Mina de Carne, a Jewish specialty made by families from North Africa to Turkey and other regions of the Sephardic diaspora, begins with sauteed onions and ground beef — or beef mixed with lamb — layered in a dish with squares of matzo that have been soaked quickly in chicken broth or water to soften them slightly, then baked until the top starts to brown. It seems like the kind of food a modern blogger might have invented to accommodate the prohibition against bread and pasta during Passover, the Jewish holiday that begins on April 15. With its layers of matzo and meat, Mina de Carne has a lasagna quality. In fact, the dish has been prepared for centuries.
This year, Passover, with its vivid recounting of Jews’ Exodus from Egypt at the Seder table on the first two nights of the eight-day holiday, will be particularly poignant as disturbing videos and photographs of Ukrainians fleeing for their lives flash across our screens.
My friend Fran Putnoi, whose family history includes Jews who escaped the Spanish Inquisition by emigrating first to Italy, then Turkey, relatives who arrived in New York’s Upper West Side in the early 20th century, and later, Holocaust survivors, explains that wherever Jews settled, they blended their own recipes and food culture with the ingredients they found in their new home.
A specialty like Mina de Carne (”meat pie”) is unusual in that it was first made in Spain by Sephardim — Jews who migrated to North Africa, the Middle East, and throughout the Ottoman Empire to avoid persecution and forced conversion — while remaining essentially the same dish. (Ashkenazi Jews trace their lineage and culture from Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe.)
In some cultures, Mina de Carne might be served as part of the Seder meal; in others it’s an ordinary weeknight dinner. Fran makes hers during the Passover week using instructions from her grandmother, Victoria Corri, and she’s pretty sure it was originally her great-grandmother’s recipe. “The dish goes back at least 500 years in Turkey,” says Fran, who lives in Kendall Square.
Spain-based writer Janet Amateau thinks Mina de Carne is at least that old. She writes on sephardicfood.com that there’s a similar recipe in a 13th-century cookbook. She explains that it was part of her childhood Seders and the women in her family fussed over it in the kitchen.
Matzo, the element in mina that gives the dish its lasagna character, is a crisp, unleavened cracker-like square (sometimes round, too). Eating matzo at Passover fulfills the instruction contained in the Torah that Jews should commemorate their Exodus from Egypt with unleavened bread as part of a special meal.
Fran’s mina is easy to assemble, since you only have to chop an onion, saute meat, pull matzos out of a box, and soften them. In order to make the stiff crackers a little malleable, you soak them in chicken broth or water for less than a minute — they go from softened to mush in seconds — and use them to line the baking dish. Form two layers of sauteed meat and three of matzos, then seal the top matzo with a mixture of beaten eggs and broth. With your hands, press the top matzo down to submerge it in the eggs. Scatter toasted pine nuts on top and let the dish sit while the oven comes up to temperature. Then bake the mina until the top matzo begins to brown and the meat mixture is bubbling at the edges.
Women in Izmir, Turkey, where Fran’s grandmother is from, would have been making their own matzos and grinding their own meat, Fran speculates, which would make the dish quite a bit more labor intensive, and, undoubtedly, better.
Families who host Passover Seders often own a stack of printed Haggadahs, a booklet that recounts the biblical story of Jews’ escape from Egypt. Fran’s daughter, Deb Putnoi, an artist, makes her own Haggadah every year for the group at her table; it involves some drawing. “Deb’s Rules of Drawing,” contained in her Haggadah, include “There is NO right or wrong way to draw.” Guests draw items, mostly found on the table, that they touch, taste, smell, see, and hear. (Disclosure: Fran’s son, Eric, is my ophthalmologist.)
That’s a far cry from Fran’s childhood Seders in New York. “My grandfather chanted the entire Haggadah in Ladino,” she says, “which took at least two hours.” Ladino, an ancient Judeo-Spanish language, is still spoken in Israel and parts of Turkey. At most of today’s Seders, everyone at the table takes turns reading the Exodus story.
Now a grandmother herself, Fran upholds some of the Sephardic traditions from her mother’s family at the Seders, and always brings huevos haminados. Origins of the name vary. Fran points to the definition in The Nosher, which explains that in Ladino, huevos is “eggs,” while haminados comes from the word “hamin,” a long-simmered stew, also known as cholent in the Ashkenazi community, in which the eggs were once cooked.
To make them today, Fran simmers eggs overnight in their shells with a little olive oil and onion skins in the water (some cooks add a few coffee grounds or black tea), which turns the shells and whites a dark brown color; should the eggs crack, the liquid marbles the whites. Eggs of some sort are always on the Passover Seder plate; they’re usually hard-boiled, and sometimes roasted.
Fran also brings two frittatas to the Seder, one baked with leeks, the other with spinach. She thinks these traditions, whatever they are, are meaningful. “Each family holds onto a pastiche of elements important to them,” she says.
Her own includes childhood Seders with her grandfather Jacques Corri chanting the Haggadah while the family sat still. “It was not one of those Seders where everyone would talk,” she says. And despite enduring the long Ladino chant as kids, when her cousins call her today, someone invariably says, “I miss that Seder table.”
Sheryl Julian can be reached at sheryl.julian@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @sheryljulian.
"dish" - Google News
March 29, 2022 at 09:00PM
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A dish made by Sephardic Jews for centuries is still a Passover favorite - The Boston Globe
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