Take heed all you just-married guys out there: this is the kind of dedication you engender when you’re as good a husband as Joe is. The missus walked all the way down from 87th and Amsterdam to about 50th and Broadway, just to take a picture of a knish. You know, honey, I’d have preferred […]
READ ONAs fortune would have it, Mrs. Pastry is in Manhattan today for a conference. This morning she went to my favorite Upper West Side eatery, Barney Greengrass, without me. I’ll find a way to forgive her, but she did send me a picture of what I might term the “tart-style” knish they make there. Frankly, […]
READ ONJim Chevallier, who is fast becoming the research arm of Joe Pastry Global Enterprises, submits this fascinating clip from a 1916 edition of the New York Times. I don’t want to give too much away, save to say it’s a ripping tale of knishes, a socialist congressman, gratuitous advertising and an oompah band. It’s notable […]
READ ONA smattering of emails overnight (mostly from Manhattanites) expressing their dismay over what they see as Joe playing fast and loose with the knish. I don’t deny it, and in fact one of the email authors was quite correct when she noted that most of the time I stay pretty true to the original of […]
READ ONIt’s like asking where bread comes from. Or more to the point: pie. The small pie — the “pocket pie” — just seems to be one of those good ideas that a lot of different people all came up with, more or less all at the same time. The Cornish had their pasties, the Spanish […]
READ ONDough and filling. Beyond that, interpretations vary wildly. There are round knishes, square knishes, tall knishes, flat knishes, oblong, ball-shaped, tube-shaped, knishes that look like miniature tarts or cupcakes, even bottomless, roll-style knishes that resemble cinnamon buns. The one rule seems to be that regardless of the way it’s shaped, a knish has to be […]
READ ONI didn’t make it to New York City for the first time until I was 27. Over the next two years or so I got very comfortable with the place, but at first I scarcely knew where to begin. Eating. Sure, pizza. Yeah, bagels. OK, a Nathan’s hot dog from the original stand on Coney […]
READ ONThe last thing I made — before I was so rudely interrupted by Mose and his cider-squeezing machine — was a rather frilly bit of French pastry shop pastry: Opera Cake. How fitting then that I should return to my request list to find something that really puts the “Joe” back in Joe Pastry: knishes. […]
READ ONSpeaking of strange cider rituals, this document, I’m told, details an old Welsh practice whereby a cake was placed on the head of a live cow, then a bucket of cider was poured over. If, when the cow shook its head, the cake fell forward, it meant good luck. If it fell back, bad luck. […]
READ ONMy post below unleashed a small flood of defiant emails stuffed with cider cake and cider bread recipes. I have only myself to blame. What I was thinking when I wrote what I wrote was simply that cider-based baking isn’t something you encounter much in books, for the reasons I discussed. That’s not to say […]
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