Sufganiyot

You may not be familiar with the term, but this translates into jelly-filled doughnuts, a hannukkah treat that is enough to produce such sayings as “lip smacking good.” While the Kemp Mill hosts a Khosher Pastry Oven, I also find excellent pastries at my favorite lunch spot, Bagel City.

Pastries of this sort are not really good for your health as a matter of routine. Blessed may make them more palatable, as well as waiting a year to have another, and another, and another…

PS: Vicki—wish you were here.

[q url="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/10/AR2009121004167.html"] "Another miracle of Hanukkah: Fried jelly doughnuts

Customers rush and gush over Md. kosher bakery's holiday treat

By Michelle Boorstein

Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 11, 2009

In sitcom Boston, barflys have their Cheers. In Kemp Mill, the heart of the region's Orthodox Jewish community, the observant have the Kosher Pastry Oven.

A place where headgear is a baseball cap with "Nationals" in Hebrew lettering or a yarmulke knitted with American flags. Where there's a spare prayer book on the counter if you forget every word to a particular meal-related blessing. Where everyone knows your name.

And where, during the holiday of Hanukkah, which begins at sundown Friday, your sunny little strip mall cafe transforms into a mob scene. That's because the Kosher Pastry Oven has some of the region's best-known sufganiyot, a fried jelly doughnut that has migrated from Israel to America as a standard treat for the eight-day holiday.

Starting in a trickle earlier this week and building to a gush Friday, Jewish people have been coming to the Pastry Oven, where the subject of holiday food triggered debate about linguistics, religion and family.

'The story behind the sufganiyot is a military one,' stockbroker Lew Sosnowik said Thursday morning to Joel Davis, his daily synagogue-and-breakfast partner, of Hanukkah's historic meaning.

'But the victory was a spiritual one!' insisted Davis, an accountant.

'Every story is dependent on the raconteur,' Sosnowik added while a woman told a clerk that she was about to drive her order to her children in New York City. It's not unusual for sufganiyot from the Pastry Oven to be taken aboard planes bound for California or Florida."

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