Making Menena Pastries

We used our final weekday session before our Edot Chamsa Family Workshop to prepare Menena. This is the Iraqi Jewish name for Arab pastries called "Ma'amoul," though they are a bit different from the Arab version. According to Claudia Roden, from whose "Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York" I borrowed the recipe, "Every Jewish family kept a boxful...."  These stuffed tartlets were especially popular during the Purim holiday, included in every basket of Mishloach Manot given to family, friends, and neighbors.

The most common filling was with walnuts or pistachios, though an alternate filling was a date paste, which we used since Isaiah is a nut-free zone.

We'll be serving the Menena during our Chamsa Family Workshop. Since we only had about 30 minutes to prepare them, I prepared the dough and date paste at home using a food processor, and had the students shape the dough into the tartlet forms and add in the date paste during class.

First, the dough had to be rolled into a walnut-sized ball:

Then the tartlet form had to be shaped by indenting the top of the dough ball with the thumb and pinching the sides:

Then the date paste was added into the bottom of the form:

That's going to be one very sweet pastry!

 Once the date paste was in, the dough had to be sealed over it, forming what looked like a pot sticker:

Then, finally, the "pot sticker" shape was rolled gently into a ball shape again, and put on the tray. Once on the tray, each ball was gently pressed down with the palm of the hand to form the final cookie shape:

I'm still waiting to hear from most of our Edot families as to whether you can join us on the 23rd. I hope you can all come to enjoy the skits, posters, and menena prepared by the students, as well as to join us in making copper foil chamsas. This workshop will serve as the culminating event for our unit of study about the Babylonian/Iraqi Jewish edah - the oldest of all the edot.