Earlier this month, The Jew and the Carrot published an article by Leah Koenig entitled “Jewish Dishes We Miss: A Top-10 List of Ashkenazi Foods To Bring Back.” Prior to publishing this list, readers were asked to write in with their own suggestions as to which dishes should go on this list and in the end it was made up of the following ten dishes: schmaltz (rendered poultry fat), gribenes (poultry skin cracklings), schav (sorrel and sorrel soup), tongue, mamaliga (cornmeal porridge), russel (fermented beets), eyerlekh (unhatched eggs), belly lox, p’tcha (jellied calf’s foot), and aranygaluska (pull apart cake). I could write blog posts about each of these dishes (admittedly some are more appealing than others) but the one that caught my attention was aranygaluska. The name wasn’t familiar but as soon as I started reading its description I immediately realized that I knew this dessert of cinnamon and sugar covered yeast dough balls, under the guise of monkey bread. This revelation immediately sent me to my stacks of cookbooks and to the Internet to find out why I knew this Hungarian Jewish dessert under another name.
