Fried Yuca with Spicy Mayo
The crispier, creamier cousin to french fried potatoes, yuca frita is a side dish and snack food found all over Latin America. Get the recipe »
When peeling and cutting yuca, you have to work pretty quickly because it’ll quickly discolor when exposed to oxygen. Peel one at a time, cut it, and submerge the pieces underwater immediately. Once the yuca is boiled and softened, you can refrigerator for up to three days before frying it, or freeze it indefinitely.

Unlike a potato which requires two dips in the fryer to get truly crisp, yuca is ready to eat after just one.

You can serve it with nothing but a squeeze of lime or bowl of guacamole, but I like to make a quick Peruvian-style sauce with mayo, lemon, and aji amarillo, a sweet-hot yellow pepper that you can buy as a paste in most Latin markets.

Manjar is spread and sandwiched between two flat cracker-like biscuits before it is covered in sweet and fluffy meringue for a bite that’s creamy, sugary, and crunchy all at once. Paraguay has its share of unusual dishes—like empanadas served between two pieces of white bread, and chipa bread made with manioc flour and cheese—but my favorite is the dulce de guayaba. Boiled guava is puréed with sugar and water (and often pectin) to form a thick sweet-tart gel that can be sliced and served with a cracker or piece of semi-hard white cheese. It’s exactly what cheese course dessert lovers should be eating for the postre. Some call it flan, some call it crème caramel, but in Venezuela, our jiggly egg and condensed milk friend is called quesillo. Unlike versions found in other parts of the world, this local rendition calls for whole eggs, instead of just yolks, to give an airy, less dense texture. It’s topped with a thin caramel syrup for a touch more caramel flavor.

When Jamie Oliver dissed Brazil’s most beloved confection, the country erupted in just as much outrage as it did when the soccer team was humiliated at the World Cup. Similar to a truffle, this ultra-sweet two-biter is made from sweetened condensed milk heated with cocoa powder to form a paste, then mixed with cold butter and rolled into small balls—which are then rolled in toppings like brown sugar, sprinkles, coconut shavings, or almonds. They’re often eaten at birthday parties. t a Peruvian restaurant, it would be unusual not to find suspiro limeño featured on the dessert menu. This classic postre dates back to 18th-century Peru and translates to “sigh of a woman from Lima.” It’s made from a creamy manjar blanco caramel base, topped with a huge dollop of Italian meringue perfumed with port and cinnamon, and served in individually portioned glasses. Sugar atop sugar, it’s only for those with an insatiable sweet tooth. Uruguayan food might not be known internationally, but this cake certainly should be. Named after a native Uruguayan bird, chajá starts from a sponge cake base and a peach syrup that’s spiked with a few tablespoons of rum. Add on layers of meringue, fresh peaches, whipped cream, and dulce de leche, then smother the whole cake with mounds of whipped cream and top it off with more sweet crisp meringue and peaches.

It’s a dish mostly found in southern Brazil, which originated within enslaved African and Afro-Brazilian communities during the late 17th century. The hominy soaks overnight before simmering with the milk until it becomes very thick and creamy, with a texture reminiscent of rice pudding. Generally eaten to celebrate Independence Day, pastelitos are a point of Argentine patriotic pride. Flaky puff pastry is filled with sweet quince or sweet potato paste and formed into a flower or pinwheel shape, then deep fried in lard or sunflower oil until golden brown. It’s finished off with sugary glaze, and topped with festive sprinkles. The sugary cake is light and fluffy and while there’s a delicate trace of peach and rum flavor, the whipped cream, dulce de leche, and meringue definitely star. Every year in June during the annual corn harvest, Brazilians chow down on canjica de milho, a sweet, thick corn-based dessert made with hominy (whole white maize kernels), sugar, milk, and often cinnamon, sweetened condensed milk, and peanuts.

Silver’s book is stuffed with anecdotes and historical notes that show just how important it was to Jewish life in New York. In its prime, she writes, the knish was a must-eat on the city’s political circuit, a flag for any candidate to rally behind to demonstrate his support for the Jewish community. It was a Jewish pop culture muse, from Yiddish theater to comedy, where it was sometimes used as slang for women’s genitals. It’s all part of a tradition, Silver explains, that began with Jewish female comedians in the 1950s and continues to this day in the raunchy routines of Sarah Silverman.

New York still has its knisheries, but compared to the bagel and bialy, the knish just never made it big as a culinary icon. It appears in few guide books as a must-eat dish. Few people, these days, will kvell about a knish. That’s a shame, as it deserves to be more than a historical footnote.

Migration from Eastern European countries, including Romania, began to pick up in the 1880s and accelerated through the early 20th century. Between 1881 and 1914, in particular, some 75,000 Jews left Romania and settled in New York City. As these immigrants arrived on the Lower East Side, they began to open delicatessen stores that resembled those of their German predecessors, but featured kosher products alongside some of the more popular delicacies from their homelands. If you adjust the timelines to match historical records, both Volk’s business and Iceland & Katz were established not ahead of the curve, but rather right alongside a slew of other Jewish delicatessens that were then popping up on the Lower East Side—and a few years after pastrami started making a nationwide splash. Sussman Volk appears to have been in the game earlier than Iceland & Katz, but perhaps not as early as has been claimed. The first record of Volk operating any business is a city directory entry in 1899, which lists “Volk, Sussman, provisions” at 86 Delancey Street, a location he maintained until 1907, when he apparently moved next door to 88 Delancey and sold bologna, frankfurters, and “spiced meat.”

These crucial distinctions, however, remained irrelevant through much of the 19th century, since it doesn’t seem that any of the pastirma exported during that period was actually destined for the United States. In fact, I’ve been unable to turn up any advertisements or other references to anything similar in name being sold in this country any earlier than the closing years of the 1890s, when a large wave of Eastern European immigration brought the pastirma-makers themselves to America.

Until the 1870s, the majority of immigrants in the United States had arrived from Germany. German-language New York newspapers were filled with advertisements for grocers or provisioners, listing a wide array of cheeses, sausages, and pickles under the heading “Delicatessen.” “‘Deutsch Delicatessen’ is the sign over a Second Ave. shop,” the New York Tribune noted in 1877, adding, “The window is heaped with huge bologna sausages.” Until the early years of the 20th century, these were known as “delicatessen shops”—retailers of fancy foods, chief among them prepared meats.

Texas-style beef brisket barbecue is currently enjoying a period of nationwide vogue. So it was both timely and compelling when Robert Sietsema advanced a somewhat novel theory of pastrami’s barbecue-bound origins in his 2015 book, New York in a Dozen Dishes. The longtime Village Voice restaurant critic, now senior critic at Eater New York, admitted that his argument was “far-fetched, perhaps.” But he made it nonetheless: “Maybe New York pastrami as we know it—corned beef rubbed with spices and smoked—might have originated in Texas via Jewish butchers.”

Pastirma Comes to America
One problem we face when tracing the history of pastrami is that there was absolutely no agreement on how to spell the name of that particular meat product until well into the 20th century. “Pastrame,” “pastromie,” “pestrame,” “pastromi,” “pasturma,” “pastromer,” “pastroma”—all are variants found in early newspaper ads and other sources.

One of those delicacies, it seems, was pastirma, and it didn’t remain an isolated immigrant specialty for very long. Established German-American sausage companies quickly picked up on the preparation and added it to their nationally distributed lines, taking it all across America—including all the way down to Texas.

But it is safe to say that modern pastrami couldn’t exist without a form of preserved meat known by at least one of the aforementioned names, the most common of which was “pastirma.” Trade journals from the 1850s indicate that the area known today as Romania was exporting “pastroma, or jerk beef” from Brăila, one of the primary ports on the Danube River, by the mid-19th century, if not earlier. In his 1878 text, A Handy Dictionary of Commercial Information, Edward T. Blakely described the preparation as “ox, sheep, or goat’s flesh salted, with garlic and spices, and dried in the sun for winter food.”

Many accounts of pastrami’s history claim that the original Romanian version was made with goose, but that its makers adapted the preparation to cheaper, more plentiful beef after moving to the United States. This idea seems to derive from a single source, Marcus Eli Ravage’s 1917 book, An American in the Making: The Life Story of an Immigrant, in which the Romanian-born author recalls an early-1900s New York City where “on Rivington Street and on Allen Street the Rumanian delicatessen-store was making its appearance, with its goose-pastrama and kegs of ripe olives and tubs of salted vine-leaves.” But, as trade journals and many other sources make clear, Romanians were making pastirma from all sorts of different meats back in the old country, primarily beef.

Sietsema, who lived in Texas himself before moving to New York, was drawing upon research by Daniel Vaughn of Texas Monthly, who had turned up several examples of grocers and butchers selling pastrami in Texas in the early part of the 20th century. Nick Solares, also at Eater, picked up on the thread recently, interviewing Vaughn for a video piece called “How Pastrami Arrived in New York City,” which repeats the same conjecture about pastrami’s Texan roots. “Pastrami, as we know it in the New York City deli, actually came from Europe through Texas, and then to New York,” Solares proposes. “Czech and German butchers migrated to Texas and brought with them the way that they prepared meats, cured meats, in the Old World.”

Dig deep enough and it becomes clear that pastrami first established its foothold in large northern immigrant centers, like New York, Montreal, and Chicago, and was then taken across the country by a group of national-scale meatpacking companies. And—wait for it—it may have even gotten a little boost from a scandalous murder.

It’s a form of preserved meat that can be found today across the eastern Mediterranean, from Turkey around to Egypt. But the real question is how it got to the United States, became defined as a cut of beef brisket (or the fattier cut adjoining it, known as the navel), and started being piled atop rye bread in delis. Though Middle Eastern pastirma and American pastrami are both forms of cured beef, the preparations are quite different.

Pastirma is rubbed in salt to cure, dried in the open air for several days, and covered in a thick spice rub of fenugreek and cumin. The resulting meat has a vivid deep-red color and is typically sliced very thin, much like bresaola. Modern pastrami, on the other hand, is cured in a liquid brine, cold-smoked, and then boiled. And, unlike with pastirma, the spice coating—which is applied just before the meat goes on the smoker—is dominated by black pepper and coriander.

Don’t let the simplicity of this recipe fool you. It has very few ingredients, but once they are reduced and seasoned with salt and a touch of maple syrup, the result is a rich and nutty soup with a clean and deep flavor. Pick the garnish that appeals to you more: hominy corn, the more traditional option given it’s indigenous to the Americas, or roasted sweet potatoes, a non-native option that’s popular today.
12 ounces (340g) raw shelled hickory nuts or pecans (see note)
1 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more as needed
1 tablespoon maple syrup
1 cup cooked and drained whole or cracked hominy, or 1 large sweet potato (1 pound 6 ounces; 625g), peeled, cut into 1/2-inch dice, and roasted (see note)

As a Southerner and barbecue lover myself, I would be delighted to claim pastrami as a legacy of the long, proud Southern tradition of slow-smoking meats. But, unfortunately, I can’t: The historical record simply doesn’t hold up.

In a food processor, process nuts, scraping down sides once or twice during processing, until they form a thick paste, about 3 minutes. Scrape nut paste into a medium bowl.

Divide paste into 3 even portions. You only need one portion to make this recipe; you can save the rest for future batches or use it as a nut butter in other preparations. To save the extra nut paste: If the paste is thick enough to hold its shape, form the remaining portions into balls, wrap tightly in plastic and then aluminum foil, and freeze for up to 3 months; if the paste is too loose to hold its shape, transfer portions to small zipper-lock bags, press out the air, then seal and freeze for up to 3 months.

Transfer remaining portion of nut paste to a 3-quart saucepan and add 1 quart (1 liter) cold water along with the 1 teaspoon kosher salt. Set over high heat and bring to a boil, whisking to incorporate nut paste. Reduce heat to maintain a simmer and cook uncovered, stirring occasionally, until reduced by half, about 30 minutes.

Add maple syrup, then increase heat to high, allowing soup to boil until any separated fats on the surface have emulsified back into the soup. Taste, adding more salt if desired.

To serve, briefly reheat hominy or sweet potato. Ladle hot soup into bowls and garnish with hominy or sweet potato.

Special equipment
Food processor, instant-read thermometer

Notes
Hominy comes precooked in cans and sold dry; if dry, boil in ample water until tender, about 1 hour (though cooking time will depend on the size and type of hominy). If roasting sweet potatoes, preheat oven to 400°F (200°C). Drain sweet potatoes and transfer to medium bowl. Toss with just enough oil to coat and season with salt. Spread sweet potatoes on a rimmed baking sheet and roast, turning sweet potato pieces once or twice during cooking with a thin metal spatula, until lightly browned and tender, about 30 minutes. Set aside until ready to use.

A rich and creamy nut soup of Cherokee origin, kanuchi has few ingredients but a world of deep nutty flavor. Simmering the nuts while the liquid reduces softens the nut paste while thickening the soup.
A hard boil at the end emulsifies any separated fats into the soup.
Kanuchi is a creamy Cherokee soup traditionally made from hickory nuts that are crushed by hand into a thick paste. That paste is then formed into large balls and stored until ready to use for this soup. Because hickory nuts aren’t farmed commercially in the United States, pecans, which have a similar flavor, can be used instead.

In this recipe, adapted from one provided by Taelor Barton, we use a food processor to transform the nuts into a paste, but depending on the power of your machine and how long you allow it to process the nuts, it’s possible your paste will end up too smooth and loose to form balls. This is fine, in that you can still make a delicious soup regardless of the final consistency of the paste.

“I kind of concluded early on that [knishes] weren’t for me, and left them alone,” Wells told me. “I have no use for the turmeric-colored ones sold out of hot dog carts, and this is coming from a man who at one point in his life ate a single hot pretzel with mustard for lunch every day.”

Though Wells enjoyed the ones from Yonah Schimmel’s more than the street cart knishes, he said he never craved them enough to make the store into a regular stop when he lived on the Lower East Side. But what if, I asked him, you had discovered a knish like the one at Russ & Daughters earlier in life? Or had took the subway to Knish Knosh in Queens, Ms. Stahl’s, or had even met the famed Ruby, whose specter haunts the internet and inspired a devoted Facebook group? Would you be singing a different song?

“Oh for sure,” Wells responded. “If I’d met a knish like that in my formative years there’s no telling what might have happened.”

“Since ur-knishes hadn’t penetrated American mainstream consciousness to any serious extent, it was easy for most people to link the name to the Gabila objects,” Leff added. “If they were delicious, you’d hear no objections from me. But they’re not delicious. They’re a convenience item invented by some dude trying to move product.”

Fortunately, some rustlings in the knish underground signal the beginnings of change. Like pastrami and bagels, knishes have migrated with Jewish expats and popped up in nouveau delis out west. In San Francisco, King Knish sells decidedly non-traditional, very treyf flavors like curry beef and chocolate.

In his review of the Russ and Daughters Café, New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells praised their knishes as “light and fluffy specimens” that stood out from the crowd of dense, flavorless carb bombs.

Make-Ahead and Storage
The soup base can be refrigerated in an airtight container for up to 1 week; reheat before serving. The extra nut paste can be tightly wrapped and frozen for up to 3 months.

There might’ve been something else, though, that held the knish back. I reached out to Leff because of comments he made for a 2003 New York Times article about the disappearance of street knishes. The knishes in question are popularly known as the Coney Island knish, square-shaped and deep-fried specimens that are turmeric-yellow in color. They were invented on Forsyth Street on the Lower East Side in 1921 and continue to be produced by the family company, Gabila’s, in Copiague in Suffolk County.

The company was very successful and their knishes became widespread in delis and at hot dog carts, so much so that when many modern New Yorkers say “knish,” they mean Gabilla’s. When the company’s factory caught fire in 2013, alarmist headlines declared a knish shortage and famine.

But some, including Leff, just don’t care for Gabilla’s. As he tells it, these mass-produced knishes are pretenders to the throne, which by right belongs to the one true knish: the baked, handmade variety with far more delicious fillings, which he calls, for lack of a better term, the ur-knish.

Like Silver, he grew up with Ms. Stahl’s, because his mother was from Brooklyn. After his mother died, he returned there for the first time in years only to find the knishery had disappeared. He felt like he lost a part of his mother, the way one might if a family home is torn down. “That was how she fed me. Feeding me part of her own childhood, it connected us—I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but now that it’s gone it’s so glaringly obvious.”

“Is there an expectation that foreign traditions ought to permeate our culture?” Leff asked back. “When something does make that jump that’s the exception rather than the rule. But it’s not like football play-offs; the worthiest don’t make the cut via a series of trials. Stuff just sneaks in. One can trace why tacos did make it, but there’s no explaining why knishes didn’t. Yes, they’re delicious, when right, but a great many things are delicious when right.”

“People used to say, ‘the streets in New York are paved in gold,'” Laura Silver said to me over the phone. “No they’re not. They’re paved in knishes.”

Born in Brooklyn and bred in Queens, Silver is the world’s leading authority on the knish. And as the author of the authoritative and charming Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food, she knows just how vital it is to Jews’—and New Yorkers’—culinary heritage, even if everyone else forgets about the poor thing.

A bomb of starchy fillings like nutty kasha groats or mashed potato with caramelized onions, wrapped in a thin sheet of dough and baked, the knish is claimed by Russians, Poles, and Ukrainians, and came to New York on the backs of Jewish immigrants. The way Silver sees it, the knish is a quintessential New York food, one that filled stomachs for pennies on the dollar and granted immigrants an economic opportunity to build a future for their children’s children.

No, the knish is not sexy. It’s brownish and rotund and anything but elegantly shaped. But it is food that will make you feel good, fill you up on the cheap before a long day of work, or sop up the pain of loss or an unexpected breakup.

Some New Yorkers believe that it’s no longer easy—or possible—to get a good knish. Silver disagrees, and she makes a strong case with her “Where To Eat A Good Knish” map, which includes Judy’s Knishes, established in 2014, among her growing list of 16 approved sources in the five boroughs. So why isn’t the knish more popular?

Growing up, Wildman thought every American household stocked knishes. “It had never occurred to me that this wasn’t something that was common from here to California and beyond,” he says.

People like Wildman and Silver attach a profound importance to the knish. To see why more people don’t, I turned to Jim Leff, the founder of Chowhound and a retired food obsessive who once catalogued outer borough eats.

Silver believes that the knish was a victim of its own success, arguing that knisheries gave immigrant Jews a living, if only meager, that allowed them to take the first steps up the social ladder. As upwardly mobile Jews left poor neighborhoods like the Lower East Side, the knisheries that boosted economies a generation ago lost business and eventually closed. New knisheries opened where Jewish communities landed: Long Beach on Long Island, Baldwin in Westchester, and elsewhere. The knish sustained itself, but didn’t see breakout success like the bagel did.

As part of her efforts to spread the knish gospel, Silver started teaching classes on its history. At one such class, a Staten Island native named Noah Wildman showed up, finding in Silver a fellow obsessive. Wildman had gone to culinary school, worked at Brooklyn charmer Franny’s, and once wanted to open up his own pizzeria. But he eventually ditched the slice to launch a brief-lived knishery in 2011.

“[The knish] was a conduit to a better life and a different social status,” Silver says. Knishes first started showing up on Lower East Side around 1910, when Yonah Schimmel reportedly opened on Houston Street. In 1916, the New York Times reported from the front lines of the Lower East Side’s knish scene. In an early instance of Times reporting on the food, an article titled “Rivington St. Sees War” covered a long lost place called Max Green’s, which it deemed “the originator of the great knish” and the first to sell it. Knisheries opened up wherever Jews moved, from Shatzkin’s in Coney Island to Adelman’s in Midwood to Knish Nosh in Forest Hills. The knish, when it’s done right, is just as delicious as the bagel. There’s a filling of onions cooked to golden caramel in chicken fat, then painted onto a belly-hugging potato canvas. That carby mass is then wrapped in thin, pliant dough and blistered in the oven. It’s great with deli mustard.

I set up a little experiment to see if I could figure out what was at the root of the issue. I theorized that the difference in flavor might be attributable to two factors: the pH of the liquid that the garlic is puréed in (perhaps it’s essential to first purée the garlic in a very acidic environment before diluting it down), or whether or not the garlic is peeled before puréeing.

I ran six heads of garlic through the blender:

Unpeeled, with lemon juice
Unpeeled, with vinegar
Unpeeled, with water
Peeled, with lemon juice
Peeled, with vinegar
Peeled, with water
I then let them sit in containers for five minutes (in order to allow time for any enzymatic reactions to take place), then smelled and tasted them.

From aroma alone, it seemed like peeling versus not peeling was at least part of the answer: The batches of garlic cloves that were peeled had a stronger garlic aroma than those that weren’t. But tasting them told a very different story. While the batches of garlic puréed in lemon juice and vinegar had a very mild flavor, the ones puréed in water were so hot that they burned the back of my throat as I tried to swallow them. It’s definitely the acidity in the lemon juice and vinegar that prevents the garlic from turning hot.