The History of Kugel and Poppy seed walnut kugel recipe

Shneur Zalman of Liadi, founder of Chabbad (1745-1812) once said: “What we achieve by blowing the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, a person can achieve by eating kugel on Shabbat.”

Someone asked: “If so, why blow the shofar on Rosh Hashanah? We should eat kugel!”

“Indeed,” replied the rabbi, “that’s what we do when Rosh Hashanah comes out on Shabbat, we eat kugel and do not blow the shofarl!”

(My loose translation from the Hebrew translation of the Yiddish original).

The kugel was born in Eastern Europe as a leftover bread pastry with fat and eggs and only eight centuries ago evolved into the lokshen (noodle) kugel we know today. Rice kugels were invented in the 16th century thanks to Ottoman influences, and the popular Polish potato kugel showed up in the nineteenth century.  

Since the kugel was born out of need for a warm dish on Shabbat, when cooking is forbidden, it was prepared overnight in a communal oven. Cooks used to seal the kugel pan with a strip of dough, or place it inside the cholent pot, resulting a steamed pastry rather than baked one. Steaming potato kugel inside the cholent was the way my grandmother used to make it and how my mother still prepares kugel today.

For flavor and sweetness, some recipes began to add sauted apples, cherries, berries and dried fruit into to kugels. A specialty kugel from Galicia (today in Ukraine,) called mandavortchinek, combines potatoes with yeast dough (see recipe here.) A similar one called totch from the historic Bukovina region in Romania is prepared the same, with potatoes, onions and yeasted dough.

In Israel the noodle kugel took another turn, becaming peppery and caramelized, to make what is widely known as the Jerusalem kugel. And while dairy kugels, made with cream or milk, were popular during Shavuot in Europe, it seems that adding cheese to the recipe was an American invention. For the predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish American community, kugel is still one of the most popular holiday staples. 

In Israel, many families call the pastry “kigel” (pronounced kee-ghel), the Galician way. Kugel is the Lithuanian version. When I asked why the word “kigel” disappeared from the American Jewish culinary vocabulary, I was told it is due to a set of pelvic floor exercised by the same name, invented in 1948 by Arnold Kegal. Here’s how languages change, right in front of our eyes.             

Are you already convinced to eat kugel before or after Yom Kippur? 

If not, note that “The Seer of Lublin” (Rabbi Jacob Isaac Horowitz, 1745-1815) taught that just as one’s respective mitzvot and transgressions are weighed in the balance in the process of our final judgment in heavenly courts, so too are weighed all of the kugel that one ate in honor of the Shabbat. (Holly Kugel: The Sanctification of Ashkenazic Ethnic Foods in Hasidim, by Allan Nadler).