Tish Pishti

[Mark A Mandel]

On Tue, 2 Apr 2002, Alice Faber wrote:

#Mark A Mandel said:
#>For Passover my wife made a "soaked cake" called Tish Pishti. The recipe
#>was described as a Judeo-Spanish dish, but the book it was taken from
#>(with attribution) says it is Turkish, which is a much more plausible
#>source for a name like that. *Is* it Turkish? Are the "i"s front or
#>back? What does it mean?
#
#There's no contradiction. When the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, a
#lot of them fetched up in Turkey (and the Balkans and...). My Claudia Roden
#cookbook (The Book of Jewish Food) describes it as a "Judeo-Spanish
#specialty of Turkey". It looks delicious, but *awfully* sweet...

Yes, I know that bit of history. The apparent contradiction was between
the immediate source's description of it as "Judeo-Spanish" and a name
that was obviously nothing of the kind.

We have the Roden book and (somebody) Nathan's cookbook (Passover
Recipes???) as well, but Rene used the recipe from the NY Times Magazine
of April something, 2000, Molly O'Neill's column. It is sweet, but the
sweetness is not overwhelming (to my taste), being absorbed and
distributed through the "pastry".

-- Mark M.