Claus, for example, is called El Viejo Pascuero.)

Monica says it’s “kind of a fluffy round loaf, like an egg bread or a brioche — but it traditionally has candied orange peels, and there are ones with chocolate or pistachio.”

For Monica’s mom, those traditional fruit ones “smell most like what she remembers growing up.”

In Orange County, Monica has bought panettone from the Cortina’s Italian market in Anaheim, but her mom’s favorite place to find them is at the Costco in Fullerton. They buy the Madi brand, an Italian bakery that uses a 50-year-old sourdough starter in the 70-hour process of making the holiday confection.

Monica’s family eats panettone around the Christmas season especially during tea time, where it pairs well with a traditional drink Cola de Mono, monkey’s tail. Which, she says is “a kind of an eggnog or White Russian with milk, coffee, cinnamon, cloves and aguardiente.”

This year Monica splurged on her mom, ordering a panettone From Roy, a Northern California baker who studied under Pierre Hermé, Ferran Adria, and Thomas Keller. And most importantly for Monica’s mom — it’s Oprah’s favorite panettone.

Dutch Baby

Gab Chabrán, LAist Associate Editor, food and culture

Gab tells me that a Dutch Baby is “a big pancake you make in the oven; they have a great look, perfect for Instagram.” This buzzy fluffy pastry has become a part of the Chabráns’ holiday celebration in recent years.

The Dutch in the name is probably less Holland and more a derivation of Deutsch, meaning German, not too dissimilar from a Pfannkuchen. The Dutch Baby name was trademarked in 1942 by Manca’s Cafe, a popular Seattle restaurant.

But for the Chabráns it has more of a SoCal connection. The Original Pancake House breakfast chain, an Oregon original, still has a few branches here from Whittier to Orange to Encinitas.
Their signature Dutch Baby dish takes twenty minutes to cook so
Gab says it’s the first decision you need to make when you sit down to order.

Katie, Gab’s wife, thought it’d be better if they just started making it themselves, and it has turned into an annual tradition for their family. Each year they alternate between sweet and savory dutch babies. This year it’s sweet, using powdered sugar with some lemon, to make sure it sticks. Another advantage of making it at home — since there’s always a few blueberries around, there’s no surcharge to add berries.

Gab and his wife Katie and their daughter Luisa

(Gab Chabrán

/

LAist )

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Tamales Guatemaltecos

Jill Replogle, Senior Reporter, Orange County

Jill has Arizona roots but spent more than eight years in Guatemala, where she met her husband, Erwin, who’s originally from the high altitude pine tree cloudforests of Cobán.

Back in the U.S., their family enjoys Guatemalan tamales during the holidays. She and her husband made “close to 75 tamales from right after the World Cup finale until 10 p.m.”

When she can’t find hoja de maxán, a large Central American Calathea leaf, she uses banana leaves to wrap her tamales. In Guatemala, maiz masa-based tamales are the most common, but Jill and Erwin usually make paches — which have a mashed potato base, as well as a rice-based masa typical of eastern Guatemala.

For the paches, Erwin makes a sauce with toasted sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds, chiles, and tomatoes, which is then scooped onto either chicken, pork, or a vegetarian friendly mushroom/kale melange.

For tamales de arroz guatemaltecos, you make rice on the stove and keep adding water, butter and oil — it turns to a rice porridge — which is then blended into a sticky base where meat and vegetables can be added. The meat and veggies are raw, so they are cooked by the steamer.

Tamales are a year-round food in Guatemala, but during the holidays they often have extra ingredients. Jill’s family adds olives, some peanuts, bell peppers, and capers to make them more festive. These festive tamales are typically eaten on the 24th of December, before presents are opened at midnight, and again on New Year’s Eve.

And those 75 tamales that are now cooling her fridge will be eaten at home and given away to friends and family, because during this time of year they’re best to eat, says Jill, “just whenever you can. We literally eat them for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

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Bibingka

Kristine Malicse, Social Media Producer 

Bibingka is the holiday dessert that most feels like home for Kristine, a sweet soft and spongy rice cake baked in a terracotta bowl wrapped with a banana leaf. Christmas in the Philippines is huge.

While Americans might start getting decorations up after Thanksgiving, Kristine says “people start getting their decorations out in September and have them up through December. They call these the ‘Brrrr’ months.”

Bibingka is traditionally eaten throughout the holiday season, but especially after night church services. When she was a kid in Quezon City Kristine would eat the cake around midnight on Christmas Eve, but since she moved to L.A., her family eats it as part of the Christmas meal around 4ish on the 25th. Some people save it for the end of the meal, but Kristine says “I have a sweet tooth so I definitely eat some before the meal.”

This year she’ll be spending the holidays with her boyfriend and his family. They aren’t Filipino so she was thinking about searching the San Gabriel Valley for a great bibingka to share with them as they’ve never tried it — and maybe create a new tradition along the way.

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Deviled Eggs (classic ’50s style)

Erin Mercer, Director of HR

Erin knows that there are fancier deviled eggs out there. She’s had the ones with savory truffle-y notes and wasabi accents. She loves them too — but for her family’s longstanding holiday meal, it has to be a traditional deviled egg.

By that, she means yolks pulled from egg whites, seasoned with mayonnaise, a dash of yellow mustard, some salt, paprika and a dollop of sweet relish, then piped back into the egg white and topped with a little more paprika.

Her family has been in Los Angeles for at least three generations. She says she’s lucky to still have some relatives in their 90s, who filled up on these protein-dense delicacies during the Great Depression.

The signature 1950s suburban party dish even has its own platter in Erin’s family, which she remembers as a child. Since deviled eggs can be a meal unto themselves, they’re often the first thing served during the holidays. She calls them a “pre-appetizer, when you get the party started early” for a happy hour-style snack time which Erin’s family calls “Happy Talk.”

When it comes to hard-boiling the eggs, Erin has some useful tips (I’ve been trying Martha Stewart’s 12-minutes-then-ice-bath-method but have been having mixed results.)

“I have learned the best way is in the pressure cooker to hard boil eggs for four or five minutes,” she says. Then “let the steam go and the peels will fall right off. As they cool you can cut them in half and they remain intact.”

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British Mince Pie

Suzanne Levy, LAist Senior Editor

Suzanne immediately tells me that she’s British (as if I didn’t already know from the accent), which explains why her holiday food choice is mince pies, a popular sweet hand pie served throughout the Commonwealth.

She tells me “it’s a dish first written about in the 14th century, as a way to preserve meat by adding raisins and cloves and cinnamon and other spices in a pie. (In British English “minced” meat means what we would call ground meat.)

These days the the dish doesn’t contain chopped meat — “the meat got less and less, and the sugar got more and more, which is a very British thing.” Even though there is not chunks of meat, traditionally it is made with suet, an animal fat, although this can substituted with other fats or a specially-made vegetable suet if needed.

When it comes out properly, it should, according to Suzanne, be “basically pastry on the outside — no soggy bottom — crumbly shortbread pastry, filling on the inside, a light dusting of icing sugar, what Americans call confectioners sugar, and you should have cream added on top.”

It’s generally eaten at tea-time, with a cup of tea, in the afternoon. Over the holidays, they’re everywhere in the UK, but will disappear in January.

“They’re like the Pumpkin Spice Latte of Britain,” she says. “They’re only available for a limited time.”

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This story originally appeared at LAist.